Interesting Facts

New Paltz, New York is far more than a pretty Hudson Valley college town — its past holds some genuinely odd and overlooked chapters.

• America's oldest street of houses: Huguenot Street in New Paltz contains a row of stone houses dating to the early 1700s and is recognized as one of the oldest continuously inhabited streets in the United States, with several original structures still standing on their original foundations.
  
  
• A refugee colony with its own language: The Huguenot founders who settled New Paltz in 1678 spoke a distinctive French dialect and maintained it within their tight-knit community for generations, long after most other immigrant groups in colonial New York had shifted entirely to English or Dutch.
  
  
• Same-sex marriage pioneer: In February 2004, New Paltz Mayor Jason West began officiating same-sex weddings — making it one of the very first municipalities in the country to do so — a full decade before federal recognition, and he was subsequently charged with 19 misdemeanor counts for it.
  
  
• A climbing mecca hiding in plain sight: The Shawangunk Ridge, just outside town, is rated among the top rock-climbing destinations in the entire world, drawing elite climbers for its famously hard quartzite conglomerate cliffs, known locally simply as "the Gunks."
  
  
• Named after a city that no longer exists: New Paltz takes its name from the Palatinate region of Germany, honoring the refugees' homeland — but the specific electoral territory called the "Pfalz" that they knew was politically dismantled and reorganized multiple times after their departure, making the original place they memorialized essentially extinct as a political entity.