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SAUGERTIES, NY – The 6.5-acre bluestone maze emerging from a quarry here is one of the wonders of the Hudson Valley, an artistic tour de force from a self-taught sculptor who has spent over the half of his life creating it with thousands of rocks, infinite patience and no cement.
Opus 40, whose very name evokes the tenacity of its creator, Harvey Fite, is a monument to the upper limits of hard work and dedication that took almost 37 years to build.
But now, some say, that exhilarating triumph has been tarnished by the ordinary: a chain link fence, nearly 400 feet long, that wraps around one of its edges, spoils its beauty and is the product. of a long, smoldering argument.
“A man built it all – it’s amazing,” said Alvah L. Weeks Jr., the city’s building inspector. “It’s sad, this fence. Why haven’t you been able to find something? “
Participants in the dispute include the Fite family, the association that operates Opus 40 and the neighbors around it. While the feud is full of unsubstantiated theories and unsolicited recriminations, it comes down to a fight over the house Fite built that adjoins his masterful creation.
The house is still owned by Fite’s 81-year-old son-in-law Tad Richards and his wife, Pat, and is operated by their 20-year-old grandson who rented it online, allowed guests to camp nearby and used it as a gathering place.
Neighbors have complained about events and Airbnb guests they say make noise until the wee hours of the morning. The small nonprofit that runs the site believes these activities pose a security risk and legal liability.
Enter the fence, in May, that the nonprofit erected to separate the genius of Fite, which they own, from the house of Fite, which they do not own.
“The fence is way over – tasteless,” said Gerald Pallor, 73, of Saugerties, a longtime friend of the Richards family. “There is definitely a better way to resolve disputes than to come up with something like this. “
Jonathan Becker, chairman of the board of directors of Opus 40 Inc., said that “security is an absolute – it is not negotiable” and that the fence, however unsightly, is necessary until a broader solution can be forged.
“Harvey Fite spent almost 40 years building this sculpture, and this temporary fence will be less than an incident in this story,” Becker said.
It’s hard to imagine how Fite, who has worked in the quiet corners of his career to build something that has been compared to a North American Stonehenge, would react to the clamor that surrounds him now.
Angry neighbors have filed a noise petition and have repeatedly complained at city council meetings about activities in the house. Family members have assembled a wealth of material titled ‘Opusgate’ to chronicle what they see as abuse by various parties. Their supporters have formed a Facebook group and started a petition on change.org calling for the fence to be removed..
In a recent outbreak, Steven Dunning, a neighbor, called police just after 3 a.m. to report loud music and a party at the Fite House, according to police records. About 12 hours later, the Richards’ grandson Arick Manocha called police to report Dunning – whose wife works at Opus 40 – for trespassing on the property and for yelling at the person staying at the house .
“I’m at my wit’s end,” Dunning told officials at a recent town hall meeting.
The quarry that became the site of Opus 40 was purchased by Fite in 1938 while he was a teacher at nearby Bard College. He finished building the house there a year later at a time when Fite, initially a drama teacher, had already changed to teaching sculpture.
After a trip to Honduras in 1939 to help restore the Mayan ruins, Fite began to learn on his own how to finely join stones without mortar or cement. Every summer, free from his responsibilities as a teacher, he worked on his sprawling rock formation. In 1963, Fite added one of the finishing touches: a nine-ton boulder he would use as his centerpiece, a 15-foot monolith that soared triumphantly into the air. Opus 40, as some have noted, ended with an exclamation mark.
Fite died while still working on the Opus 40 in 1976. (While driving an electric lawn mower, he fell into the quarry from a precipice on the property, according to his obituary published in the New York Times.) He had said it would take him 40 years to complete the project and when he died at 72, some 37 years later, he had been fully equipped with ramps, stairs, ponds, moats and underground passages, all made from hand-carved stone that has been placed with remarkable precision.
“He left areas unfinished; but Opus 40 is as complete as it ever would have been, “wrote Tad Richards in the book” Opus 40: The First 20 Years. “” It was the product of Fite’s relentless vision and n ‘could have been stopped only by his death. “
Barbara Fite, the artist’s wife, would set up the nonprofit Opus 40, Inc. ran the association for years after her mother passed away.
He ceded control to the organization in 2018 after saying that Alan Siegel, the former director of the Thompson Family Foundation, had expressed interest in helping fund the association and helping buy the Fite House in order to unify it with the sculpture site, which was now separately owned by the non-profit organization. (An organization led by Richards couldn’t buy Fite House on its own, without breaking nonprofit regulations.)
Siegel pushed the organization to evolve from a family business to a professionalized non-profit organization and a new independent board of directors was therefore installed. But in March 2019, Siegel passed away suddenly before the house was purchased. Without Siegel at the helm, the foundation he led said they could no longer lead the fundraising efforts.
“Things started to go downhill here from there,” Tad Richards said.
The list of grievances from all parties has grown steadily. Nonprofit officials say when they took over the organization, they were tasked with cleaning up the messy bookkeeping the family left in its wake. They later noticed they said items like wooden benches, sculptures and quarry tools were missing from Opus 40, and in a letter the association blamed the Richards and their grandson for taking them and selling them to a local antique dealer. The association then changed the locks on the doors of the quarry museum.
The Richards said they had struggled financially and only sold items that were theirs. They complained that the nonprofit was not taking proper care of the grounds and had, as Tad Richards said, let the hedges “run wild”.
Now there’s a lawsuit that has complicated matters even further, one brought by a local businessman who had already made a deal to jointly buy the house with the Richards’ grandson for $ 580,000, according to court documents. . As part of the deal, businessman David Hanzl bought a house in nearby Kingston for the Richards to live there, court documents say, and Hanzl and Manocha were supposed to run the Fite House together as a short term rental property. .
But the sale of the Fite House was never successful. The civil lawsuit accuses the Richards and their grandson of “roping” Hanzl in a reckless plan to financially save the family and says the Richards are now living rent-free in the Kingston house Hanzl bought them.
Tad Richards, in an interview, said he was left “dry” when Hanzl gave up on buying the Fite House.
Manocha said his grandparents had always intended to “fix these issues” and buy the Kingston home after the Fite House was sold.
In May, the situation began to escalate when the nonprofit officially announced in a letter to The Richards that the organization was severing ties with the home after years of paying to use the family aisle as part of a ‘entry to the park and occasionally work with the family. on various programs. He also said he would work to create a new entrance to the sculpture and put up a fence.
The association said there had to be an “appropriate and binding security, programming and management plan for Fite House” before the fence fell. Becker, the association’s board chairman, emailed Tad Richards in July describing several more specific “common sense ideas for a framework agreement”, such as the ban on camping, noise after 10 p.m. and events of more than 12 people. He insisted that if interested parties used a fraction of the time they spent posting on social media on the work of developing a safety plan, a deal could be reached “in the aftermath. midday “.
One solution would be for the association to buy the house, an idea that has been around for years but which would involve raising funds for a down payment. Organization officials say they would like that. Manocha said that because the association “made it impossible” to turn ownership into a business, “our mind turned to selling.”
Becker said in late July that he planned to meet with Tad Richards soon to re-negotiate a possible deal. And on Friday, representatives of Opus 40, the Richards family and the city gathered to review the framework of a deal defined by Becker.
Everyone agrees that the sculpture itself is in dire need of repair and that if they can iron out their differences, the focus may shift back to preserving Harvey’s artistic masterpiece and personal legacy. Fite.
On a recent afternoon, Tad Richards gave himself a moment of optimism and reflection as he stood next to the house he had grown up in and looked at a work of art that helped define his life. . “It means more than I can say,” he said.
Sheelagh McNeill contributed to the research.
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