In the shadow of Overlook Mountain in Upstate New York, you’ll find one of the most apt monuments of the Catskills, The Opus 40 Sculpture Park. It’s apt because it was built by hand using Catskills bluestone, and in the Catskills it’s no exaggeration to say we have vast quantities of rock and stone, which is emblematic of the strength of character necessary to create the life of a resilient, full-time mountain-dweller. Living in the Catskills year-round is to be like Sisyphus, to roll the proverbial rock up the hill and attempt to keep it there. Opus 40 is the quintessential symbol of the challenging task of making a living in these ancient hills. Here, as the saying goes, there are “two stones for every dirt” – more loose stone than soil – and one local transplant even spent four years removing all the stones from his land so that he could start a farm fit to be planted.
Assembled by hand over 37 years by local sculptor Harvey Fite, the park rises out of the pit of an abandoned quarry like it’s a relic that’s been delicately unearthed by the brush of a giant archeologist. What’s extraordinary is that there were no plans or drawings made before the work began. Fite literally just began and continued until his death 37 years later, and all his tools, winches and pulleys remain to this day in the Quarryman’s Museum in a red barn on the property. It’s named Opus 40 because he predicted that it would take 40 years to complete, but he met an untimely demise three years shy of his goal in an accidental fall in the park.
