Growing up around his parents’ business, Ishmael Martinez, Jr., would spend his summers mowing lawns and washing dishes. As a teenager he worked as a waiter and bartender. Martinez would help serve breakfast and work in the restaurant until noon. After lunch, employees would play a game of softball, then “take a dip before getting dressed and serving … dinner,” Martinez recalls. Their family business was called the Village of Sunny Acres, a summer resort in the town of Plattekill.
The Sunny Acres summer resort was part of an area known as the Spanish Alps or “Las Villas,” a diverse group of hotels and summer resorts in Plattekill that for several decades were the main tourist destination for Spanish-speaking communities on the East Coast of the United States.
People always felt at home in the Villas, Martinez says. Customers could eat tostones, pastelitos (Puerto Rican empanadas), roast suckling pig, and arroz con habichuelas (rice and beans). The atmosphere was “very family-oriented,” Martinez explains, adding that his memories of the villas are of “hot summer days, with people coming and going and children laughing.”
During the Villas’ golden age in the 1960s and 1970s, Martinez says, Plattekill’s population would quadruple thanks to the number of visitors. Some villas provided entertainment for locals. One of Martinez’s favorite childhood memories was Wednesday nights, when Sunny Acres would invite neighborhood kids to watch movies on the dance floor and enjoy pizza and soda.
The Villas began to appear in the Hudson Valley in the early 1920s, when immigrants from Spain began to leave New York City seeking rural settings. At the time, the economy of Plattekill and larger Ulster County consisted mostly of apple orchards and dairy farms. To supplement their income, several families adapted their homes to host tourists over the summer months. Among the first villas to open were Villa Rodríguez, Villa Galicia, Villa Nueva, and Villa Victoria.
Many visitors came from the Puerto Rican communities of New York City, just a two-hour drive from the Villas, from neighborhoods such as Spanish Harlem and the Bronx. Among them were Martinez’s parents, who after their first visits to the area were so enchanted by the Villas, small towns, and rural life that in 1955 they decided to buy a dairy farm and moved the whole family to the county. Their father, who was a carpenter, built new areas to accommodate summer visitors.
“The most popular thing for Latinos on the East Coast was to go to the Villas,” Martinez says, adding that visitors included Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Cubans and South Americans. As the Latino population grew in cities like New York and Philadelphia, the number of Spanish-speaking tourists in the Villas increased.
One of the great attractions of the Villas was the music: “Even when I was working I could hear the music playing on the dance floor and get a good feeling,” adds Martinez. For decades, famous Latin American artists visited Plattekill to entertain the visiting population. From celebrated singers like Juan Legido and the trio Los Panchos in the 1950s, to boogaloo pioneer Pete Rodriguez and great salsa orchestras like the Joe Cuba Sextet and the Gran Combo de Puerto Rico in the 1960s and 1970s.
In the 1980s, the Villas began to slowly deteriorate and eventually disappear. As airline travel prices began to plummet, many families changed their vacation destinations to places like Puerto Rico, Florida, California, and even Europe. Each year the Villas would see fewer visitors, and one by one they began to close. The last villa, Casa Perez, closed in the early 2000s.
Today it is very difficult to find any evidence that these villas existed and of the thousands of Latino guests that visited them each year. The buildings have been converted into churches, restaurants, or condominiums. Others have been abandoned and have slowly returned to nature.
That’s why Carla Ramos, Martinez’s sister, decided to create a Facebook group to share photos and memories of those who visited and worked in the Villas. The group “The Villas of Plattekill, New York” has more than 1,800 members who share photos and memories of family vacations. This prompted Martinez to write a book about his memories and the history of the Villas. The Villas of Plattekill and Ulster County was published in 2016. Tito Puente wrote in the introduction to the book that he fondly remembers “this place with hot days, cold nights and something else — Latin music.”
“With this book Ish Martinez has captured an important piece of Hudson Valley history,” says Libbie Welaw, Plattekill town historian, adding that it is very important to rescue the first-hand knowledge of the community, food, music, and traditions that made the Villas one of the most popular destinations in New York State.
For Martinez, it is important to remember this history and fight to make sure it is not forgotten. “It’s our history, our Latin American history. It’s important.”
