To Joseph Mitchell, buildings inspired reverence.
In his essays for The New Yorker over nearly three decades, with keen attention to detail and expression, Mitchell became renowned for his true-to-life, eloquent writing capturing the lives of movie-house bouncers, the longshoremen working the harbor, circus characters like the bearded Lady Olga, clammers in sloops, and others among the usually unsung.
Mitchell brought the same fascination to looking at New York City’s buildings, particularly its older ones. He devoted many hours to this passion.
“What I really like to do is wander the streets aimlessly in the city,” by day and by night, Mitchell wrote. He would ride the city buses or walk, at times taking detours to examine certain buildings more closely.
The variety of ornamentation astounded Mitchell. So, too, did the resilience of what lasted over generations in these buildings, ornaments that “have triumphed” over the ravages of ice, frost, heat, humidity, wind and rain, and traffic constant enough to cause “stone-cracking and mortar-crumbling vibrations.”
Undoubtedly, human intervention helps. Yet, as Mitchell reflected in the third quarter of the 20th century, these structures triumphed over profound changes in architectural styles.
“I revere them,” he wrote. “To me, they are sacred objects.”
Walking or riding on the streets, lanes, and country roads of Ulster County, one can feel this awe in the architectural variety, character, beauty, and one-of-a-kind elements around us. Autumn’s cooler, crisp days and display of bright reds, oranges, and yellows as a backdrop invite long walks and those Joseph Mitchell-inspired detours on streets, roads, and alleys to gaze at architecture. Graceful fan windows, ornate cornices, brickwork on corners rounded as finely as though a bricklayer had poured it as liquid, striped patterns of stone with marble trim, and much more await.
The architecture around us reveals layers of past lives and features to be cherished on buildings both humble and grand. In the introduction to his superb book, Ulster County New York: The Architectural History and Guide, author and architectural historian William B. Rhoads writes that Ulster County is a place of many architectural treasures. Often, they are “the simpler structures associated with everyday middle- and working-class life … [having] an interest and appeal no less great than the architecture of the wealthy.”
A new temple
Kingston’s Uptown area is blessed with three historic districts, each within comfortable walking distance. They offer a mix of many historic buildings and styles, from the pre-Revolutionary stone houses, with parts traced to the 17th century, to mid-20th-century Modernism, of which a prime example: the International-Style county office building.
Within the Fair Street Historic District, St. James United Methodist Church, 29 Pearl Street, at the corner of Pearl and Fair streets, has a gorgeous, sumptuous exterior texture. Rhoads terms the church Kingston’s best example of the Richardsonian Romanesque style. Its architect was George W. Kramer, who in just over a half-century of work designed more than 2200 churches. When it opened as St. James Methodist Episcopal Church in January 1894, The New York Times headline proclaimed, “A New Temple for Kingston.” No wonder, given its rounded arches, tower roof in the shape of a pyramid, and thick stone walls. Kramer used a striking material known as green serpentine stone, from Chester County, Pennsylvania, one quite popular in the late 19th century. At the center of its broad walls on the street sides are huge, richly patterned semi-circular stained-glass windows.
Less than two blocks away, at 265 Fair Street, is a splendid, well-kept building from Kingston’s 19th-century firefighting days, in which volunteers maintain a museum that keeps alive this history today. The volunteer Wiltwyck Hose Company (named after the early Dutch settlement in New Netherland) built this firemen’s hall in 1857. Though its twin doors date from the 20th century, otherwise the slim four-sided bell tower and façade remain intact. It has twin brackets within the pediment and a round arch of the Italianate design in favor at the time. These elements signified a place of civic importance. The Volunteer Fireman’s Hall and Museum, open to the public, preserves Kingston’s firefighting history with its collection and display of equipment, vehicles, artifacts and documents.
For sheer look-up-and-be-in-awe, it’s hard to beat the Clermont Building, at 295-299 Wall Street. It’s a magnificent commercial survivor from the 19th century. The 1878 building is topped by delicate iron cresting, a slate mansard roof, a large arched window, and an intricate set of two corbel tables – continuous rows of stone blocks – below the cornice. The corbels enhance the Clermont’s character. Six polychromatic tiles punctuate the brickwork above the second floor. Mansard roofs were going up a lot at the time in Kingston and all over, which the Kingston Daily Freeman termed “the French-roof epidemic” even before the construction of the Clermont Building.
What industry hath wrought
The capability to see generations of working-class and middle-class people making homes and creating new places is evident in countless buildings in Ulster County. St. Peter’s Catholic Church and Rectory, atop a commanding vista in Rosendale, were built in the 1870s for a parish of hundreds of workers for the Delaware and Hudson Canal and the cement industry. The former Temple Emanuel synagogue (now residential), which a congregation erected in 1891-1892 at 50 Abeel Street in Kingston’s Rondout, shows two tablets of the Law on its stone façade that make clear its beginnings as a Jewish house of worship.
The restoration of Midtown Kingston’s awesome former factory buildings and their reuse as homes, workspaces and art studios often takes center stage. Nearby, however, whether along its main thoroughfares or on residential side streets, lie other architectural riches which often have roots in the times of the city’s booming industrial growth.
Holy Cross Episcopal Church, born out of a desire to serve working-class families, remains an architectural beauty. The Rev. Paul Watson aimed to establish an Episcopal church in the Anglo-Catholic model. William J. Beardsley designed the Gothic Revival church at 30 Pine Grove Street, built in 1891-1892. Today, Holy Cross + Santa Cruz Episcopal Church holds services in English and Spanish. It has a simple, eye-catching wooden belfry. The exterior walls have rough-cut bluestone from Ulster County’s quarries that go up to the windowsills. In the early 20th century, the parish expanded the church and did significant renovations to the interior, adding a small chapel, two side altars, and a high a altar.
The lasting power of inimitable buildings through generations is astonishing, with imaginative renovations that bring a neglected place back to life. People who see this potential adapt them to wholly different uses. Take the Coach House Players building, at 12 Augusta Street in Kingston’s historic Chestnut Street neighborhood. Constructed around 1894, it was a carriage house for coaches and horses on the Coykendall family estate, and today it’s a theater with a long-running life of its own. (The elaborate Samuel Coykendall mansion did not survive.)
In its first life, the carriage house combined an Old-World, medieval feeling in its cupolas, dormers, and exposed timbers. Its inventive interior included pulleys that brought down hay and a cistern that collected water, each devised for the horses. Through a confluence of events in the 1950s, a community theater group was able to purchase and ultimately renovate it, starting in 2000.
Today, the Coach House Players continues to produce theatrical performances and hints, on its website, that if you use your imagination, you might just hear the “clopping hooves of ghost horses.”
Locally sourced
Exploring so often reveals how designers and builders used local materials, both natural and manufactured. A Shingle-style house in New Paltz, at 19 North Chestnut Street, has cobblestones that the builder drew from the mountainside, according to Rhoads. A professor at New Paltz Normal School, Henry Griffis was the owner of this home, completed in 1892-1893. It’s a marvelous survivor, embodying a more American architecture that rebelled against Victorian opulence and expressed a stronger relationship to the outdoors. This is evident in the home’s eclectic mix of shingles and rustic stone walls, varied porches and balconies with rounded arches, and a lack of ornamentation.
Local materials of another sort are in two very distinctive 1907 houses at 26-28 North Oakwood Terrace in New Paltz, composed of concrete blocks shaped in front to make them look like stone. David Storr, successful in manufacturing, moved to New Paltz in 1905. As Rhoads relates, Storr began to manufacture concrete blocks from Portland cement and sand in a former coal shed. Homes of concrete block construction became quite the rage in the early decades of the 20th century. Storr bought up land in the village, laid out streets, and erected some 20 houses, though mostly of wood-frame construction, in a development he called Oakwood Park. Storr, who became a local leader and benefactor of various worthy causes, resided at 28 North Oakwood Terrace.
As Joseph Mitchell observed, the sight of masonry, tile, or stone that working people labored to execute long, long ago “will lift my spirit for hours.” Contemplating these places and those who keep them intact and cared for today inspires and soothes the spirit.
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