Long-time SUNY New Paltz employee provides Rockefeller Center Xmas tree

The Rockefeller Center Christmas celebration for 2015 will center on a 79-foot-tall, 80-year old Norway spruce from the Gardiner, N.Y. home of Al Asendorf and Nancy Puchalski.

Many SUNY New Paltz faculty and staff will remember Asendorf as the long-tenured and recently retired plant utilities engineer with Facilities Operations. He has been living on this property since the late 1950s, and said he remembers the tree having been there for years when he and his family first moved in.

“We played around in it as kids, and our grandkids did the same thing,” Asendorf said. “But it was getting too big, and we were getting afraid it would fall on the house or on my wires, so we figured we had to take it down.”

Asendorf and Puchalski originally intended to have the tree removed for use as firewood. Before committing to that, though, they reached out to Rockefeller Center, who sent a Head Gardener, Eric Pauze, to their home near the end of summer.

Pauze was impressed, and plans quickly got underway to cut and transport the 10-ton tree over the 80 miles between Gardiner and the heart of Manhattan, where it was set up on the morning of Nov. 6.

Asendorf and Puchalski have mixed feelings about the tree being gone, but since it needed to be removed regardless, the couple is happy that it will have a second life as the world’s most famous Christmas tree.

“We’re sad to see it go, but it’s going to a good place where a lot of other people can enjoy it,” Asendorf said.

Once the stump is removed, Asendorf said he plans to plant another Norway spruce in its place, continuing the tradition that began for his family more than 50 years ago.

“Maybe my grandson’s son, when he gets older, can do the same thing again.”

The tree will be lit for the first time on Wednesday, Dec. 2, at its new Rockefeller Center home between West 48th and West 51st Streets and Fifth and Sixth Avenues. More than 45,000 individual lights are expected to adorn the giant spruce. Tens of thousands crowd the sidewalks for the annual lighting event, and millions more watch it live across the globe. The tree will remain lit and can be viewed until Jan. 6, 2016.