Walk by Kingston’s historic museums and sites on a winter day, such as the Reher Center for Immigrant History and Culture in the Rondout or the Friends of Historic Kingston’s Gallery in Uptown, and you could be forgiven for thinking that the quiet outside reflects a stillness within these organizations. Make no mistake about it: During these winter days, though some key Kingston historic exhibit spaces are closed, things are not at a standstill. Many ideas, plans, and activities are quickening, building, and coalescing to shape the exhibitions and offerings that will come as late winter plays out and takes its turn into spring. Behind the scenes, dedicated staff are keeping busy during these winter weeks – in dozens of phone calls; an exhibit designer’s blueprints on a wall; desks piled with snapshots, old postcards, photographic negatives, and folders of clippings; font samples; examinations and selections of artifacts; text drafts; and much more. It’s like looking in on a theater production in the works.
Checking in on a few key Kingston-based historic museums and programs – the Reher Center, the Friends of Historic Kingston, the Ulster County Clerk’s Office and the Matthewis Persen House Museum the county owns – reveals engaging exhibitions that each one plans to open as the warmer months arrive.
The Reher Center for Immigrant History and Culture
In May, the Reher Center will launch a major multisensory exhibition, Taking Root: Immigrant Stories of the Hudson Valley. The exhibition has its genesis in the center’s ongoing oral history project featuring people who are immigrants or whose parents or grandparents are immigrants to the Hudson Valley.
In the spring of 2022, Reher Center and the Kingston Library began a collaborative project to gather, document, preserve, and share the oral histories of immigrants in the Kingston community. Thus far, the Kingston Immigrant Oral History Project is comprised of the interviews of 36 narrators from 22 countries relating their individual, diverse immigration experiences.
This effort was spurred to address a lack of materials in the Kingston Library’s Local History collection on immigrant experiences of the later 20th and early 21st centuries, the project’s summary notes. Compared to New York City, for example, immigration to the Hudson Valley has drawn a lot less historic scholarship, according to Sarah Litvin, Reher Center executive director. Part of the center’s mission is to collect and preserve the stories and experiences and help build the historical record.
As Litvin explains: With the oral histories forming the foundation of an upcoming exhibition and series of programs, it’s been crucial to construct this project as a “community-based” initiative that involves locals every step of the way. One example lies in the actual questions for the interviews. Bard College students conducted the interviews using a set of questions that the library and Reher Center established with community advisory partners such as members of Vida Real, the Hudson Valley LGBTQ Community Center, the A.J. Williams-Myers African Roots Center, and others.
The stories that the students collected in oral history interviews will further come to life in an immersive exhibition opening in May, Taking Root. The exhibition aims to make clear and tangible just how varied each person’s experience, while at the same time evoking the continuity of immigrant experience over generations. People emigrate for manifold reasons (e.g., to escape gang warfare and violence where they live, to join a husband who has found a job in the U.S.), and yet certain basic themes exist. The title comes from the interview of Lidia Gabriela Vilma Cirila Aliaga Rios, who emigrated to the United States from Peru in 2021 and settled in Kingston: “I’m almost 60 years old…today I have a chance to flourish again and take root in this new land.”
Reher Center will employ varied, innovative ways to engage the senses, as Litvin and curator Sarah Gordon explained. Visitors can hear about each person’s immigrant story by listening to audio recordings. The center is also producing bilingual transcripts. Coupled with these recordings in the display, photographer Judit German-Heins is doing a tintype portrait of each storyteller, the technique that flourished in the 1860s and 1870s, continued into the early 20th century, and is seeing renewed use now.
The theme of taking root is connected visually in key elements exhibit designer Cesar Zapata is conceiving in the second-floor exhibition space. Around the space, single trees will display one of the questions in the interviews, and leaves will embody the individual responses, showing the incredible diversity of experiences among the narrators. Language comes up consistently, but each immigrant’s experience of it differs. Most of the narrators are learning the English language. The Ulster Literacy Association has been an instrumental partner, bringing in these participants and conducting interviews with them.
Even as he uses a tree in an abstract way for the exhibit design, Zapata said in a video about exhibit preparations that trees also depict the Hudson Valley’s beautiful natural surroundings that the immigrants cited in their stories.
In the oral history stories, food always came up. To reflect this importance and commonality-yet-uniqueness, the exhibition will feature a long table at the center of the gallery, with placemats representing various dishes. The Reher Center has been working with food studies scholar Dr. Willa Zhen and her students at the Culinary Institute of America to research the cultural context of the foods. As part of the multisensory experience, Gordon is working on smell cannisters, and there will be various food-related items that the storytellers have used in food preparation.
Of the process in the months leading up to the exhibition opening, Gordon said, “It’s a lot like theater…editing and cutting.”
“We are so excited about the exhibition,” Litvin said. “There are so many different people, so many different stories.” She hopes that the exhibition, which will remain in the gallery for two seasons; its related programs and activities; and the ensuing community gatherings will significantly contribute to the knowledge and understanding of the immigrant experience in the Hudson Valley.
Taking Root: Immigrant Stories of the Hudson Valley will open on the morning of May 6, with a 10:45 a.m. ribbon-cutting, followed by the public opening at 11 a.m.
Friends of Historic Kingston
When he was volunteering for the Friends of Historic Kingston in the organization’s Gallery in Uptown Kingston, Dean Engle at various times was greeted with an incredulous response when he talked about the Kingston City Hall having been abandoned in 1972 for nearly three decades. The city government moved out after building a new City Hall in the Rondout. Neglected and falling into horrible disrepair, it came perilously close to being lost, a victim of “demolition by neglect.” However, after the Friends of Historic Kingston spearheaded a campaign and FHK, concerned citizens, some of the artists who had settled in the city, and others lobbied to save the building, the city government restored it. “What are you talking about?” a visitor said to him, Engle recalled. The gallery visitor had no idea that Kingston City Hall had been abandoned and left to decay, and such incredulity wasn’t a rare occurrence when he talked of Kingston City Hall.
Out of such conversations with visitors, Engle came to believe that it might well be time to tell the story again of a good number of Kingston’s saved historic buildings and places, and how such treasures of architecture, history, and art are not something to be taken for granted. The idea seemed a very fitting one for an exhibit. Engle, now a member of the Friends of Historic Kingston’s Board of Trustees, is hard at work to help lead and put together the Friends’ new exhibition for the 2023 season, slated for a spring unveiling.
Entitled Still Here, the exhibition will feature, through dramatic then-and-now images, 12 historic buildings and sites that are, in essence, preservation success stories. (Engle jokingly calls them “the greatest hits.”) They have come through circumstances that could well have meant their degradation or total loss.
The dozen locations range from high-profile buildings to lesser known yet still important homes and sites. The exhibition will feature a photograph of the place today, which photographer Tim Burger is taking. The exhibition will pair each with a striking image from the past. This “then-and-now” display will illustrate Kingston City Hall and some others that were in various states of disrepair or neglect, or deemed obsolete. In addition, the Friends is making a video that will be in the gallery, which will provide additional history and make use of more images from the past such as postcards and clippings. The objective: Give a full picture of why the saving and preservation of these buildings and places often was anything but a sure thing.
The successes include civic buildings such as City Hall and the former Kingston City Library, the 1904 building on Broadway; a building from Kingston’s manufacturing heyday, the 1903 United States Lace Curtain Mills, now the Lace Mill, a sustainable, green building with quality affordable housing for artists; and the Dr. Luke Kiersted House, on John Street, the only pre-1900 clapboard house remaining in the Stockade area. The Friends intervened to buy and store the Kiersted House when it was threatened with demolition due to a street widening project. The Sharp Burying Ground on Albany Avenue will be part of the exhibition as well, a picturesque burial ground used during the middle decades of the 19th century. Once it was not in use, it deteriorated over decades, with many fallen or broken tombstones and unkempt grounds. The Friends today is assisting in preserving this burial ground and restoring burial plots.
For each of the 12 places that are “still standing,” the Friends exhibition will describe the history and how it was ultimately saved, whether through reuse, restoration, landmark designation, or other means. The “then” image for many of these places will likely be quite illuminating for those who take in the exhibition, images that Engle is researching, culling, and preparing in these winter weeks. As an example, many today admire the polychromatic arches, graceful cupola, and splendid bluestone of the 1870 Second Empire-style building on Abeel Street that housed the offices of Simeon and William B. Fitch, for their wholesale bluestone business. Yet the building was in poor condition for years, and one can appreciate the miracle of it remaining today, beautiful along the bank of the Rondout Creek, if seeing older images of it with the windows missing, as Engle noted.
“The show makes the argument that while there is a lot of feeling of mourning the places that have been lost, we need to celebrate what is saved,” Engle said. He credits the Friends of Historic Kingston’s executive director, Jane Kellar; the late Kingston historian Ed Ford; and others who have worked and campaigned for decades to preserve, reuse, and care for Kingston’s historic buildings and sites. Engle added, “We can attribute what the city looks like today to their foresight and their courage.”
The exhibition Still Standing is set to open in early May. It promises to spark a fuller appreciation of the architectural and historical gems that remain in Kingston’s civic spaces and neighborhoods today.
Matthewis Persen House Museum – Ulster County Clerk’s Office
The Matthewis Persen House Museum and Culture Heritage Center has drawn people from every one of the 50 U.S. states and from 23 countries. This is a statistic that Ulster County Clerk Nina Postupack cites to show the diverse audience that comes to the Persen House as well as the powerful draw of tourism to Kingston. In the early weeks of 2023, the County Clerk’s Office is busily crafting new exhibitions and finetuning existing offerings. To do so, the office makes use of archival records, digital resources, and outreach and collaboration with a wide range of Ulster County’s guest host organizations and presenters.
While the Persen House is open for the warm weather months, from May through October, there’s no slow season in the clerk office’s endeavors to preserve, share, and promote Ulster County history. The office also generates an ongoing historic exhibit on the second floor of the Ulster County Office Building on Fair Street in Kingston as well as a “Historical Profile Series” exhibition in the first-floor lobby.
Postupack, who has been with the office for 44 years, was elected the 45th Ulster County Clerk, and took office in 2006, said she had an initial vision to grow the archives. Through the current exhibit in the Ulster County Office Building, the public can learn about the archival mission and the services people can access. Archives in Action: Celebrating the 20th Anniversary of the Archives gives an informative, inviting look at Ulster County’s voluminous collection of records and its Records Management program, how people use it (“over 40% of research inquiries are for genealogical information”), and the materials and many activities available for children.
For Women’s History Month in March, the historical profile will spotlight the life story of a trailblazing women from Ulster County who is not widely known: Dorothy Frooks, activist, author, lawyer, and military figure. Born in Saugerties in 1896, Frooks devoted much of her life to fighting for justice and equal rights. The exhibition will highlight Frooks’ actions and accomplishments, such as how she delivered her first address at age 11 and became one of Ulster County’s youngest suffragists. During World War I, Frooks is credited with recruiting more than 30,000 men for military service. She advocated for the rights of children and widowed mothers.
When those in the County Clerk’s Office discovered Frooks’ story, they sensed that she would be an excellent historical profile. “She fought for women prisoners, for women’s right to vote, for women and children,” Postupack said. The exhibit panel will display newspaper clippings, photographs, and explanatory text to explore Frooks’ life of purposeful action and her impact.
Through an exhibit tentatively opening in early March in the second-floor Ulster County Office Building space, the public will have the opportunity to find out about the fascinating artifacts and records that people, organizations, and groups donate to the Ulster County Archives. The clerk’s office is currently selecting which donations will be included. These donations encompass maps (e.g., an 1894 souvenir map of Kingston), family papers, items from regional tribes, photographs (e.g., from IBM), memo books, and other materials. The exhibition’s title, Into My Hands, is taken directly from the 18th century oath of Christopher Tappen to faithfully preserve the records and papers that belonged to the public officers. Tappen, as deputy Ulster County clerk, saved Ulster County’s records, administrative papers, and ledgers from the destruction wrought by the burning of the Kingston Stockade area in October, 1777. He had these county as well as state records removed to a rural location in Rochester on Oct. 12, 1777.
Meantime, preparations for the Persen House’s new season are underway. The County Clerk’s Office is sending out invitations to 109 historic societies, museums, reenactors, art and cultural groups, land trusts, and local historians as prospective guest hosts for a Saturday at the Persen House. A final list for 23 Saturday guest hosts will be chosen. These programs will complement the Persen House’s all-season exhibits that will be on view from May-October, including one of artifacts from the Native tribes and the European settlers of the area. New this year, TRANSART, which provides arts and cultural programming in the Hudson Valley, will have a season-long exhibit at the Persen House on how African culture influenced Early America.
The Persen House Opening Day is May 27.
Behind the scenes, much work is going on in Kingston’s museums and sites. Such are some of the signs of spring for Kingston and Ulster County history.
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