Pakatakan Artists Colony Historic District

Set on the northern slope of Pakatakan Mountain at the edge of Arkville, this district is a small colony of artists' studios, summer residences and cottages gathered around the original Pakatakan Inn. Its roughly sixty-five acres hold thirty-five contributing features, built mostly between 1886 and 1930. The hotel opened in 1886, and landscape painter J. Francis Murphy built his studio the next year. Alexander Wyant, Charles Mann, Field and others followed, each building a shingled studio with a large north-facing window, a vaulted studio room, a corner fireplace and a sleeping loft. The buildings are simple, steeply roofed and spaced irregularly along rambling roads, with the grandest Shingle Style examples being the Wyant Studio and the Locke House. The painters favored delicate color and light over the grand scenes of the Hudson River School, and are described as a distinct Catskill Mountain group. Few alterations have occurred, though open meadows have grown back into woodland.