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I’m always amazed at how much there is to see when an old-house (and barn) fanatic really looks. All these pictures were taken Wednesday in the course of an hour’s drive around the Dutchess County town of Red Hook.
Click on any image to enlarge and get a description.
Flared eaves are a mark of Dutch Colonial architecture.
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.
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 (left side 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, but 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.
Eight rolling creekfront acres, four (count ‘em!) old barns, and an 18th century brick and stone house with intact, original rooms, in perfectly livable shape. Still going begging. For more info, read this excerpt from my article in the New York Times on 11/28/08 or call Sarah Lipsky at Peggy Lampman Real Estate, 518 851 2277. Clearly, I want someone to buy this place!
“Three miles outside Hudson, I pulled up at an uninhabited house built in 1742 by Tobias Van Deusen, who, I discovered by researching genealogy Web sites, was born around 1696 and baptized at the Albany Dutch Reformed Church. With a tall gabled roof line reminiscent of an Amsterdam canal house, a divided Dutch door with hand-forged hardware, and a Victorian addition with a front porch, it’s a child’s crayon version of a cozy, archetypal house, even without smoke pouring from its three chimneys. One original wing is made of local stone. The brickwork, equally old, is exemplary, with a tumbling pattern and a stylized flower basket on one end gable.
I can easily visualize sitting by the fire in such a house, sipping brandy under the beamed ceilings of a room with walls two feet thick. It’s all still there, intact, down to the built-in cupboard for firewood. Even more extraordinary, I can imagine Tobias and Ariaantje Van Deusen there, cooking in the giant hearth, sleeping under the slanting ceilings of the upper story, their son Johannes running around on the extra-wide-plank floors and swimming in the creek nearby.
The eight-acre property (asking price $425,000) has four barns from its days as a dairy farm, which ended three decades ago. The northern approach, past cornfields on evocatively named Spook Rock Road, is peaceful. But to the south, a short distance away, is a juvenile detention center, enwrapped in shiny rolls of barbed wire. From an aesthetic standpoint alone, that is a deal-breaker for me, though the house and land are so gorgeous I briefly considered Frank Lloyd Wright’s tactic at Taliesin West. When the electric company marred his sunset view with poles and wires, he never looked in that direction again.”
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