The eastern Catskills were once rich with numerous bluestone quarries. Up and down the Wall of Manitou, the Catskill Front, there were active quarries during the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Then, one by one, they closed. They fell into neglect and each one left heaps of broken stone behind to spoil the scenery. How odd it is that all this ugliness should actually have attracted artists - some of them very good artists. Our column has spent a lot of time describing the work of Harvey Fite, a sculptor who specialized in working with leftover bluestone in a particularly large, once abandoned, quarry, now called Opus 40. Over a period of decades Fite carefully placed endless numbers of bluestone slabs into a growing sculpture. We wrote nearly a dozen columns about Opus 40 just last year.
Tom Gottesleben and Patty Livingston; photo by Andrea Barrist Stern
We never met Harvey Fite and regret that very much. But there was another bluestone sculptor who we did meet. That man was the late Tom Gottsleben. Tom worked with paint and crystals, but he is best known for his bluestone sculptures. He arrived in the Hudson Valley in 1982. He and wife Patty Livingston lived in a small home next to an old bluestone quarry, much as Harvey Fite once did. By 1997 they set to work creating a concrete, bluestone, steel and glass architectural masterpiece which would be their home: Spiral House. See our second photo.
Photo by Phil Mansfield
We met Tom in the most unusual and remarkable way. One of us, Robert, was being auctioned off by the Woodstock Land Conservancy. The money from the auction went to the Conservancy. In return the winning bidders, Tom and Patty, got Robert’s geological services for a full day. They wanted to have Robert explore the property around the Spiral House and tell them all about the geological history there. It proved to be a memorable day. There is a lot of geology at Spiral House.
Sadly, Tom died in 2019, but the Spiral House property is now becoming a public park. Robert has been invited to return as a consultant, incorporating the geological history into the park experience. That’s a tribute to Tom and Patty’s keen interest in the geology here and their feelings that the past is part of the present. Robert has been exploring the grounds and working out the bedrock and ice age histories there. On this upcoming Sunday and Monday, October 13 and 14, there will be something of a soft opening. Spiral House will always, of course, be the centerpiece of the new park, but 1.5 miles of hiking trails will take visitors all across the undeveloped part of the property. And . . . all across its geological past. On October 14th Robert will be leading a geology hike, starting at 10:30. Admission is free but requires registration, which you can do through the park’s website spiralhousepark.org.
Contact the authors at randjtitus@prodigy.net. Join their facebook page “The Catskill Geologist.” Read their blogs at “thecatskillgeologist.com.”
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