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Kaatscast: the Catskills Podcast is a biweekly series featuring Catskills culture, history, sustainability, local interviews, literature, and the arts. Shows are hosted by Brett Barry and produced by Silver Hollow Audio, in the heart of the Catskills. Subscribe and experience what reviewers have called “delightfully informative” storytelling with “great production quality.” Voted “Best Regional Podcast” three years in a row. Episode archives, transcripts, and a robust search engine at kaatscast.com. Enjoy!
[00:00:00] Sarah Finn: I was reading Hudson Valley Magazine, and they said, "From Tannersville, go 23C—go by the beautiful farm, Farber Farm, on 23C—come back around, come down into 296, and go to the right and go to Lexington." They told everyone to go, to miss, to bypass Hunter, to see Tannersville, and to see Lexington, not Hunter, so that was really what inspired me in the early years.
[00:00:32] Brett Barry: What do you do when the home you love is anchored in a town that's losing its footing? In the 1990s, Hunter was struggling: empty storefronts, fading energy, a sense that the mountaintop's best days might be behind it. You can look away, you can wait for someone else to fix it, or you can do what Peter and Sarah Finn did: roll up your sleeves and start building the future you want to live in. I'm Brett Barry, and this is "Kaatscast." For almost three decades, the Catskill Mountain Foundation has been quietly but steadily reshaping life on the mountaintop in Hunter and Tannersville and even over at Sugar Maples in the town of Windham. The foundation has become part of the local fabric, a place where world-class performances share a stage with community recitals, where artists find space to create, and where the mountaintop gathers. Its scope is remarkable for a rural arts organization: a three-screen movie theater, a Piano Performance Museum, ballet and dance programs, arts classes at Sugar Maples, a full calendar of performing arts events, and a monthly magazine, The Catskill Mountain Region Guide, distributed widely across the Catskills. Together, these pieces form a cultural ecosystem that's redefined the mountaintop. Today, we're sitting down with the people who sparked that transformation and continue to guide it forward. Peter and Sarah Finn, the foundation's founders, invited me to their Hunter home to talk about how an ambitious idea took root and grew into one of the Catskills' cultural anchors. Peter's new book, "Driven to Build, Guided by Values: Leading for Long-Term Success in the For-Profit and Nonprofit Worlds," offers a window into the principles that shaped both his career and the foundation itself, and we'll touch on how those values continue to influence its direction. We're also joined by Executive Director Amy Scheibe, who's helping shape the next chapter, expanding programs, deepening community connections, and imagining what mountaintop arts can be in the years ahead. Their experience offers a playbook for any community that sees the arts not as an add-on but as the groundwork for meaningful, sustainable growth, and with that, here's our conversation. Alright, I'm here with Peter Finn and Sarah Finn, founders of the Catskill Mountain Foundation, which is almost 30 years old—it was founded in 1998—and also with Amy Scheibe, the executive director of the Catskill Mountain Foundation. Welcome to "Kaatscast."
[00:03:26] Peter Finn: Thank you.
[00:03:27] Amy Scheibe: Thank you.
[00:03:27] Sarah Finn: Thank you.
[00:03:29] Brett Barry: Peter, your Hunter roots go way back. In fact, this property that we're at right now was purchased by your great-grandparents in 1907, and Great-Grandpa Louis Borgenicht...
[00:03:41] Peter Finn: Correct.
[00:03:42] Brett Barry: Okay.
[00:03:42] Peter Finn: Yes.
[00:03:43] Brett Barry: ...emigrated from the borderlands of Poland and Ukraine in 1889, and his wife Regina, your great-grandmother, worked from home sewing dresses and aprons. Louis would sell them on the streets of New York. This little enterprise grew into a clothing empire with 1,000 employees, and Malcolm Gladwell tells the story of your great-grandfather in his book "Outliers." In Louis' own memoir, "The Happiest Man," he writes, "In the old days labor did not organize and fight for higher wages and shorter hours. Everybody wanted to work hard, and as long as flesh could endure." Reading that in your book, Peter, it feels like maybe you inherited a bit of that work ethic.
[00:04:22] Peter Finn: I think that's true, yeah.
[00:04:24] Brett Barry: Yours and Sarah's love of the Catskills also appears to have rippled down through the generations. Your great-grandfather writes in his memoir, "Business, expensive city apartments, money, flattery—these were all very well. But Hunter—the houses, the stables, the laundries, the pastures, orchards, chicken coops, and later the tennis court and the swimming pool with the friendly green mountains all around us—for the immigrant who gasped for a breath of air free from feudal tradition and prejudice, it was Eden. Arriving on a weekend to find first a horse and carriage, later a car, waiting at the station for me with a dozen kids screaming a welcome and telling me of the week's events—that was driving through the front gates of Heaven itself," and one of those kids was your grandmother, Sadie.
[00:05:10] Peter Finn: Correct, that's right.
[00:05:11] Brett Barry: What can you tell me about the ties that bind you to these immigrant ancestors in business and in such a strong and loving connection to the Catskills?
[00:05:22] Peter Finn: Well, when my grandmother was young, she spent her summers up here with all her siblings, and when my father was young, he spent his summers up here with many, many cousins. I never spent my summers up here, but I knew this was an important place in my family history, and I would come up for a week or two every year, and I love the mountains, and I always dreamed of maybe someday spending, being here full-time. I never thought it would be possible, but here we are. Sarah and I are mainly at our house in Hunter.
[00:05:56] Brett Barry: So, Peter and Sarah, how did you come to buy this home for your own family, your own generation of Finns?
[00:06:03] Peter Finn: So my great-grandparents bought two houses side by side. One was for themselves, the parents, and they had 12 kids, and so the other house was for the kids and for help, and, of course, when there are so many kids, and they have, you know, they have kids, and then more kids, the ownership became very complicated, and so, at one point, my family, with three siblings, owned part of one of the houses with five cousins on one side, the Ruder cousins, and then there were some Finn cousins who lived in Phoenix. There were three of them that we owned together on one side of the house, and my father's sister, Helen Ruder, was sort of in charge of managing, taking care of the house, and booking the house, and she passed away in the early '80s, I'm sorry, early '90s, and so somebody had to take charge of the house. After a number of discussions, we ended up buying half of the house from my siblings and from cousins and renovated it and turned into our weekend home. It was maybe 10 years later when my father's cousin, who had the house next door, asked us if we would want to buy that. He was getting older and didn't want to keep it anymore, and we bought that house and actually renovated that and moved into that a year ago, and that's where we live now.
[00:07:39] Brett Barry: I didn't realize the Ruders were also family.
[00:07:41] Peter Finn: Yeah.
[00:07:41] Brett Barry: So FINN Partners, which is your company that you founded, had its roots in your father's company, Ruder Finn, which was established in 1948, and...
[00:07:51] Peter Finn: Yes, by my father and his childhood friend...
[00:07:53] Brett Barry: ...and his childhood friend...
[00:07:53] Peter Finn: ...who married my father's sister.
[00:07:55] Brett Barry: Okay, there comes the family, and at 24, you began running the research and forecasts department at your father's company, and then that developed into bigger and greater things.
[00:08:07] Peter Finn: Right.
[00:08:08] Brett Barry: You write in your book that by the 1990s, Main Street in Hunter had become an embarrassing eyesore, and that you'd joke with friends up for a visit, "Close your eyes when you roll through town and open them when you get to the driveway."
[00:08:18] Peter Finn: Yeah.
[00:08:19] Brett Barry: Can you paint a picture of what Hunter was like then and what it had become and, you know, what led to that circumstance?
[00:08:27] Peter Finn: So both the village of Hunter and the village of Tannersville had gone through a steep decline, and in both villages, a third of the buildings had "for sale" signs on them in the 1990s, and buildings were collapsing on Main Street. It was really a dire situation, and I believe it was in 1997. There were two late-night murders at local bars. We hit bottom at that point, and we wondered if we could do anything to try and help the community, and that really led to the formation of the Catskill Mountain Foundation.
[00:09:08] Brett Barry: It didn't happen right away, so this kind of set you on an unofficial mission at that point to help improve the town, to revive Main Street in a way, and I think... did that start with the Red Barn?
[00:09:18] Peter Finn: It did, so we bought some property adjacent to our house, a field that had once been owned by my family, and then a developer bought it and was building houses, and then we ended up buying a five-and-a-half-acre lot that had not been built on that was adjacent to our property, and from there I could see a dilapidated barn. It had been a dairy barn, which I later learned actually had been owned by my family, and then a series of nightclubs, and then it shut down, and it was a vacant building for at least a decade, and when we bought it, it was boarded up, and animals had been living in it, and we walked through the second floor and the floor had rotted out. I almost fell through. Well, one leg fell through. I almost fell all the way down to the floor below. Fortunately, I didn't, but we renovated that. We started that probably in 1995, and that building ended up being the first building used by the Catskill Mountain Foundation, but originally because we shared a house at that point with cousins, our idea was that we were going to renovate that into a private house for ourselves, and we never moved in there, but...
[00:10:32] Brett Barry: It was too good of a performance space...
[00:10:34] Peter Finn: Exactly, yeah.
[00:10:36] Brett Barry: ...and then a "for sale" sign on the movie theater across the road...
[00:10:39] Peter Finn: Right, right.
[00:10:39] Brett Barry: ...that also happened before the foundation actually officially took root.
[00:10:42] Peter Finn: Yeah, so Sarah and I love movies, and for years, we watched old movies. We watched—every night we watched a different old movie, but we also saw movies as they came out in theaters, and so every weekend we were up here, we would go with our two kids down to the movie theater in the village of Hunter. There weren't many people there other than us, and it was not a very pleasant place to be. It was sort of dingy, but there was a "for sale" sign on the front of the building for a couple of years, and at one point I said to Sarah, "Maybe we should buy that," and she looked at me like I was crazy and said, "Well, why would we do that?"
[00:11:22] Sarah Finn: He said, "I have an idea." That was the beginning.
[00:11:28] Brett Barry: And that's how it goes, right, Sarah?
[00:11:30] Sarah Finn: He has an idea, and we think about it and debate about it, but we usually say yes.
[00:11:44] Brett Barry: Years ago, I was on a panel of judges for a teen film competition called "Reel Teens," and Barry Kerr put his heart and soul into that.
[00:11:52] Peter Finn: Right.
[00:11:53] Brett Barry: So I really—I smiled when I read that he and Linda Nicholls were part of the origin story for the Catskill Mountain Foundation, and that was about the time that the movie theater was being purchased, so can you tell me about those interactions and how that developed into an idea for a full-on foundation?
[00:12:07] Peter Finn: Yeah, a friend of ours, Sean Byrne, started the Hunter Foundation. He and I met because he saw our renovation of the Red Barn and, you know, so appreciated what we had done. He came to introduce himself to me and told me he was thinking of starting a not-for-profit organization, which ended up being called the Hunter Foundation, and it was all going to be about buying vacant buildings, renovating them, and turning them into, you know, useful assets for the community, so I became one of the founding board members for the Hunter Foundation. At one of those meetings, I mentioned to Sean that we were thinking of buying the Hunter Movie Theater, and then we would show movies, but maybe we'd have some performances there, and he said, "Look, I want to introduce you to two other people who are also interested in the arts, and they might be interested in working with you. So one was Linda Nicholls, who was running the Green Room Players, and the other one was Barry Kerr, who had a history in both film and theater in New York City," and I told Barry that the movie theater had been for sale in the village of Hunter for quite some time. I had actually reached out after Sarah. I convinced Sarah that it was a good idea. I had reached out to the owner to ask him if he would sell it to me, and it was, you know, I was proposing we pay for it over time, and he turned down the offer, so Barry said to me, "Well, why don't you form a not-for-profit to buy the movie theater?" And I said, "Well, if I do that, I'm going to have to give money to the not-for-profit to buy the theater, and I'll never get my money back." He said, "You're never going to get your money back anyway," so he said, "If you do it as a not-for-profit, other people will help," and I thought about it, and he was right, and so that's—we went ahead and formed the Catskill Mountain Foundation, so Barry Kerr played a very important role in the creation of the Catskill Mountain Foundation. The idea really came from him.
[00:14:00] Brett Barry: Pam and Judd Weisberg were also very much involved in those initial conversations. Can you tell me about them? And their arts group at the time also was kind of wrapping up as this one was coming into being.
[00:14:12] Peter Finn: Pam and Judd ran an arts organization called "Art Awareness" in Lexington, and we had visited their main building, and they had exhibits there, and after we started the Catskill Mountain Foundation, which, I think, we officially launched it in February 1998, we needed to hire somebody to help organize performances, so we were looking for a director of performing arts programming, and we thought of talking to Pam to see if either she'd be interested or she'd know somebody who was interested, so we went to meet with her, and they were already in the process of winding down "Art Awareness." They couldn't keep it going financially, and she had several part-time jobs off the mountaintop, and so she was thrilled at the idea of joining us, and we were thrilled to have her join us because she knew so much more than we did about running a performing arts organization and writing grants, and she had connections to artists, so that was a very fortunate conversation for us.
[00:15:17] Brett Barry: And Pam was the first hire for CMF...
[00:15:19] Peter Finn: She was, yes.
[00:15:20] Brett Barry: ...who's still going with it, the director of performance arts programming, and we actually spoke to her in a recent episode about the Piano Performance Museum, so you mentioned Sean Byrne, also a multi-generational Catskiller who runs or founded the Hunter Foundation, and I think there's always a little confusion about the two. Can you tell me about the relationship and how those two organizations work in parallel?
[00:15:45] Peter Finn: So in the early years, Sean was on our board. I was on the Hunter Foundation board, and the Hunter Foundation was focused on [as Sean had intended] to buy vacant buildings, renovate them, and either sell them or lease them to a business or to a family. The Hunter Foundation's come a long way since then. Chuck Royce got involved, which made a big difference to both the Hunter Foundation and the Catskill Mountain Foundation, so the two have been sister organizations since the beginning with complementary missions and visions. Ours is all about the arts, and the Hunter Foundation is more about Main Street and revitalizing Main Street.
[00:16:27] Brett Barry: CMF's about the arts, but there's a lot of buildings that go into it...
[00:16:29] Peter Finn: Yes.
[00:16:30] Brett Barry: ...and a lot of money that goes into rehabilitating these buildings, so there's a bit of crossover, I think.
[00:16:34] Peter Finn: Right, so arts programs need facilities [whether it's a performing arts venue or whether it's housing for artists or whether it's a studio for studio art courses], so we've renovated more than 15 buildings that were either vacant, dilapidated, or underutilized and turned them into active arts facilities.
[00:16:59] Brett Barry: And this all costs money.
[00:17:01] Peter Finn: Yes.
[00:17:02] Brett Barry: Pam Weisberg writes in a guest essay in your book that it's not easy raising money in the Catskills. There's no major Catskill-centered foundations, no large corporations, and a population that's not particularly wealthy, so how have you overcome that challenge? It seems like there's been a lot of collaboration and connections.
[00:17:21] Peter Finn: So in the beginning, Sarah and I funded everything, and that gave us credibility because we were not just—we didn't just have an idea and go to other people to ask them to fund it, but we were actually putting our own money into the organization and making things happen, and that did inspire others. I think also one of the early connections we made was to the Slutzky family, and when I first met Orville Slutzky, he said to me, "Peter, when I was a little kid, your great-grandparents were the elders in the community," so that gave me instant credibility with an important year-round resident, so the Slutzkys became donors, and then I met many others who became donors to the organization.
[00:18:07] Brett Barry: And the Slutzkys are the family behind Hunter Mountain.
[00:18:11] Peter Finn: Yeah, they created Hunter Mountain, ran it for years, and are still members of the Slutzky family who are still involved in Hunter Mountain operations.
[00:18:21] Brett Barry: All of this is in a new book, and it's called "Driven to Build, Guided by Values: Leading for Long-Term Success in the For-Profit and Nonprofit Worlds," and it bridges those two worlds. One, a Catskills cultural nonprofit. The other, a major PR firm, FINN Partners, with offices worldwide. You founded both of them. How has your business background, your lifelong business background, shaped what takes place up here in the Catskills?
[00:18:49] Peter Finn: Well, there are a couple of ways my business experience impacted what we did with the Catskill Mountain Foundation. One, I've been involved in finance and business for a long time, so I was from the start focused on careful financial planning for everything we did with the Catskill Mountain Foundation. The foundation has evolved to be something much larger and more complex than I ever envisioned, but every step of the way, I made sure to prepare a budget, update it as needed, and be careful about not taking on more than we can handle. The other way my business experience influenced the Catskill Mountain Foundation is that I've been in the PR agency business my entire career, working inside of first one large agency that my father founded and then another agency that became a large agency that I started, and a large PR firm has many different business units. Many offices, each one is a business unit or different industry specialties or different service specialties, so I had—my experience was in not doing one thing but in having lots of different things happen simultaneously. Most arts organizations will do one thing. It might be a theater company, it might be a film organization, it might be a group that performs or presents classical music, or it might be pop music, or it might be a studio art school. There are not many that do all of those things, but because of my experience in working in a large PR agency environment, I kept wanting to do more and to create a diversified portfolio of offerings the way I was used to having in the PR agency.
[00:20:35] Brett Barry: Sarah, this is a question for you. The cover of the book is a white button-down shirt and a pair of wire-rim glasses in the chest pocket, and I can't help but notice that Peter's sitting here with a white button-down shirt and those wire-rim glasses. Is this the workday uniform?
[00:20:56] Sarah Finn: It's an inside joke.
[00:20:57] Brett Barry: Yeah.
[00:20:59] Sarah Finn: Anybody who knows Peter in business gets the cover right away, but it's a perfect one that describes, you know, Peter's approach. I think the approach to everything he does, which is, as he was saying, you know, with a financial point of view, with a creative point of view, and with a driven, you know, really driven to create organizations that do good in the world.
[00:21:29] Brett Barry: So, Sarah, you have a guest essay in this book, and you write, "At our home in New Rochelle, New York, where Peter and I raised our two children, our house was on a hill, and Peter built stone walls to terrace the hill for flower beds. We both planted the annual flowers, but we used to laugh that once he did the hard work, it was then left to me to do the year-round weeding. Perhaps that's the story of our marriage in a nutshell. Peter has the big ideas, and I do the weeding," and you say, "Another inside joke is that Peter will suddenly announce, 'You know, Sarah, I have an idea,' and then he'll wait for me to roll my eyes as I think to myself, 'Uh-oh, another idea on its way,' but the truth is, I've been complicit in every one of those ideas."
[00:22:08] Sarah Finn: I recognize that I would never have taken the risks. Peter also talks about taking risks. I would never come up with ideas that involve the risk, but, you know, working with Peter and sharing a life with Peter, I see what he can do in taking those risks and being able to really accomplish something, so I've been a happy and willing partner along the way.
[00:22:37] Brett Barry: A lot of people who have careers in the city come to the Catskills to relax, but it doesn't seem that was ever really part of the picture.
[00:22:45] Peter Finn: Well, it's relaxing to be in the mountains and the open scenery, but you're right that for a long time we have spent our weekends, and now it's actually mainly full-time in the Catskills working hard, whether we're working hard from upstate for my business or working hard from upstate on the Catskill Mountain Foundation, but I do take time off on the weekends to read. That's my way of relaxing.
[00:23:13] Brett Barry: How about you, Sarah?
[00:23:15] Sarah Finn: I don't read as much as Peter. I cook, I garden, I get around, so we do have different preferences now as we're living up here...
[00:23:27] Brett Barry: And now, you have Amy...
[00:23:28] Sarah Finn: Yes.
[00:23:29] Brett Barry: ...who hopefully is taking some of that heavy lifting off your shoulders. Amy, can you tell me how you're involved?
[00:23:37] Amy Scheibe: I have been involved with the Catskill Mountain Foundation now for five years in running Maude Adams Theater Hub at Sarah and Peter's request. The one piece they felt was missing from the outlay of arts in their organization was live theater, and not of the professional variety because that's easy enough to bring in and produce as a package, but to engage the community on a different level by creating opportunities not just for experiencing the stage but for growing as artists in that capacity. It may look from the outside that it's different than creating a vase because you have something tangible at the end, but for an artist on the stage or a director directing those artists, they're creating a vessel as well that they then give to an audience in a different form, and we saw very much eye to eye on how to bring that to the stage and also to develop a different relationship within the community because we have a lot, as you know, with Phoenicia Playhouse, which I've done work with, too. There are a lot of people who have either moved here, retired here, or are growing up here that have the desire to be experiencing acting and singing and all of those things, and to be able to provide them with a resource for that was an aligned mission with Peter and Sarah.
[00:25:04] Brett Barry: So between all of us, maybe we can come up with a list of everything that falls under the CMF umbrella because it's difficult. There's a three-screen movie theater with a grand piano in each theater for some reason.
[00:25:16] Sarah Finn: So we have summer residency programs. We've had those for 10-15 years. Music residencies for children 12 and up and, more recently, with college or postgraduate musicians, so those are teaching studios during the week or when we have these residencies, and there's an opportunity there to use those pianos.
[00:25:40] Brett Barry: Yeah.
[00:25:41] Amy Scheibe: Yeah, and our goal in the next five years is to create a type of music school or center for people who want to have continuing education that's extracurricular from school programming, or if you're up here in the summer and you want to continue your piano lessons, voice lessons, guitar, etc., that is in the very, very fetus level right now because we need to figure out how and who would run that. This is always the thing. We have a big idea, and then we say, "But who's going to do it?" So maybe someone out there is listening, and they feel like they really want to live their best life in their next chapter as a music school operator. Come and find us.
[00:26:26] Brett Barry: There you go. There's also a Piano Performance Museum, which has an episode of its own on "Kaatscast," and you can hear all about it and hear some of the pianos in it. Several performing arts theaters in Hunter and Tannersville. An organic farm, which I didn't even know about. Sugar Maples Center for the Creative Arts, which I didn't know was part of CMF. Ballet workshops also did an episode with Victoria Rinaldi many years ago when this podcast first began, The Catskill Mountain Shakespeare, The Catskill Mountain Guide, which is a monthly four-color magazine found all over the Catskills, all that part of the CMF, The Hunter Village Square, and The Maude Adams Theater Hub, and I've probably missed a few things.
[00:27:07] Amy Scheibe: Well, I'll just redefine two of those. With Victoria Rinaldi, we have created the Orpheum Dance Program, which is now a wholesale part of Catskill Mountain Foundation, and we just featured her premiere of "Cinderella: The Ballet," which she created from the ground up, and we're really thrilled to have Victoria on as a full-time employee and participant and partner in shepherding the Orpheum Dance Program and ultimately our dance studios, which will open in 2027, that are being built next to the Orpheum. The other thing is Catskill Mountain Shakespeare is not a part of Catskill Mountain Foundation but is hugely underwritten by us in order for them to be able to put a tent behind the Red Barn and have housing, etc., and so we're in a partnership with them more than being a part of CMF.
[00:28:04] Brett Barry: And you mentioned Victoria as an employee. I think as kind of a point of pride in your book, you write that CMF now employs something like 30 people with health benefits, which is really kind of rare nowadays.
[00:28:17] Peter Finn: Yeah.
[00:28:18] Sarah Finn: Yeah, we made a commitment very early on to provide...
[00:28:24] Peter Finn: ...the health insurance at no cost to the employees.
[00:28:26] Brett Barry: Looking forward a bit, so the state—well, let's look back first. In 2021, the state awarded Tannersville a $10 million downtown revitalization grant. That's another show that we did together, Amy...
[00:28:40] Amy Scheibe: Yeah, that was fun.
[00:28:41] Brett Barry: ...and part of that distribution includes an award to CMF, a $1.75 million matching grant. Can you tell me how that money is being allocated?
[00:28:52] Peter Finn: Yeah, so the original plans for the Orpheum Theater, which were designed by Hugh Hardy and others on his staff, called for a significant amount of theatrical equipment, which we didn't have the money for, and we've been trying to raise money for that for some time, and because of this grant, we were able to install over a million dollars' worth of state-of-the-art theatrical equipment in the Orpheum, which is fantastic and really makes a difference in the quality of the performances we can present. In addition to that, we're building a two-story building adjacent to the Orpheum called the Orpheum Studios, and that is going to be both rehearsal space and space for dance classes.
[00:29:37] Brett Barry: And is that where this other grant comes in from NYSERDA?
[00:29:40] Peter Finn: The NYSERDA grant is for turning the dance studio or dance rehearsal studio building into a net-zero building.
[00:29:49] Brett Barry: A net-zero building, so net carbon or net zero carbon...
[00:29:53] Peter Finn: Right.
[00:29:53] Brett Barry: ...and that's through NYSERDA. That's almost a million-dollar grant for green building techniques and energy usage, so there's a lot that's been done. Do you see it continuing to expand or putting more resources into what happens in these existing spaces?
[00:30:12] Peter Finn: I think we'll continue to put more resources into what happens in the spaces we have. We're tearing down an existing building and putting up a new one on a building we're calling Creekside Retreat, which is in the village of Hunter. That's for artist housing. People don't realize how much artist housing we need. When we convinced Catskill Mountain Shakespeare to move from Route 28 to the village of Hunter, part of what enticed them is the fact that we offered to give them housing at no cost for their staff. They needed 20 bedrooms, each with a private bathroom, for six weeks, so we have 50 bedrooms for artist housing, but we need more, so we're putting up a new building in the village of Hunter, which will have 14 bedrooms for artist housing, each with a private bath. We do want to make some additional investments down the road at Sugar Maples. There are still buildings there that need to be renovated. We need more student housing at Sugar Maples, and we want to have housing combined with studios so that an artist could come and stay with us for a month or three months or six months and have a space to live and to work on their art, so we have more capital investments planned at Sugar Maples. We have to finish some of the other things we're working on right now first.
[00:31:31] Brett Barry: How much of the performances or events are you able to enjoy on a personal level? I've seen you at a few.
[00:31:39] Peter Finn: We go to just about everything that the CMF presents, yeah.
[00:31:45] Brett Barry: You've built your own calendar of events.
[00:31:47] Peter Finn: Yes.
[00:31:48] Sarah Finn: We'll never be bored in Hunter.
[00:31:49] Peter Finn: Yeah.
[00:31:50] Brett Barry: You know, driving through Hunter today, there are still lots of vacant buildings even just around the Doctorow Center with the movie theater and the Piano Performance Museum. I remember there was not too long ago a hardware store and that kind of thing. CMF can't do it all. Hunter Foundation can't do it all. What else needs to happen in this town and others like it in the Catskills so that they don't fall into a state of disuse?
[00:32:17] Peter Finn: There are others who are investing in the community, so the owners of Scribner's have bought a number of properties. They opened Fellow Cafe in the village. They're using some of the properties they purchased for staff housing, but there's certainly room for others, too. There are buildings that are available. They don't necessarily have for sale signs in them, but they're—let's put it this way. They're buildings that are not currently being used that should be filled, and so there's opportunities for others to invest in the community.
[00:32:49] Brett Barry: But these days, I imagine you don't tell guests that they need to cover their eyes when they come up because there has been a good deal of change since when you drove through in the early '90s.
[00:32:59] Peter Finn: Yes, absolutely.
[00:33:00] Brett Barry: Yeah.
[00:33:01] Sarah Finn: So the story I have of that time is... I was reading Hudson Valley Magazine, and they said, "From Tannersville, go 23C—go by the beautiful farm, Farber Farm, on 23C—come back around, come down into 296, and go to the right and go to Lexington." They told everyone to go, to miss, to bypass Hunter, and to see Tannersville and to see Lexington, not Hunter, so that was really what inspired me in the early years: we wanted Hudson Valley Magazine to come back and do a different story that says Tannersville, Hunter, and Lexington.
[00:33:39] Peter Finn: Which they have.
[00:33:45] Brett Barry: So, Amy, as a relatively new executive director, you must have a good handle on what's coming up and what to look forward to, so what should we be on the lookout for, and how do we stay tuned into all the events and performances and residencies and things that are going on up here on the mountaintop?
[00:34:05] Amy Scheibe: The greatest part of being the creative director of Maude Adams for five years before I took on the increased grace of being executive director is I got to really know the people involved in the organization and to see where there could be more life, where there could be more energy if we were able to assess what really needed to be more efficient in order to free people up to pursue their strengths and their dreams, and one of the areas that we're primarily focused on in the next two years is getting the movie theater back to its glory. It was such an important piece of Hunter's history. All of the entertainment that came through this strip, there were something like 20 different vaudeville houses between Tannersville and Hunter. This, I believe, was one of them. We've brought back music, and we've brought back theater, but now we're really going to try to fit film into that puzzle. We've been doing an independent film series every month, once a month, but now we're adding a second night where we'll do classics, and we provide those free to the public because we really want people to be seeing these wonderful documentaries and giving those filmmakers an opportunity to have their film shown one more time. Additionally, we are increasing partnerships with channels in New York City, in addition to works in process at the Guggenheim, with which we've had a wonderful partnership, and the Joyce Theater, with whom we work to bring very exceptional modern dance to our stages. We've just inked a deal with Lincoln Center to be one of their think tanks when they will be able to send up people that are coming into Alice Tully Hall who need to figure out their lights and sound and et cetera. Looking more forward to being able to host weddings behind the Red Barn—open that space up and just deepen our roots in the community and our responsiveness to what the community needs. For example, with our idea with the music school, we've started that process with a grant from the Slutzky Foundation in order to find out what the community wants, not to tell them what they need, and that, I think, is the hallmark of Catskill Mountain Foundation that a lot of people miss. There may be people who say, "Oh, the Finns just want this the way they want it," but everything we do is with a lot of thought and conversation with what the community needs and what's going to lift them. That's the future.
[00:36:40] Brett Barry: How has the response been over the years? Has it warmed? Did it start a little bit cooler in terms of locals saying, "Oh, they're coming in and kind of renovating all these spaces to fit what they want," as Amy just said? On the other hand, you said that the Slutzkys welcomed you immediately as a native, really because of your deep roots here, so how has that tension kind of played out?
[00:37:05] Peter Finn: So the reception has warmed over the years, so the fact that Orville Slutzky welcomed us as long-term residents and not as outsiders was important in the beginning, but there were people in the early days who said, "We don't need any of this. Things were fine the way they were." That diminished over time, and I think we do a lot for children in the community and for the entire community, and I think that's very much appreciated.
[00:37:34] Brett Barry: And so by now it's become very much a part of just the fabric of the town, and people who are coming up now don't know where it was and where it's—how far it's come.
[00:37:42] Peter Finn: Right.
[00:37:42] Amy Scheibe: I would add on the education side. It's something that CMF does not brag about at all, and many members of the community aren't even aware of just how much resources are put into education. We run a crop program every summer with professionals from New York City coming in to teach theater and puppetry and dance and art. Sugar Maples has a robust "Art Explorers" program that's been going for a number of years and that has deep discounts for local kids. We never turn away anyone who can't afford it. We find resources. We have people like the Laura Coe Dance Company this summer that came in. We have a local anonymous donor that underwrites every student in that group. I very much want people to explore those opportunities and to look at our website, catskillmtn.org, in order to come to us and say, "This is what my child is interested in. What do you have for them?" We have something for every child in every avenue of the arts. The more that we can invest in them, the more that they return to us and help us get deeper into the community because why would we do it otherwise if it's not helping people grow and foster education?
[00:39:13] Brett Barry: Peter, I want to end with an encounter you had with your great-uncle Louis. In high school, you were interested in Eastern religion and meditation. You visited India and became a lifelong vegetarian. You started losing weight. Your dad was concerned and sent you to visit your Uncle Louis, a rabbi in New York City. Can you recount that experience and tell us how it shaped your life moving forward?
[00:39:38] Peter Finn: Sure, so I was becoming very introspective and meditating, and my parents were just worried that I was going to go to an ashram or, you know, just disappear from their lives, and so they asked me if I'd be willing to meet with my father's uncle, and I said, "Sure," and I went to the city. We sat down for lunch, and he said, "Peter, tell me what's going on with you," so I told him about the things I was interested in and what I was reading and my meditation, and I had no idea how he would react. He was an important rabbi at the Jewish Theological Seminary, and what I said to him is... I said, "You know, my, I know my life is going to go by in a flash, and I just don't want to look back at my life at the end and say I wasted my life, that I just spent it on trivial things," and he thought for a second. "Peter," he said, "You're absolutely right. You're 18 years old, though. How could you possibly know that?" I said, "I just know it." I remember that conversation many times. He said to me, "I'll tell your parents you're fine." He did. He told my parents, "Don't worry about Peter. He's okay." My parents stopped worrying, and as I said, I remember that conversation for a long time.
[00:40:58] Brett Barry: I mean, worst case, they would've lost you to maybe the Woodstock area...
[00:41:02] Peter Finn: I might've gone back to India. Who knows?
[00:41:05] Brett Barry: ...and meditation brought you together. You met at a meditation class in college.
[00:41:09] Peter Finn: Yes, that's correct.
[00:41:10] Brett Barry: 18 years old.
[00:41:11] Sarah Finn: Right.
[00:41:11] Peter Finn: Yes.
[00:41:12] Sarah Finn: Right.
[00:41:12] Brett Barry: Still at it...
[00:41:13] Sarah Finn: Yes.
[00:41:14] Brett Barry: ...and many years of projects and meaningful work.
[00:41:22] Audio: [MUSIC STARTS]
[00:41:24] Brett Barry: Peter's new book, "Driven to Build, Guided by Values," is available now. We'll put a link in the show notes. For more on the Catskill Mountain Foundation, you can visit catskillmtn.org, where you'll find performances, workshops, programs, and classes, and you can connect with us anytime at kaatscast.com, home of the complete program archive, transcribed and searchable. Transcription by Jerome Kazlauskas. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and tune in for a weekly radio edit every Saturday at 11:00 on Radio Catskill. I'm Brett Barry. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time.
[00:42:05] Audio: [MUSIC ENDS]