A much-loved Woodstock ritual has returned to the tucked-away cluster of downtown shops that was long known as Tinker Village: Liza Szarejko's annual fall plant sale. The event will continue through the end of October. Szarejko herself is a Woodstock institution with many remarkable stories to tell.
Her current store is called Treasure Chest Antiques, located in a tiny cottage at 6 Waterfall Way. It's open only during the warmer months, and only on Saturdays and Sundays from noon to 5 p.m. "It's not really a moneymaking thing," Liza says. "This morning I was at five yard sales, all within 10 miles, so I could be back to open the shop at 12 o'clock."
The store is packed to the rafters with rustic collectibles and charm to match, with wonky old wood-plank floors. It's one of the last remnants of a group of eight artist studios built in the 1920s on the site, purchased by Liza's late father in 1979. "They were just summer shacks, with no insulation, built right on the ground," she explains. The family made improvements to the buildings over time, installing woodstoves for heat, and rented them out as affordable housing.
That went on until about ten years ago, when a development group called Tannery Brook, LLC bought the adjoining property and transformed the ramshackle buildings into what are now the posh accommodations known as Hotel Woodstock Way. "They put up new buildings in the footprints of the cottages we had here," says Liza. It now costs $700 and up per night to stay there.
Beyond the confines of Treasure Chest's interior, one of the major attractions of this hidden oasis smack in the middle of Woodstock is the luxuriant garden that surrounds the shop. There's a cozy seating area in front of an espaliered fence, little animal sculptures to delight young children, enormous butterfly bushes that one must elbow aside to get from the gate to the front door. People come from all over the world to sit here and enjoy the scent of the gardens and the sight and sound of Tannery Falls, whether they end up buying anything in the shop or not. "It's an art installation - it's not just a garden," Liza says.
The whole vibe harks back to a time that she remembers with nostalgia, when "People came to Woodstock to live unrestrained, to make art and music, drop out, chill out... They wanted to live peacefully and simply. Now it's just the opposite. People come here to make money."
Directly across the courtyard from her store is Liza's home, where she now dedicates much of her time to cultivating huge, lush houseplants from tiny cuttings in a big glass atrium that was a late addition to the building, with a fine view of the falls. The plants for sale are displayed outdoors, densely arrayed on a long porch. Many are potted up in vintage odds and ends of ceramic ware that she acquires at yard sales. She greets her green charges tenderly, pointing out which ones she has been growing for as long as 25 or 30 years. Some will come inside for the winter, but most have to go before the first hard frost. Prices are reasonable.
Liza and her twin brother Michael were born in Manhattan, but moved to Zena at age 10 with their mother Lena, in the wake of her divorce from their father. "My mother was an eccentric artist and a Bohemian person. She made art out of garbage, and sold it as 'Rena from Zena.' She called her pieces Objets d'Junk." Rena also taught arts and crafts classes at summer camps and even freelanced as a private eye: "She would spy on cheating husbands out of our VW bus. Sometimes she would take me along, when I was only about 11, in the winter - and the bus didn't have any heat."
Woodstock as it existed in the 1970s fostered a barter economy, in which the family was able to make do on little income, "thrifting" long before that became trendy. "I buy nothing new. I learned that from my mother," Liza says. She still owns many examples of Rena's artwork: milk cans, Band-Aid tins and other small commercial containers, transformed via enamel paint and découpage into Baroque indulgences - not to mention a mirror framed in an elaborately painted toilet seat.
Lena bought the 1930s-vintage house on Waterfall Way in 1975, in a financial partnership with Liza's grandmother and half-brother from Lena's first marriage. "We visited some friends who lived in the house, and my mother took one look at the waterfall and decided she had to have it, one way or another." In 1977 Lena, Liza and Michael moved into a two-room section of the house and began renting out the rest of it.
Before needing to be hospitalized for schizophrenia in 1984, Michael was incredibly handy and did most of the physical improvements to the house and site, using all repurposed materials, including building an enormous deck overlooking the falls. He doubled the size of the basement by jackhammering out some of the bedrock underlying the house. "The rock went into the falls - you can still see it out there in the streambed. Michael added a kitchen, and all of us lived down there for awhile."
The rooming house quickly became the home base for several cottage industries, and ended up serving over many years as an incubator for new businesses that went on to thrive in larger locations. "Woodstock Design started out in my bedroom," Liza says, while giving a tour of the house. "This room was the Woodstock Answering Service, before there were answering machines...Howie Greenberg started the Catskill Center for Photography in my living room."
On the porch of the building, the Szarejkos set up an outdoor kitchen/café, which served as the launching pad for Taco Juan and a juice bar that was the first iteration of Sunfrost Farms. In the 1980s the family used it as a hot dog stand and an ice cream stand in the summertime. The building that is now Treasure Chest Antiques also helped a succession of Woodstock businesses to get started. Dharmaware was an early tenant, as well as Camp Kinderland.
Among Liza's souvenirs of the old days are several signs listing the shops and amenities that made up Tinker Village, including one that touted "The Best (and only) Little Public Rest Room in Woodstock!" To make their community welcoming to visitors, the Szarejkos built an outdoor enclosure with an outhouse and a sink, just steps away from the Tannery Falls overlook. Users were asked to drop a quarter into a slot to use the facilities, but eventually the Town of Woodstock ordered them to stop charging money for the privilege.
Conflicts with the municipality became routine for the Szarejkos during the years when Michael's mental illness, which started out as an obsession with Eastern religions, became markedly worse. He recruited homeless men as "volunteer" laborers to help with major building projects, paying them only with room and board. At one point he decided to build an extension of the shop onto the adjoining property, which the family also owned, without going through the proper protocols of getting a subdivision or easement. The town made him tear it down and levied a substantial fine.
After a local real estate broker sat on her father's lap and flirted with him, Liza says, in a vain effort to persuade him to sell the parcel with the cottages, she retaliated to his refusal by calling the family "slumlords" in the local press. For some time during the 1980s, business was badly disrupted by the town's excavation of the street to install sewer lines, and then by flooding when the flimsy old water supply lines were damaged upon being reburied.
Rena died in 1982, and Liza moved into one of the cottages. Her father, a high school social studies teacher who lived in Queens and prospered via sidelines in buying and selling antiques and investing in real estate, came up on weekends to help with the upkeep of the Tinker Village properties. Liza was operating a cleaning business and helping people tend their gardens. "I took care of Todd Rundgren's studio," she says. "I met all the famous people."
But in the late '80s, after Michael was permanently institutionalized and she found herself living alone, Liza decided to stop renting out the main house, except for a separate apartment upstairs called Getaway on the Falls. She moved into the house, gave up the cleaning service and took a leap into the artform she loved best: raising plants.
"I was 15 when I first started with my houseplants: an avocado pit - you know, with the toothpicks? I kept killing plants until I knew what I was doing." She learned by trial-and-error and by asking questions of friends with green thumbs, until in 1989 she enrolled in a gardening program at Ulster County Community College and earned a certificate in Horticulture. "It's been about 30 years that I've been a serious gardener. It's my heart and soul now."
She still manages to balance that passion for plants with running the antiques shop, which she launched in 1990. While keeping consistently busy, she occasionally finds time to swim in the pool below the falls, noting that she's the only one who does anymore. The falls belong to the house, but not the pool itself; the terms of the sale of the adjoining property to the hotel developers included a clause allowing her swimming rights - along with right of first refusal, should she ever decide to sell her home. A time will come when this remnant of "old Woodstock," open to anyone who wants to sit in the garden or gaze at the waterfall, will be only a memory.
Liza also takes her two chonky, friendly tuxedo cats, Mama and Charly, for walks through the neighborhood every day. You're sure to meet them if you come to buy antiques or plants. "The cats are the biggest draw," she notes. Come and introduce yourself while the Fall Plant Sale is going on, throughout September and October. To learn more, call (845) 679-2568.