Few places in America rival the architectural heritage of Kingston. “On Fair Street, there’s every architectural style between 1720 and 1920, which is very rare,” noted Derrick McNab, a specialist in historic restoration trades. In recent years, the richness of this historical infrastructure has come to light as many homeowners, both longtime Kingston residents and migrants from New York City alike, have restored their buildings, removing vinyl siding, repairing porches, and preserving bluestone walls and sidewalks.
Back in March, McNab was the featured speaker at a historic preservation talk at the Kingston Public Library, part of a monthly series at the library launched by historic preservationist Marissa Marvelli in January.
“It really frustrates me how difficult it is for property owners to get information about historic preservation resources,” said Marvelli, who moved to Kingston with her husband, Andrei, in 2014 and served on the city’s Historic Landmarks Preservation Commission. “We have a community of people passionate about historic preservation. At the first talk, I was expecting ten people to come, but it was standing room only.”
In response, Marvelli has compiled a comprehensive “(Working) Preservation Guide for Historic Property Owners in Ulster Co.” in a Google document that is impressively comprehensive, including maps, books, sources of historic photographs and newspapers, instructions on how to research a deed, and information on the state’s program of historic tax credits. Soon She plans to add information on window preservation.
Marvelli worked for a New York architectural firm for nine years and is now an independent historic preservation consultant. Her clients include local governments, nonprofit organizations, developers and homeowners. She won two Excellence in Preservation Awards, from the Preservation League of NYS and the state government, for her 2022 cultural resources study of El Barrio—the East Harlem neighborhood, which is the heart of the Puerto Rican diaspora, has the largest concentration of public housing projects in the nation—and recently completed a cultural resources survey for Lansingburgh, in North Troy, which just got listed to the State and National Register of Historic Places as a historic district.
She and Andrei and their two-year-old twin daughters reside in a 19th-century brick building that was the carriage house and stables of the nearby mansion on Pearl Street built for limestone dealer Luke Noone. Fallen limestone columns and other remnants from Noone’s quarry still grace the grotto-like back yard. Inside, the earthy charm of the building with its layers of history has been preserved, down to the rustic ceiling beams, massive porcelain sink in the kitchen, and rough wood floor of the former stables.
“We instantly fell in love with Kingston’s distinctive sense of place and special architectural heritage,” Marvelli said.
Marvelli and McNab are two of the names that come up when you talk to a Kingston property owner who has done research on his or her historic house and is committed to restoration as opposed to renovation, which tends to be “more expensive due to the duration, intensity and unpredictability of the jobs,” according to McNab. (Another name that comes up frequently is Rob Sweeney, Town of Ulster Historian and pastor at Old Dutch Church.)
Their homes are a testament to the rewards of a careful approach to preservation. “Slow down and study what you have before you undertake stuff,” advised Marvelli. “There’s probably a long line of owners of the building. You’re not the first nor the last, just temporary stewards of the building. In a sense, it belongs to the community.”
Please, no vinyl siding
A common mistake is removing the original windows. “I’m so tired of people being misled that the windows must be replaced,” Marvelli said. “Even the state has done a study showing there’s no justification for replacing a historic window in terms of energy savings. You’ll never get your return on investment. As Derrick says, the window replacement industry is the vinyl siding of our time. Windows need maintenance, and one of the most common issues is excessive layers of paint.” Indeed, one of the themes of McNab’s talk was that there’s no such thing as a maintenance-free building, and that materials such as vinyl siding marketed as such actually create more problems.
McNab’s 1880 stick-style house, which he purchased with his wife, Giovanna Righini, in 2006, had the original windows (a few had new glass, which he replaced with antique glass for consistency). The structure was covered in gray aluminum siding and broken up into a dentist’s office when the couple bought it. After years of research, experimentation, and skilled hand work by McNab, it has regained its sumptuous High Victorian style.
Inside, richly hued plaster walls are topped by muted multi-color ceiling medallions and plaster crown moldings; most rooms have a marbled slate mantel (hand-painted by McNab to match the period style), and gaslight-era chandeliers that draw the eye upward. Original features are indistinguishable from re-creations, one of which is the shellacked herringbone floor in the front parlor, which was crafted from red oak bought at Herzog’s, carefully sawed and stained.
McNab is self-taught, a necessity given that his skill set went the way of the horse and buggy when cheap, synthetic materials that purported to be maintenance-free hit the market. He was trained as a painter. After earning an MFA from the Maryland Institute of Art, he moved to New York City, earning money as a decorative painter for wealthy people in the region. Cracked plaster walls were a common problem, so he was hired to fix them, and the disappointing results caused him to spend 10 years learning how to master traditional plastering techniques. When the rent on their Brooklyn loft went up, he and Righini bought a storefront in Croton-on-Hudson. The couple never took to the commuting town, and six years later, they moved to Kingston. Righini subsequently served on the city’s Heritage Area Commission and is a local preservation activist.
McNab’s finely honed skills and purist approach are unique, but he is hardly alone in his passion for historic preservation, which seems to be a hazard of buying property in Kingston. Many owners have taken on the role of steward and are committed to preserving and restoring their building’s integrity. They have discovered doing work that will endure well beyond their lifetime is highly rewarding.
Many homeowners in Kingston have taken on the role of steward and are committed to preserving and restoring the integrity of their building. They’ve discovered restoration work on their historic house that will endure beyond their lifetime is highly rewarding.
In 2014, Richard Kaleta bought his 1875 three-story brick Second Empire building on Linderman Avenue for $38,000, a price that reflected the abandoned structure’s advanced state of decay. He intended to rent it out, but during the two-year duration of the gut renovation, the New York City-based contractor discovered a fondness for Kingston, so instead he, his wife, and son moved full-time into the property.
At first he planned to replace the original slate on the deteriorating mansard roof with a slate synthetic, but after the estimate came in that matched the cost of slate, he instead chose slate. He purchased 1,600 pieces of slate from a company in Vermont, along with The Slate Roof Bible and a slate cutter from a company in England, and supervised the roofing crew himself, displaying a layout of the patterned design on his patio that the workers could view from the roof. The slate was ordered in three colors, which roughly matched the originals, and each 8 x 16-inch tile, a quarter inch thick, had two small holes for the copper nails. He also had the box gutters rebuilt and installed copper edging. The job took a month to complete and involved some trial and error—one challenge was the slight curvature of the underlying planking—but he’s very happy with the final result.
Kaleta was born and raised in Poland. In 1981, when martial law was declared, he was visiting New York City and defected. He replaced the asphalt sidewalk with bluestone and repaired the bluestone retaining wall of the adjacent property, which he bought after the house, a drug den, burned down. “The architecture of this town is its biggest asset, so spending money on restoration is a very good investment,” Kaleta said. “There was a lot of personal satisfaction when we renovated this building, and all our neighbors were very excited by it. They love us because we’ve improved their life and environment.”
Indeed, I know the feeling: last summer, I was delighted when the neighbors across the street, Andrew Molleur and Jocelyn Krodman, replaced their cement sidewalk with beautifully cut and fitted bluestone pieces. The couple, who each maintain a studio in their home (he is a ceramicist and she is a needle felter), bought the former carriage house in 2015 from the Boy Scouts and have restored its beautiful exterior walls of antique brick. With its traditional glass double doors and an iron balcony, the property resembles a Tuscan farmhouse and is a welcome contrast to the barren cement sidewalk, chain-link fence, and houses stripped of their defining architectural features that extend down the rest of the street.
To be an effective steward, you don’t have to own a large property and have the wallet to match. Geoffrey Berliner and his wife, Julia Rothenberg, purchased the tiny corner house next to Kaleta’s two years ago to be closer to their son, who is attending SUNY-New Paltz, and have a weekend refuge from the city. Berliner is executive director of Penumbra Foundation, a nonprofit specializing in alternative photographic arts that supports contemporary and especially emerging artists using these traditional photographic techniques; Rothenberg is a sociology professor at Queensborough Community College. “We bought the cheapest house in the nicest neighborhood,” Berliner said, noting they chose Kingston because, like Manhattan, “it’s very diverse, has an Uptown, a Midtown, and a Downtown, it’s got a river and a rich history.”
One of the walls of the small house is stone, which they knew was unusual. However, they didn’t realize how historic the building was until they moved in and started noticing things—such as the base of what had been the hearth and the wide-plank floor visible above the beams in the basement. Consulting with Marvelli, they learned that the house was probably built in the mid or late 1700s and was occupied by Abraham Elmendorf, a blacksmith. (The deli next door, originally a blacksmith shop, was probably added later, in the early 19th century, by Abraham’s son Martin, who is buried in the Old Dutch Church cemetery.)
The couple removed the walls on the first floor and took up four layers of flooring to reveal the original red-pine planks underneath. Red pine is a difficult wood to source, but they located a supplier in Albany (Berliner thinks the wood might actually be hemlock) and hired a master carpenter to repair the floors. They hired McNab to replaster the walls with lime plaster and horsehair, a task that involved removing layers of wallpaper. Berliner said the second floor was probably originally a storage loft accessible by a rope or wood ladder. In removing the drywall on the Linderman side of the house, he discovered a lining of yellow unbaked brick, called nogging, similar to what can be seen in the Persen House, the Ulster County-owned museum on John Street. Berliner and Rothenberg installed a heat pump and eventually plan to remove the vinyl siding to reveal the underlying clapboard of the three exterior walls, as well as install wood paneling on the fireplace, which it originally had, and a 1750s Dutch door Berliner picked up at an auction.
Known as a “stone ender,” this type of house was probably once common in Kingston since it was cheaper to build a single wall of stone, which supported the hearth, rather than four, said Berliner. It’s now the last survivor of its kind in Kingston and therefore is of significant historic value. “The house is part of the history of Kingston and the U.S.. and I hope will outlive us,” said Berliner. The couple also plan to repair the bluestone sidewalk and install a bluestone walkway and patio on the property.
Down in the Rondout, people passing the brick duplex under construction on Post Street assume it’s a renovation, when in fact it’s brand new. Retired Kingston physician Jack Weeks bought the five contiguous wooded lots on the corner of Post and Union ten years ago and eventually decided to build a house where he and his wife, Elizabeth Collins, could retire. He hired architect Paul Jankowitz, who had done a lot of pro bono work for the Hudson River Maritime Museum, where Weeks was a longtime board member, and consulted historic photographs to come up with a design. The result is two attached brick buildings whose heavy wooden cornice, diamond-pattern brickwork over the upper front façade windows, and varying elevation, to accommodate the hill, is consistent with the Italianate brick buildings of old Rondout. Lou Mickel, who restored the brick on the building across the street, was the mason and installed bluestone lintels over all the windows except under the front porch, which are made of walnut.
“I wanted the building to fit in, but I also wanted it to have all the modern advances in building technology,” Weeks said. ICFs, a type of Lego-like foam form into which concrete is poured, were used for the foundation, which provides insulation inside and out, while Rockwood insulation, a green material consisting of rock processed into a mesh, was used to insulate the walls. The two attached buildings were so tight that over the winter, only one of the four heat pumps installed was required for heating. Radiant heat was installed in the basement floors, and Weeks plans to put solar panels atop both roofs.
Inside, the space feels contemporary, with the master suite on the second floor opening onto a loft that overlooks the living area and a deck beyond the glass doors. What’s unusual is the abundance of wood, including large timbers that support part of the structure, maple stairs, and oak and walnut floors, countertops, railings, and exposed beams, all of which was sourced from trees cut down on Weeks’ woodlot in St. Remy and sawn in his sawmill (Weeks has taught a class in timber frame at the Maritime Museum, and one of his students is foreman Bill Otis’s son, who is part of the crew). The massive corbel along the roof line is made of white pine, which was fashioned after an old corbel obtained from Zaborski Emporium. Sadly, given the importance in the 19th and early 20th centuries of Kingston’s brick industry, the antique-looking bricks were sourced from Ohio, Weeks said.
Construction started in the summer of 2021 and will be completed this summer. Weeks sold one unit to his sister and plans on moving into the other one with his wife. He might add another, smaller building on the West Union side of the property, zoned commercial and residential, which would re-semble the long, low-slung 19th-century commercial building that stood on the spot until it was torn down in the 1960s. All the units would have access to a common garden.
Weeks said the project has been rewarding for all involved. “Everyone had a say in the project,” he said, adding “I’ve always loved history and the architecture of Kingston, particularly in the Rondout. I wanted the building to fit in, and it’s what I expected.”
The Case for Historic Preservation
Marissa Marvelli’s series of historic preservation talks at the Kingston Library and her compilation of the Google document that constitutes a working guide for the owners of historic properties is a labor of love designed to fill a glaring void. “We don’t have a strong preservation ethic in the city of Kingston,” she said, adding “If you give people the information they need, whether it’s how to research the history of their house or understanding the construction or architectural style, it makes them better stewards.” Yet “there’s no one in the county to talk to about preservation, even though it’s a major economic generator in terms of attracting and supporting businesses, bringing in new residents, and supporting tourism and the building trades. We have an extraordinary built heritage, but there’s no strong government policy or programming.” She noted that the last historic district to be established in the city was in the 1980s.
That’s a shame because “New York State has a robust historic rehabilitation tax credits program, which is one of the best in the nation.” Homeowners within a listed state and national historic district benefit from a 20 percent state tax credit on eligible expenses; if their income is below $60,000, the credit takes the form of a rebate. (Likewise, owners of income-producing properties can utilize the state and federal commercial tax credit programs, which total 40 percent or 50 percent of eligible expenses depending on the size of the project.) These economic incentives are the reason why the City of Troy pursued nomination of the Central Lansingburgh Historic District, an area of north Troy that dates back to the 18th century and is predominantly low income. (To prepare for the nomination, which was approved in February, Marveilli was hired to conduct a cultural resources study for the area.)
Indeed, according to the December 12, 2022 New York State press release announcing the normination of 11 state and national registered historic places, “over the last decade, the state has approved the use of rehabilitation commercial tax credits for more than 1,200 historic properties, driving almost $15 billion in private investment.” The release also notes the impact on jobs and tax revenues:
“A study by the National Park Service on the impact of the tax credit on jobs and tax revenue in New York State found that between 2016 and 2020, the credits generated 74,220 jobs nationally and more than $1.3 billion in local, state, and federal taxes.”
While serving on the city’s Historic Landmarks Preservation Commission (HLPC) from 2016 to 2019, Marvelli pushed the city to get the Fair Street Historic District, which is a local historic district only, listed by the state, because only state and national register-listed historic districts qualify property owners for the tax credits. Her efforts were not supported. She also tried to get the city to update its preservation ordinance, which contains language that is vague and contradictory, by adopting the state’s Preservation Model Law, but again, to no avail. During her tenure, the city’s corporation counsel actually sought to weaken the city’s preservation law, by for example, preventing the HLPC from considering scale in a proposal—a key factor in how well a structure fits in with the existing streetscape. Fortunately, the changes were rejected, but her term was not renewed by Mayor Steve Noble.
Somewhat ironically, the city has been good at getting the funding for cultural resource surveys—most recently for Ponckhockie and Wilbur—which document the historic assets of Kingston’s various neighborhoods and are intended to recommend preservation actions, but they just sit on the shelf. “I’ve mapped all the surveys [which include Midtown West, Midtown East, Albany Avenue, and expanding the Stockade Historic District] to understand what has been studied. Nothing has ever come of them.” Marvelli said.
Enforcement of the preservation ordinances that do exist for the historic districts is nonexistent, according to McNab. Original windows, slate roofs, and other historic features have been removed willy-nilly by property owners, who ignore the requirement to have changes reviewed by the HLPC–and don’t suffer any consequences. He’s also dismayed by the lack of maintenance in such publicly owned historic buildings as the Senate House.
Homeowners who are installing or repairing their bluestone sidewalks have gotten no help from the city either. Despite the stockpile of historic bluestone at the city’s bluestone bank, neither Kaleleta nor Molleur and Krodman were able to use any of it. “We applied several times and were told we couldn’t get any bluestone because we were replacing cement,” said Krodman.
Instead of being complacent and downright resistant, the city should view historic preservation as an economic driver that could directly benefit youth by establishing a historic preservation trades school, suggested McNab. Such training would also help make up for the lack of contractors in the area.. It would not only provide a valuable service to the community by preserving Kingston’s historic bluestone sidewalks and foundations, masonry walls and chimneys, slate roofs, plaster walls, woodwork, and windows, but also give young people the skills to make a good living. “You could train kids from the community who could be making $40 an hour over a short period of time” said McNab.
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