The best source for local news from Marbletown, Rochester & Rosendale
Published the 1st and 3rd Friday of each month | Vol. 27, Issue 4
February 18, 2022 | 75 cents
New 10-room hotel plans move forward The Audrey Farmhouse project currently before the Marbletown Planning Board Amber Kelly BSP Reporter Over a half dozen neighbors showed up to the Town of Marbletown Planning Board meeting on Feb. 14 to hear about the Audrey Farmhouse project. The meeting was attended by board members John Kostides, Paris Perry, Dan Proctor, Dave Cobb, Sharon Klein, Tracey Kellogg
and Shawn Marks. The owners of the property live locally and own several properties elsewhere. This property of 14 acres is just outside the historic district, at 4321 Route 209, and will only utilize the 5 acres along the road. The applicants pointed out that the steep incline downward from the road makes the view of the proposed buildings obscured. The first thing to be done is the
driveway in order to reduce tracking of mud from the construction project onto Route 209. The construction will be done in phases, with only 1 acre of land disturbed. The finished project will have a 20-guest capacity with 10 rooms and a maximum capacity of 200 people. There will be 120 parking spots. It will be one story high and technically two buildings in a line,
connected in the middle. The event center is three buildings but connected so as to function as one building, and comprise a total of 2,400 square feet. No food will be cooked on site, and events will only be on weekends. The lighting planned is dark-sky compliant, facing down and
See Planning, page 3
Smitty's Dude Ranch The Farfetched Coffee story Page 13
The WSW Annual Chilli Bowl Fest will warm your heart Page 20
Handspring Puppet Company live in Rosendale Page 22
Old times on Clove Valley Road, Part II Ann Belmont BSP Reporter Clove Valley Road is one of the most magical places around. To the south, a line of vertical cliffs face the valley and the country road that snakes along it. Those awesome rocks have seen human endeavors come and go, as people looking for a place to farm, or simply drawn by the valley's bewitching beauty, came and settled there. Reel back the years to the 1960s, when Wilbur Smith, aka “Smitty,” bought a piece of land with frontage on Clove Valley Road and built a house there as well as a barn and a hotel/bar. Unlike the Wickie Wackie Club a couple of miles up the road (profiled in the Feb. 4 issue of the BSP), Smitty's Dude Ranch was a casual gathering place. Smitty's has a special place in local history because – like the Wickie Wackie – it was one of the rare Black-owned resort businesses of that era. Smitty was by all accounts a generous guy, and his ranch attracted some of the local free spirits, often college students whose focus on education was somewhat tenuous. Carol Pressman of High Falls recalls, “I was a student at SUNY New Paltz from 1965 until 1970. By the second year I started living off campus and partying with the arty crowd – beatniks and long-haired political activists ... I don’t know how some of us managed to graduate. There were a few places that the arty folks hung out at … Spinelli’s (which is now Joe’s East West on upper Main Street in New Paltz), the Black Swan in Rifton, and Smitty's.” In spite of the dude ranch title, Smitty doesn’t seem to have kept a lot of riding horses. Terry Hightower, maitre d’ at the Depuy Canal House for decades, used to
Wilbur Smith, “Smitty,” riding a horse at his dude ranch and an archive photo of Smitty’s Bar and Dude Ranch on Clove Valley Road in the 1960s
rent a horse from a neighbor of Smitty's. “We used to ride down to Smitty’s then we’d go to Top of the Falls," Hightower recalled. Laural Walsh of Kingston remembers that “there was one horse there, named Mike.” Walsh was introduced to Smitty's as a 15-year-old. "My dad discovered the place … My dad and my sister and I used to go up there and listen to the Arm Brothers, the bluegrass band." (The Arm Brothers were from Poughkeepsie and
Smitty's was their regular gig.) Walsh continued, "When I was 18 I left home and moved there, to the hotel upstairs." There were around 15 rooms upstairs above the bar, she said, and behind the bar “there was a huge commercial kitchen” available to the renters, who used it to cook for themselves. “I knew Smitty pretty well,” Walsh
See Smitty's, page 15