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IN AN EFFORT TO HELP FILL THE VOID left by Cottage Living, here are some pictures of my place in the sticks, 9 miles outside Red Hook, N.Y.
Spring is on the way!
Yesterday’s post on Brownstoner that the new condos called Green on Dean (357 Dean, right) have gone on the market drew a few supportive comments about the building and its architectural context.
As an old-house person, I find it a crying shame to have a 6-story modern monster towering above a rare collection of wood-frame 19th century row houses.
Its presence (it went up in a flash) points up the vulnerability of the blocks between Third and Fourth Avenues, where development pressure is great. I worry in particular about St. Marks Place, below, a long, unbroken row of uniform brownstones on both sides of the block.
St. Marks Place between 3rd and 4th Aves
How do you all feel about Green on Dean?
NEW TO MARKET IN TIVOLI, N.Y. (Northern Dutchess): A sweet c.1900 house on a quiet side street, asking 249K. They don’t come up all that often. For details, go here.
THE FIRST TIME I SAW TIVOLI, I thought I had traveled back in time to the 1960s and landed in northern California.
Tivoli (pop. 1100) is impossibly cute, its main street lined with front-porch Victorians marching
down to the Hudson River. As practicalities go, the town is fairly useless. There’s no bank, drug store, supermarket, or gas station — just a good Mexican restaurant; a bakery, right, in an old house that makes wonderful scones and baguettes; and a couple of art galleries and antiquarian bookstores.
In the 19th century, Tivoli was a transportation hub; it had a ferry landing and a railroad station. Now it has neither. Three miles off Route 9, it’s a definite detour, and that’s as it should be.
The chi-chi Madalin Hotel and Madalin’s Table, below, opened in 2006, but Tivoli just goes its low-key, hippie throwback way.
HEY, OLD-HOUSE RENOVATORS from Brooklyn to the Hudson Valley: wouldn’t it be great if there was, like, a school you could go to for anywhere from 2 to 12 days to get some hands-on, experiential learning in building design and construction?
And what if it was located in central Vermont’s Mad River Valley, and wasn’t too expensive, and the food was good?
There is such a place: it’s called Yestermorrow Design/Build School, and since 1980, it’s been offering courses in all aspects of the building arts and trades to students, homeowners, architects, and builders on its 38-acre campus. The instructors are all pros in their fields, and the teacher-to-student ratio is high.
I’m drawn to Carpentry for Women — oh, to know how to hang a door without having to hire someone! — and intrigued by Put the Fab back in Pre-Fab and Ply Like an Eagle, a furniture-making workshop (all 5 days, $750).
There are more than 150 different courses between April and October, from Basic Home Design (12 days, $1,680; 6 days, $900) and Residential Additions & Renovations (2 days, $300) to Plumbing, Electricity and Masonry Demystified. Sustainable-design offerings include Green Roof Design (5 days, $750), and 1-2 day quickies in Solar Design, Wind Power, and Ecological Water Systems.
Then there’s esoterica like Strawbale Construction (who knew?) and Japanese Shoji & Woodworking.
You can stay in a dorm ($30/night), cabin ($15), your own tent ($8), or a B&B in town.
So stop paying through the nose for things you could do yourself and get thee to Yestermorrow’s website, or call 888/496 5541 for more info.
You’ll be raising a barn before you know it.
AFTER TOO MANY HOURS at the computer, I needed an adventure. So I hopped into my casaCARA-mobile and hied out to Flatlands, once one of several villages that made up the original Dutch settlement of Breukelen. I was racing the setting sun to find and photograph some old Dutch houses.
Flared eaves, right, are a mark of Dutch colonial architecture
Did you know there are over a dozen houses in Brooklyn still extant from the 17th/18th century Dutch colonial period? Some are well-known and open to the public, like the 1699 Old Stone House at Fifth Avenue and Third Street in Park Slope, but that’s a reconstruction. Then there’s the 1652 Pieter Claesen Wyckoff house, New York City’s oldest, in Canarsie, and the Lefferts farmstead in Prospect Park, not in its original location.
A few other survivors, amazingly, are privately owned. A 1945 list I found on the internet showed several on Neck Road in Gravesend. I went there first and found only one remaining, but it had been badly messed with and that saddened me.
In Flatlands, though, I was rewarded by the graceful and intact Stoothoff-Baxter house, bizarrely tucked among completely unremarkable brick semi-detached houses of the 1940s. Ken Friedlander, a teacher in the New York City public school system and an emigre from Fort Greene, has owned it for 15 years.
The earliest part of the house, a small wing on the south side (at left in the photo above), was built in 1747 by Garret Stoothoff. One of his daughters married an Irishman named John Baxter, who expanded the house in 1811, but very much in the old Dutch style, with characteristic flaring eaves.
Friedlander wasn’t home, but I photographed the exterior. Later, I talked with him, and he e-mailed pictures of the inside, which is more original than seems possible after two centuries.
The rooms in the smaller, older section have low, beamed ceilings. In the later, larger section, the interior architecture shows English influence in the moldings and fireplace surrounds, above. The kitchen, below, still has its divided Dutch door.
In the 1940s, Friedlander told me, the house and its surrounding land were sold to a developer, who built four houses on one side of it and one on the other. As for the Stoothoff-Baxter house itself, the developer “never got around to knocking it down.”
I like to think he just couldn’t bear to.
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