This time of year, Liza Szarejko’s home overflows with potted plants and people, most of whom are just passing through.
Her old brown house at 57 Tinker St., with its big white sign reading “Tinker Village,” is hard to miss. It sits along Waterfall Way, a gravel road tucked behind Tinker Street near the Tannery Brook waterfall.
Matt Hickson and Devon Johnson, visiting from Washington, D.C., stopped in Woodstock while driving upstate to see the fall foliage. Drawn in by the view from the street, they left with one of Szarejko’s plants.
Throughout October, Szarejko runs her annual fall plant sale from her porch. She grows and pots each plant herself, using vessels found at local shops, artists’ studios, yard sales, and even in roadside boxes. The plants start as cuttings from the tropical varieties she grows in her sunroom.
“I have so many ‘cause I can’t stop myself. I love growing,” Szarejko said.
Across the gravel road, she runs Treasure Chest Antiques, a shop she has had for 40 years and opens on weekends during peak season. Her two cats, Charly and Mama, wander the grounds.
Szarejko, 69, has called Tinker Street home for almost 50 years. She moved to Woodstock from New York City in 1967 with her mother and twin brother, Michael, when she was 10.
Over the decades, Szarejko said, she watched Woodstock change from an artists’ colony to an increasingly expensive seasonal destination. Her family’s property became part of that transformation. In 2014, Szarejko sold the family’s largely wooded, 2-acre parcel to hotel developers Ryan Giuliani and Jesse Halliburton. The listing history records the sale price as $583,750.
Her new neighbor at 10 Waterfall Way, Woodstock Way Hotel, stands where the family once rented cottages to local artists. She said the cottages’ upkeep became too expensive, forcing a sale. When the buyers also sought her home, she refused.
By September 2026, the typical home value in Woodstock’s 12498 ZIP code had almost doubled, rising about 88% from $352,600 in September 2019 to $661,200, according to an analysis of Zillow’s historical data.
The five single-story cottages had fallen into disrepair, Szarejko said. Eight hotel buildings now occupy the site, according to the project’s architect.
“A lot of folks were upset about this new place going in and taking away rooms for locals, and I was upset too but I had no choice,” Szarejko said. “It was the only affordable place left to live in Woodstock.”
She remembers a town populated by artists, drifters, craftspeople, musicians, and “freethinkers,” people she said came to Woodstock to “drop out of society.” Many residents were drawn to the town because of its connection to the legendary Woodstock Festival in 1969.
That welcoming spirit is what drew her mother, Rena, who moved the family to their first home on Zena Road in 1967. An artist who made a living selling pieces constructed from garbage and recycled materials, she became known around town as “Rena from Zena.”
A 1979 article in The New York Times described her as an “unusual entrepreneur” who offered “to turn an old sneaker or other favorite castoff into ‘Objects d’Junque’ with glue, paint and varnish.”
Her mother found the Tinker Street property in the 1970s, Szarejko said. Her family bought the Tinker Street property in 1976 for around $90,000, Szarejko said. The family then created Tinker Village.
“We bought it really without a penny to our name,” she said. “We were broke. We had no money. We were like hippies, you know?”
With help from local carpenters, the family renovated the property into shops for artists and craftspeople.
“She made it into an arts and crafts mini-mall here. Every room in my house and in this shop were all different artists or craftspeople,” Szarejko said.
At various points, the property had a flea market and Village Cafe, which sold hot dogs, juice, and tacos. Szarejko sold plants from a stand called Liza’s Green Thumbhouse.
For one summer in the early 1980s, her brother ran an outhouse they called the “best little restroom in Woodstock,” after the Dolly Parton movie “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.” He decorated the interior and even rolled out a red carpet from the street down Waterfall Way to the restroom.
Visitors were asked to leave 25-cent donations in a box outside, Szarejko said. The restroom was shut down because the family wasn’t allowed to charge for its use, she said.
Her mother’s habit of finding value in discarded things also endured.
“I learned from my mother. You don’t need to buy anything new here, ‘cause everybody’s always got something,” Szarejko said.
Her antiques shop suits that philosophy.
“I hate anything new. I really do.”
Her interest in plants stretches back even further than Tinker Village. She recalled her grandmother’s love of nature and growing her first plant, an avocado, in 1972, when she was 15.
“I killed about a thousand plants before I got good at it, but I guess I never gave up ‘cause I loved it,” she said.
Learning to grow them was one challenge. Parting with them was another.
“I love my plants so much. I used to have trouble selling them. They’re literally my babies,” she said.
Woodstock’s identity as an artists’ community predates her family’s arrival. The founding of Byrdcliffe in 1902 and the Maverick arts colony in 1905 helped draw artists to the area, said Janine Mower of the Historical Society of Woodstock.
The town “changed dramatically” in the decades after the 1969 Woodstock music festival, held in Bethel, as newcomers arrived, Mower said.
Szarejko said she began noticing a demographic shift in the 1980s, as more wealth flowed into the community.
“It was getting more commercial and more capitalistic here,” she said. “We had a mix of places that the locals could use and the tourists could use, and they were also used together. But now it’s very expensive to eat, to stay, to be entertained. Everything costs money now that was practically free.”
Rising costs extend beyond Woodstock. Consumer prices nationwide increased about 31% between September 2019 and September 2026, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
Szarejko pointed to the growth of hotels and short-term rentals as part of the pressure on housing for people who work in town.
“It’s all gentrified towns, and it’s sad to see that happen,” she said.
Mower said Woodstock’s artistic identity has evolved alongside those changes.
“The ‘artist colony’ mystique is still with us. It has just morphed over the past 60 or so years to be blended with a well-respected music Mecca, a tourist destination, and a weekend Airbnb retreat.”
Woodstock, Szarejko said, still has “a contingent of artists that are not rich, and musicians that struggle here to make a living.”
For her, staying was a choice she made even as the hotel buyers repeatedly asked to purchase her home along with the cottage property. The properties were separate, she said, and she considered whether she wanted to leave.
“I didn’t sell it. I stayed. And it’s my home. It’s my homestead. It has a lot of history.”
On a busy Saturday in October, Szarejko buzzed around her shop and porch, collecting cash from customers and giving detailed instructions on caring for their plants.
After Hickson and Johnson left, she checked the box where customers are instructed to leave cash if she isn’t around to collect it.
“Oh! They gave me extra. That’s nice,” she said.
Isabella Schoonover is a staff reporter for The Overlook covering Woodstock, Saugerties, Hurley, and surrounding Ulster County communities. Send correspondence to isabella@theoverlooknews.com.
