String instrument maker Roger Benedict plays guitar to children during the Center for Music, Drama and Arts Summer Sampler Program in August 1980. (File photo)

LAKE PLACID — Summertime on the campus of the Lake Placid Center for Music, Drama and Art was like a “utopia of the arts” in the 1970s, according to Dan Patchett, one of the founding fathers of the CMDA.

“It was really a magnificent thing,” Patchett said. “When you walked around in the summertime, you would see actors, you would see dancers, you’d see musicians, you’d see artists … There was so much going on and so many people, and I think almost every night of the week there were things on the stage — including children’s events during the daytime and a couple of matinees. It was very active back then.”

The CMDA has gone by different names since it was founded by benefactress Nettie Marie Jones in 1972. Now — as the center’s staff prepares to celebrate 50 years of operations — it’s known as the Lake Placid Center for the Arts, or the LPCA.

The center has actually been open for nearly 51 years, but LPCA Executive Director James Lemons said that 2020, when the center shuttered in-person operations and performances due to pandemic-related state orders, isn’t being counted in the total tally.

The LPCA is throwing its 50th-anniversary gala on Thursday, July 20, but LPCA staff members are already celebrating. That’s because they received a $7.5 million state Council on the Arts grant earlier this month to build a new arts facility that will essentially ensure another 50 years of performances, art exhibits and art-based community classes at the LPCA. Construction is expected to start in the spring or summer of 2024 and be complete by 2026.

Nettie Marie Jones (File photo)

But as LPCA staff plan for the next 50 years, Patchett reflected with the Lake Placid News about the first few years of operations at the CMDA, which he helped to shape as a visual arts school in 1971.

The first state money ever funneled toward the CMDA in the 1970s, he said, also came from a New York State Council on the Arts grant, though the check was smaller back then at $3,500.

Most of the center’s financial — and ideological — foundation was laid by Nettie Marie Jones, who was inducted into the Lake Placid Hall of Fame for her community service and philanthropy and was instrumental in founding local institutions such as the CMDA, Uihlein Mercy Center, Placid Memorial Hospital and W. Alton Jones Cell Science Center, named after her deceased husband.

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Paradox Bay

Working over the budget figures for 1976 are managing director of the Center for Music, Drama and Art in Lake Placid, Joan Frank, and acting president of the center's controlling board, James Rogers III. (File photo)

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Jones was a wealthy woman with a penchant for arts and education, and she was known for divvying up her wealth to institutions that specialized in these fields. She and her late husband William Alton Pete Jones — an oil businessman who died in a plane crash in 1962 — spent summers in Lake Placid for many years, and the village became a subject of her philanthropy. It was Nettie Marie Jones who provided the land and donated $2.5 million for the construction of the Cell Science Center on Barn Road, and her financial contributions to the CMDA from the “W. Alton Jones Foundation” is what kept the center running from its start until she pulled funding from the school in 1985. With the CMDA, Patchett said Jones envisioned a center that would provide both an education in the arts and a concert hall lit up every night with “something different.”

In the years leading up to the CMDA’s creation, Jones funded a summer art school in a boat house on Lake Placid’s Paradox Bay. Patchett first attended the school in 1968, falling in love with the community and the Adirondacks. He worked closely with Jones in the years following, and as she considered changes to the art school, Patchett became one of her advisers. He encouraged Jones to expand the school’s existing watercolor and oil painting offerings to include lithography printmaking and ceramics in a school that offered college credits for courses. Then Jones asked Patchett if he could implement his own recommendations.

“I wasn’t expecting such a question, you see, but I couldn’t pass up such a great opportunity,” Patchett said.

That’s how the “Lake Placid Workshop,” which would become the CMDA’s art school, was born.

But when the lithography press was installed in the boat house in the summer of 1971, it became clear that the old structure couldn’t bear the weight of the equipment — the building’s lakeside foundation was giving way to the water.

In October 1971, as Patchett was finishing up his Master of Arts degree from the University of Iowa, he received a call from Jones. She’d torn down the boat house, and she was building a new visual and performing arts center with Joan Frank, operator of the Placid Playhouse in the Signal Hill Concert Hall. Patchett was asked to help Jones run the art school.

The following January, with a fresh diploma in hand, Patchett loaded his belongings into his Volkswagen and headed to Lake Placid.

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The early years

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With Jones’ name on the operation, the new CMDA was born into notoriety and success. When the new center — what’s now the main theater and art gallery building — held its grand opening gala on Dec. 29, 1972, a note of congratulations was sent from the White House, penned by President Richard Nixon.

Over the next several years, the theater and gallery welcomed some of the most notable artists and performing arts groups of their time — including the Martha Graham Dance Company, the Paul Taylor Dance Company, Twyla Tharpe and Vincent Price — and the Lake Placid Workshop offered a variety of classes, such as painting, dance, photography, printmaking and ceramics. Patchett said the doors to the CMDA’s art school were never locked, encouraging students to follow their creative inklings to the studio at any time of day or night.

In the fall of 1975, the CMDA’s Lake Placid Workshop became known as the Lake Placid School of Art as the CMDA received state licensure as an accredited two-year, post-secondary private school of art. That meant that credits received through the CMDA’s art school would be transferable to other colleges. Required for the accreditation was the construction a new library for the school — the Nettie Marie Jones Fine Arts Library, which is now the annex building on the LPCA campus at Algonquin Drive. Another building added to the campus, which was formerly a Ford dealership and is the current site of the Stewart’s Shops across from the LPCA, housed a set-construction shop along with painting, photography and multimedia studios.

The 1980s, however, brought hard times to the CMDA. In January 1981, the school’s board of directors announced that it would close the arts school that May due to inflation and high interest rates, according to the Jan. 23, 1981, issue of the Adirondack Daily Enterprise.

“To everyone’s shock and surprise,” Patchett said.

Many of that spring semester’s 45 students had already arrived and paid for their upcoming courses that year, according to Patchett. Fifteen arts school faculty — including Patchett — lost their jobs.

Then, in January 1984 — around the time the CMDA changed its name to the Lake Placid Center for the Arts — it was announced that the W. Alton Jones Foundation would pull its annual funding from the LCPA altogether, beginning on June 1, 1985. According to the April 8, 1985, issue of the Enterprise, the funding was pulled as the Foundation shifted its focus to “nuclear disarmament and environmental concerns.” Eight more LPCA employees — about half of the staff at that time — were laid off. About 10,000 titles in the fine arts library were packed away and placed into storage for nearly a decade, many of them succumbing to dampness and ruin before the books that remained viable were donated to North Country Community College in Saranac Lake.

Though the CMDA’s future looked uncertain that year, the center’s board of directors tightened its purse strings and carried on by seeking funding from private donors and state grants — including grants from the state Council on the Arts.

Jon Donk, who’s currently the LPCA’s managing director, said the organization shifted over time from a visual arts-focused school to a performing arts organization that still had education for school-aged kids. Now, the LPCA houses art exhibits, hosts speakers and dance and theater productions, and is in the process of expanding its programs for children and adults alike.

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New foundations

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The LPCA’s next era of art rings loudly with echoes of the past. Interviews with Lemons, Donk and LPCA Communications Director Alison Simcox about their ideas for the new center — expanded education, better technology, bringing in top performing artists — aren’t unlike the conversations with Patchett, where he spoke of the printmaking and ceramics dreams that became part of the CMDA’s original fabric. Donk said the LPCA staff are dealing with the past “constantly,” and pieces of the center’s CMDA origins are being folded into future plans.

Hidden for years in an LPCA closet among ballet tutus, drums and other supplies, a set of old wooden looms sat in hiding. When Donk first arrived at the LPCA 10 years ago, he was tasked with clearing out closet space. Eventually, he came to the “loom room.” Lost as to what to do with the weaving machines, Donk consulted a former weaving student at the Lake Placid School of Art, Annoel Krider. She showed up to the loom room with 10 volunteers, who started setting up the looms. Now, the LPCA offers weaving classes.

“The whole program was just born that day,” Donk said.

Patchett said the looms came to the CMDA in the 1970s from the College of the Ozarks in Missouri, another educational institute that had borne the financial graces of Nettie Marie Jones.

In Donk’s time at the LPCA, he’s brushed shoulders with artists who visited the CMDA in the past — including a dancer who’d first visited the LPCA with the Paul Taylor Dance Company and Twyla Tharpe herself. While offering dance classes during the COVID pandemic, Donk said a student told the LPCA staff about learning the “Lake Placid Run,” a dancing leap, while studying the Martha Graham technique at Julliard School in New York City.

“We didn’t even know that existed,” Donk said. “We keep kind of tripping over our own history.”

Patchett gave a talk about the start of the CMDA for the Lake Placid-North Elba Historical Society this past May, and Donk said people spent hours talking with Patchett and asking him questions about the CMDA. The historical society recently opened its season at the History Museum in the train station with a 50th-anniversary exhibit for the CMDA/LPCA. Most of the collection was donated by Patchett.

“It was just like a gold mine of material and knowledge,” Donk said.

Donk believes that the LPCA’s legacy as an arts institution is reflective of the region’s artistic draw — painters like Georgia O’Keefe and Winslow Homer painted in the Adirondacks.

“To be able to tap into that legacy as an organization is always so special,” Donk said.

For Lemons, Nettie Marie’s original CMDA investment was an investment in Lake Placid — a place of athletes and artists like no other. Now, he said, the state’s $7.5 million grant for a new arts center underscores that investment — an endowment of Lake Placid’s continued legacy in the arts.

“That was a fantastic opening chapter,” Lemons said of the CMDA’s original investment, “and this investment now is a fantastic bookend.”