Kingston’s unuusally rich stock of architecture is not confined to its four historic districts.  Distinguished homes and notable buildings can be found throughout the city.

FHK is proud to feature examples of the city’s rich stock of architecture in a new series authored by Dr. William B. Rhoads,  Professor Emeritus of Art History, SUNY New Paltz , and author of “Kingston New York: The Architectural Guide.”  In addition to spotlighting distinguished residences, Dr. Rhoads will also draw attention to threatened structures such as the mule barn below.

A Romantic Ruin in Ponckhockie

Explorers of Uptown Kingston are familiar with the ruinous colonial-era house on Frog Alley, just off busy North Front Street.  Its stone walls, windowless and unroofed, stand (thanks to the ongoing efforts of the Friends of Historic Kingston) as tangible reminders of the early builders of the settlement.  At the other end of the city, in Ponckhockie, stands a more mysterious ruin shrouded in summer-time vegetation at the dead end of little-traveled Yeomans Street.  Its high concrete facade looks vaguely like a church, but in fact it was built about 1870 as a mule barn for the Newark Lime & Cement Manufacturing Company, Kingston’s “largest manufacturing establishment” in 1880.  The company provided cement for U.S. fortifications, the Croton waterworks, and other projects across the country and even in South America.

In the 1840s the company quarried stone (“cement rock”) from the hill known as the Vleightbergh (Hasbrouck Park Hill) overlooking the Rondout Creek, but processed the stone into cement in Newark.  Then in 1850 it

began construction of a plant extending from its Rondout Creek wharves to its quarries tunneled into the hillside.  The 1871 Ulster County Business Directory reported that the works produced over 225,000 barrels a year and consisted of “twenty-one kilns for burning the stone, two mill buildings in which are fourteen runs of 3-feet stones” (for grinding), as well as storehouses and various shops.  Our ruin would have been one of the “commodious barns for storing hay and other crops of the farm, with extensive stables connected.”  The facade of the barn is clearly pictured in the lithographic print of the company’s works published in the 1875 County Atlas of Ulster.  The artist also included a mule or horse pulling two carts joined together on what must have been railway tracks linking the quarries with the tops of the kilns.   In 1880 the stable room quartered 30 horses or mules.

The barn itself demonstrated through its concrete walls the structural and decorative possibilities of the company’s product, as did the Children’s Church (1870; now the Ponckhockie Congregational Church) nearby on Abruyn Street designed by J. A. Wood for the benefit of the families of company workers.  At the barn, the windows and central doorway are distinguished with Gothic-style drip moldings intended to divert water from openings below.  The narrow centerpiece at the top of the facade indicates that a monitor roof once rose above the broad lower slopes of the roof, as in factories of the time.  However, the wide central doorway, Gothic  moldings, and vertical accent atop the facade call up images of church architecture.

The making of lime and cement continued here through the end of the 19th century.  A c. 1896 photo by R. Lionel DeLisser shows two men at work “in the mines,” a cave-like quarry, and the New York Times (Nov. 18, 1896) reported that the “plant” was working at “utmost capacity.”  But Kathy Burton has found that depressed business conditions caused the closing of themanufactory in the winter of 1905, affecting nearly 200 families.

Some 20 years after the closing, local residents purchased and found a new

and unexpected use for the aging mule barn, whose address was given as East Union Street.  In August 1927 Emanuel Baptist Church, an African American congregation (then described as “colored”), prepared the ground or basement level of the building as temporary quarters for the church.  At the same time ambitious plans were announced, drawn by young Kingston architect Augustus Schrowang, to turn the structure into “an up to date religious and social center” (Kingston Daily Freeman August 26, 1927).  Architecturally, this meant transforming the slightly ornamented barn into a proper church in the Gothic Revival style.   The front of the building would be altered with gracefully pointed Gothic arches rising over the doorway (fitted with Gothic hinges) and over three upper windows (fitted with Gothic tracery and stained glass).  Internally the basement would become a social room with kitchen, toilet and boiler rooms.  An entrance vestibule would lead upstairs to the main church auditorium (48 feet by 66 feet) seating 600, with a gallery above seating an additional 200.  This effort to create a handsome “Religious and Social Center” for Emanuel Baptist Church was led by its pastor, the Rev. Charles H. King, described as “an earnest worker” in raising $2,250 in his eleven months in the city.  The building committee was headed by white men:  the chairman was the Rev. Charles B. Smith, pastor of the Wurts Street Baptist Church, and the treasurer was Frank Matthews, a prominent Kingston businessman.

In 2011 the door and window openings of the facade remain as they were for the mule barn:  it would have been very difficult to rework the thick concrete walls.  There is no roof, and no indication of how the interior was revamped for the church’s use.  The only clear sign of the church’s presence is a broken and weathered segment of the cornerstone inscribed with the church’s and King’s names and the church’s founding date, 1926.  The church was listed in city directories at this site (155 or 157 East Union Street) from 1931 through 1950.  In 1951 its address is given as 229 East Strand, which today and for many years has been the location of the New Central Baptist Church.

Ruined castle walls are preserved as romantic artifacts abroad, and efforts are underway to preserve the crumbling walls of Bannerman’s Castle, the early 20th-century armaments warehouse in the Hudson River.  A ruin associated with a key local industry, using a material not widely adopted by architects anywhere at the time, and a landmark in the history of Kingston’s African American community–there are a whole host of reasons why these walls, resonant with so much history, deserve preservation.

August 2011

194 West Chestnut Street

Today the home of Taylor and Elizabeth Thompson at 194 West Chestnut Street is a beautifully maintained residence on an elevated site with a splendid view of the Rondout Creek and Hudson River.  The clapboard and shingle-walled house was designed in 1886 by famed architect Calvert Vaux, once the partner of tastemaker Andrew Jackson Downing and later co-designer with Frederick Law Olmsted of New York’s Central Park.  Vaux’s client was Frank H. Griffiths, a flour and feed merchant in Rondout who apparently built the house a few years after its 1886 design.  In the early 20th century it was the part-time residence of Griffiths’ daughter Anna and her husband Arthur Frederick Sheldon, founder of a highly successful business school in Chicago, as well as a leader of Rotary International.  Their daughter Helen Sheldon inherited the house and occupied it until her death in 1976.

In the 1970s the house fell into disrepair and its prospects for survival were dim. Then in October 1977 it was put up for sale and when Elizabeth Thompson saw it, she was smitten by the spacious interior with its ornately embellished staircase and pair of fireplaces.  As her husband Taylor recalls:  “It was love at first sight.

Elizabeth had her own interior design business and was looking for an old house to restore.  The house had not been lived in for two years and when Taylor first saw it with its overgrown yard, shuttered windows, peeled paint, drooping porch and scattered broken furniture, he gulped and asked Elizabeth,  ”Why do you want this house?”  She had already outlined what she wanted to do, so he says he  did what any good husband would do — closed his eyes and said, “‘Okay, if you want it!”

The purchase was accomplished with the encouragement of realtor Bill Daron and Florence Cordts, friend of Helen Sheldon and executor of her estate.  Miss Cordts, who resided in Ponckhockie in  her family’s impressively towered and mansarded  house (dated 1873) with its own magnificent river view, was firmly opposed to selling the property to the owner of the former Edward Coykendall mansion next door, which had been disfigured by the addition of modern apartments.

As Taylor recounts, Elizabeth set about getting it into shape to move in.  It took one year. The  plumbing and electrical wiring that was originally in the house had been ripped out by vandals to sell for copper scrap.  The only heating system was a huge coal-burning furnace, so the house had to betotally plumbed, re-wired and a new heating system installed.  Then Elizabeth restored the kitchen, bathrooms, bedrooms and beautiful wood floors, and Taylor says, “We moved in for about 20 years of continuous restoration.” In fact, improvements to the building, its furnishings, and the landscaped grounds have never stopped.

The house as originally designed by Vaux (his authorship is confirmed by entries in the diary of his brother-in-law,  Jervis McEntee,  the well-regarded landscape painter whose home was nearby) was large and commodious. Today there are 18 rooms on three floors but externally the house is a fairly austere example of what is called the Shingle Style.  The walls of clapboard below and decoratively patterned shingles in the four gables above are flat with few projecting elements.  A bay or oriel window stood out from both the West Chestnut Street facade and the opposite façade facing the RondoutCreek. A small balcony projected from the right side of the street facade, but it was collapsing in 1977.  Elizabeth removed it and slightly shifted a nearby window to achieve a more symmetrical street front, while enriching this front by adding a balcony to what had been a simple oriel.  A more significant alteration was the replacement of the modest porch at the east end of the house, where the main entrance was originally located, with an enclosed, screened terrace.   The stone mounting block, carved with Griffiths’ name and now also with the Thompsons’, has been moved to the curving driveway from West Chestnut installed by the Thompsons.  This driveway leads to the “Carriage House,” designed by Elizabeth in a style compatible with Vaux’s, and to the house’s current main entrance, formerly the basement service entrance.

The house has a rectangular floor plan, with the principal living and bedrooms mostly on the long side facing the panorama of the Rondout Creek and Hudson River, a view similar to Jervis McEntee’s from the studio-house (1853-54) Vaux designed for him a short distancet to the east.  Designing a house for Griffiths on a hill oriented to the Rondout and Hudson view, Vaux placed the main entrance around the corner from the creek and river front–something he had done more dramatically at Frederic Church’s Olana.  A hint of Olana’s bold coloration can even be found in the red-tinted glass of the arched window lighting the Griffiths staircase–a larger yellow-tinted window colors the north light falling on Olana’s grand staircase.

Many of Vaux’s houses, both in Rondout and elsewhere, have not survived.  McEntee’s studio is long gone.  Vanished too are the houses of Walter B. Crane on Grove Street and Albert Terry on Broadway, as well as Samuel Coykendall’s West Chestnut Street mansion.  Fortunately Elizabeth and Taylor Thompson had the vision and creativity to bring 194 West Chestnut Street back to life during a time when few had the courage to undertake such an ambitious preservation project, which received a 2011 Preservation Award from the Friends of Historic Kingston.

July 2011