Jorge W. Perez
“Here’s a story,” says Durkin. “When Jorge and I got the big ice cube removed and got the place cleaned up and empty of everything, underneath this floor is another floor and it was…not good. So my big idea was let’s bring up a sander and we’ll have a nice floor and we’ll urethane it. So we started sanding it, getting this thing down to where it looked passable. And then I said, shit, might as well bleach this thing, get it lightened up…well, Russell and his crew had cob jobbed that floor out of somebody’s barn…urine soaked by cows or whoever, when the chlorine that I threw here and there…all of a sudden it was making chlorine gas. We’re lucky they didn’t find us laid out on a bleached floor.”
“Yeah we had tears in our eyes…” laughs Jorge.
One rumor had Bryan Roefs, Russell’s son, now proprietor of Catskill Mountain Pizza, being interested in the place.
“I’ve contacted them to see what they want to do, see if it would be something that would be feasible to do, not to move up there, but do something else,” says Bryan. “The word kind of drifted up to me that they might be interested. When we talked, they (Miller/Howard) seemed genuine about not knowing what they were going to do. It’s an interesting piece of property, history. I was talking to the guy and said there was a pool, and he said ‘there was a pool?’” Before, and during the Watering Troff days, it was known as Swim-o-Links, 25 cents admission to the large public pool in the back, now filled in. “I don’t know if it makes sense to spread myself out. Woodstock’s ever changing…what the town probably needs is a nice Jewish deli…”
Couple more stories, please?
“That property across the street [Route 212], somebody told us they bought it, don’t know if it’s true or not, but that farm house was redone about five or six years ago and that tree line was put in there,” says Durkin. “For a lot of years I just couldn’t suffer anymore questioning about the Festival, so I’d say, y’know it was in that field right there and people would have their drinks and they’d take their cameras…that’s the place, across the street, and they’d say thank you, somebody said it was far away, and I’d say nah, it was over there.”
And the mural in the dining room?
“That was a wedding present because Joe Figg the artist who has gone on to greater things in the art world in the city, was doing an internship at Byrdcliff, and he became friends with Todd who was a bartender here. My wife and I got married and we came back from our honeymoon and we were told you have a wedding present coming and this showed up months later. Pretty neat. It’s a real time capsule, Joni Beveridge, Maryellen’s there, Jill Cowan, people that were part of this at the time.
Who’s worked the whole time?
“Besides Jorge and myself, his sons grew up here in the restaurant, one’s out of college now and down in New York on Wall St. the other is still in college, they went through the restaurant, you will see them here working. A couple of fellows in the kitchen have been there forever with us. Relatives, people in Jorge’s extended families. People like Mara and Jessica, people that also got married and raised families and touch back. We’re not big on burning bridges here.”
Are you guys OK for money in retirement?
“Yes,” says Durkin. “I would defer the responsibility for that to him, [Perez] because the only time he let go of a dollar was to get a better grip on it.”
“We had a plan since the beginning that every five years you redo it top to bottom. We reinvent things, see what the people in Woodstock like,” says Perez. “Because it’s very different in Woodstock, than New York City, or Spring Valley or California. Here people know what they want and they don’t get fooled about it. Sometimes people that used to come here, the weekenders, they expect us to be a Mexican restaurant like Taco Bell, or like a chain. We’re not like that. We don’t open for lunch, but every day we’re here to prepare the food for the people that are here. No complaints, never. We change things here and there. The Seafood burrito became a special, it’s not on the menu. Fish soup in wintertime…but it’s a lot of preparation for that, have to make the stock…”
Durkin takes over.
“When we started in the city in 1983 at Lucy’s on 84th and Columbus, down the street two blocks was Zingone Brothers, and they’d been there for 100 years. One of the last handfuls of family owned businesses. For all these years, including up until last Thursday, one of us gets in the van, we drive to the city, everything is there for us at 11 a.m. Thursday. Our meat provider is there, we get all the stuff from him. That enabled us to keep our prices a certain way and to this day, so all these years, we’ve done business with the Zingone family. That’s going to be a hard one to say goodbye to.”
“I did it last Thursday,” said Perez, “and there were a few tears. Because they know…it’s like a family. When I worked at Lucy’s, Richie was 17 and delivering groceries…”
“When I park the truck, with the sineage on it saying Gypsy Wolf,” says Durkin, “so many people on the upper west side would walk by and go, ‘Bill….Bill, I was in there and there was no seafood burrito, what’s going on?’ So it’s been one big adventure but we never had to wait for a Cisco truck, never had to run accounts and be dependent on deliveries. So we were on top of that and it paid dividends. So I think about how the bottom falls out for these businesses, and there’s nothing like experience.”
And the grind of running a restaurant?
“When the roof in the back was raised by Hurricane Sandy, that made me think, like, holy shit, what are we going to do now?” says Durkin. “We took a good hit here and happened to have bought the weekend’s food for the coming Halloween…so we lost a lot and never regained that. Things happen. And then 2008, when the town came to a standstill, it was like, nobody out…when gas was $4 a gallon, people aren’t going to restaurants. Demographics shifted to second homes at the same time, weekends, if the weather channel cooperated with us people would come to the country.”
I’m thinking back to stories,” says Durkin. “I remember certain times when Uma would be here or Natalie Merchant, Kate Pierson, or Phil Jackson [‘walking around in pajamas’ Perez adds]. I think people enjoyed that very much. A real sidelight tribute to the town was on the evenings when Levon did something, if I was working that night behind the bar, I was always so impressed by the people who would say, ‘how far am I from Levon’s…I found out about this place and we came from Chicago,’ and I’d say did you come all the way here to go to Levon’s, and they’d go, ‘well, yes, but I know who’s playing with him’…the musicologists, people who came here with reason and knowledge…conversely, when something is going on at the Bearsville Theater, people come from all around, sit here and have a bite and want to know, is my car going to be all right here? Ok, yeah…and they’d leave their car running…
“That always kind of thrilled me, because it wasn’t just us, every business in town had that experience and I really felt part of providing part of the experience at that point. Those were the fun times.
“Sometimes when I think about it, there have been wonderful people passing through here and now they’re gone,” he says. “I’ve been thinking about Jesse Reimer, Peter Walther, Bananas, lovely, wonderful giving human beings and I guess if I can speak for both of us, we’re grateful for what the town has given us in many, many ways.”
I’m going to miss this place, I tell them.
“I think everybody will,” says Perez.
“We’re very grateful,” Durkin reiterates, “to have served, as they say, to have served the fine people of this town…”
It was sad to read of the closing of the Gypsy Wolf. My siblings and children ate there quite often when visiting our mother, Mescal Hornbeck. That was a gathering place that Mescal enjoyed when we would take her out to dinner during our visits when she resided in the Woodstock area from 1971 until her passing on January 19, 2011. We remember the old swimming pool that pre dated the Gypsy Wolf as our children swam there during the 1970’s when Mescal lived in Lake Hill prior to her move to Woodstock to live with Grandmother Olive Toms in the house that Grandfather Fred Toms built at 62 Ohayo Mt. Road during the 1950’s.
Another Woodstock land mark is gone.