SAUGERTIES, N.Y. - Harvey Fite spent 37 years turning an abandoned bluestone quarry in the Catskill Mountains into a strange and striking landscape sculpture. Visitors to Opus 40 walk through rock-wall mazes that swirl around a 9-ton monolith looming in the center like a Stone Age exclamation mark.
Fite was still working on his multi-acre artwork when he died in 1976 at age 72. His family has kept the Woodstock-area attraction open to seasonal visitors and the occasional concert, but now they're trying to sell the land, and local officials are working with them to keep this novel Hudson Valley attraction open to the public.
Town of Saugerties Supervisor Greg Helsmoortel said the small town can't afford to buy Opus 40, which has an asking price of $3.5 million. But Saugerties, which sits 100 miles north of New York City, is starting to work with arts and cultural groups to look at ways to keep it open.
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"We want to keep it just like it is, maybe even a little more," Helsmoortel said.
Opus 40 is as much a testament to tenacity as art.
Fite started work in 1939 on what was essentially a slag heap. He hand-laid each stone - no mortar - over the next 37 years as he held a full-time job as an art professor at Bard College across the Hudson River. The walls that form curving channels were made up as he went along. Even the name, Opus 40, was chosen belatedly by Fite based on his calculation of how long it would take him to complete the project.
"All of this was basically improvised," Fite's stepson, Tad Richards, said as he stepped across the stones on a recent morning.
Fite banged away with the same sort of hammers and hand tools used by old Catskill quarrymen, though the 16-foot monolith in the middle likely owes its inspiration to far older artisans.
The family runs Opus 40 as a not-for-profit site. While the work has attracted highbrow praise from art critics, it maintains a mom-and-pop feel. Richards and his wife, Pat, live on the site and do the work, helped by volunteers in the busy months.
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