3-Acre Mini-Farm with Vintage Outbuildings in Dutchess County 110K

Fired up with enthusiasm after writing my first blog post in ages, I remembered why I started blogging in the first place, more than ten years ago.

My very first post, “In Search of the Perfect Beach House,” in December 2008, was the beginning of a quest to find just that, documented here in words and pictures. But my search only lasted three months. I found, purchased and renovated a 1930s cottage on the South Fork of Long Island, N.Y., and continued blogging as I discovered this new world of country living.

I still enjoyed trawling the real estate listings, even after I’d bought a house, turning up properties I’d theoretically buy if I had unlimited energy and borrowing power.

Turns out the house wasn’t perfect. Five years later, I sold it and bought a different one nearby, whose renovation I also painstakingly recorded. Along the way, there were other renovations, apartment searches and decorating juggernauts, but the original intent of casaCARA was as an inspirational nudge to readers toward the affordable real estate that actually still abounds within two or three hours of NYC.

Last night, for the first time in quite a few years, I went back to my favorite multiple listing site: the Columbia Northern Dutchess Multiple Listing Service, which, despite its name, lists properties in many Upstate New York counties. The site was just as I remembered, with the same Y2K-era user-unfriendly interface.

Nevertheless, it works, and by searching on properties in Dutchess County, older than 1900 and cheaper than $200,000, I came upon a listing worth sharing. (I’ve owned a cottage on 20 acres in the town of Milan since 2002, though I don’t live there.)

I saw its wide open fields and sunny aspect and immediately thought “flower farm.” For two reasons: one, I’ve been following Lisa Ziegler of The Gardener’s Workshop, a professional flower grower in Newport News, Virginia, who teaches seminars and publishes books on her joyful trade. I would gladly pursue flower farming myself, at least as a hobby, if I was at my Long Island property all through the growing season (I’m not; I usually rent it out in summer) and if I had enough sun (I don’t, though I daresay Lisa Z. would find a way to make it work).

The other reason I thought this property would be ideal for flower farming is that it’s located on Battenfeld Road in northern Dutchess, a few miles east of Red Hook and Rhinebeck, near the sole remaining anemone farm in the area. Called Battenfeld’s, they grow anemones in greenhouses and have a Christmas tree business in the off-season.

Did you know….? More than a hundred years ago, anemones, which one rarely sees at all anymore, were a craze among Victorian women who wore them on their clothing and pinned them to their hats. There were numerous anemone farms in the area, and their flowers were shipped daily down the Hudson River by boat to New York City.

Nothing as charming as that happens any more, but I’ll bet the land is still plenty fertile. Grazing sheep is another option, if you have any sheep to graze — there’s a Merino sheep farm nearby called Morehouse Farm.

About the buildings on this lot: there are many and they look dire, possibly unsalvageable. Given untold amounts of work and money, though, wouldn’t it make a great compound, centered on the tree-shaded vintage house, with a separate studio and two barns, one falling down worse than the other, and of course, the flowers and sheep?

The listing agent is Paul Hallenbeck of Rhinebeck and there is more info and photos on his site. Won’t somebody please buy it and fulfill my fantasy?

This Wondrous Summertime World

If you truly love nature, you will find beauty everywhere – Vincent van Gogh

Beauty has not been hard to find this summer, despite the heat. Almost everywhere I’ve gone, and I’ve moved around a fair amount, I’ve been hyper-conscious of the natural beauty of this fragile world.

Even in the heart of the city, the sky, the light, has often been breathtaking.

Above, early evening view of Manhattan from Roosevelt Island. Below, mackerel sky over the Brooklyn Museum.

“This world is so beautiful that I can hardly believe it exists!” That was Ralph Waldo Emerson. He could have been reflecting on a scene like the one below, in Western Massachusetts:

Or these, in upstate New York:

But not to give short shrift to the human-made, either. Because this is an omnibus post after a three-month-long drought, I’m going to stuff it with a few more images that caught the eye of this lazy blogger in my summertime travels, and move on, we hope, to a more prolific fall.

Fireworks over Shelter Island, N.Y.

Vintage service station in Chester, Mass.

Victorian brick pile in Schoharie, N.Y. Cornices, shutters, columns — all outstanding.

Schenectady, N.Y. is a trove of historic architecture and that is not a joke. Below, three views of the Stockade District, a substantial, intact neighborhood of 18th and 19th century houses, about forty of which are over 200 years old.

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Hudson on a Tuesday Afternoon

THE UPSTATE NEW YORK TOWN of Hudson is an extraordinary repository of 19th century residential and commercial architecture.

Its main drag, Warren Street, is a mile-long stretch of clapboard and brick buildings — mostly row houses, many with storefronts, but there are also some grand freestanding homes from the town’s 1860s whaling heyday. There’s virtually nothing more recent than the year 1900 to mar the street’s historic purity.

For decades, Hudson had been an economically depressed community, like many Hudson Valley river towns that lost their industry in the 20th century, and its back streets still have their fair share of poverty.

I hadn’t been in Hudson for some years and had heard there were new shops and restaurants, a whole lot of renovation and restoration, and that real estate prices had gone up alarmingly since I wrote a tongue-in-cheek article in The New York Times about spending my weekends doing recreational house-shopping.

Antiques are Hudson’s stock in trade, and there are dozens of tony shops full of fine furniture and art (priced to rival NYC), architectural salvage and vintage clothing. One would think they might be doing some brisk business in the week before Christmas, but last Tuesday afternoon, most of them were closed. Likewise the restaurants.

Hudson is a weekend community, it seems; it does not have the population to support businesses in mid-week.

But the town itself is an open-air museum for the old-house lover, and it was fun to explore the shops that were open, including the impressive multi-dealer Antique Warehouse on Front Street, chock full of stuff that made me wish I had a new house to furnish. And what I saw through the shuttered storefronts made me want to go back again to Hudson…on a weekend.

 

Garden Inspiration: Untermyer Park, Yonkers

‘GRANDEUR’ is not a word I pull out very often, but it certainly applies to Untermyer Park in Westchester County. Who knew? I didn’t know, until recently, that there’s a lavish, beautifully designed, meticulously maintained historic garden in Yonkers, on property once owned Samuel Untermyer, a prominent New York lawyer, and his wife Minnie. They bought a 99-room pile called Greystone, and the riverfront acreage surrounding it, from Samuel J. Tilden in 1899. The house is long gone and won’t be coming back, but the splendiferous gardens, happily, have.

In 1915, Untermyer hired William Welles Boswoth, a Beaux Arts-trained landscape designer, who proceeded to create a 3-1/2-acre walled garden based on the Indo-Persian ‘paradise garden’ model, with Neoclassical elements like a Corinthian temple with a mosaic floor, a dramatic flight of steps down to the river inspired by the Villa d’Este near Lake Como, and a Romantic folly, the Temple of Love, on a promontory overlooking the Hudson.

The park opened to the public about three years ago, after decades of neglect. The last weekend in October, I visited with my friend Mary-Liz Campbell, a Rye, NY-based landscape designer. Not only in trees, but in berry-full shrubs and bountiful container plantings, we found all the autumn color that seems to have gone missing in NYC this season.

 


  

A great deal has been accomplished in a few years, but there’s still lots of clearing and planting to be done in the outer reaches of the site. Go here, to Margaret Roach’s indispensable blog, A Way to Garden, for an in-depth interview with Timothy Tilghman, Untermyer’s first full-time gardener in 75 years (!)

Untermyer Park is open 7AM-sunset, year round.

The Joy of Troy

ONCE-MIGHTY TROY, N.Y., one of the nation’s wealthiest cities in the glory days of the Industrial Revolution (iron, steel, precision tools, shirts and collars), fell on hard times in the 20th century, but much of its impressive — in fact, gorgeous — architecture remains intact. Some of its brownstones are more stellar, even, than Brooklyn’s best, and its commercial buildings, in the uniformly antique downtown area, are great beauties.

There’s much for an architecture aficionada to explore, and explore I did last Saturday, in the company of my travelin’ cousin Susan and Brownstoner columnist Suzanne Spellen (aka Montrose Morris), a new Troy resident and now expert on the buildings of that city. (Her recent New York Daily News article on the revitalization of Troy is here.)

Here we are at Lucas Confectionery, a hip new wine bar/ restaurant/grocery that retains the name of the original 1863 store in this space, toasting the wonders of the city named after the ancient Troy, whose motto is “Ilium fuit, Troja est (Latin for “Ilium was, Troy is”) — and, young entrepreneurs and real estate developers hope, will be.

Above, Suzanne with Lucas Confectionery owner Vic Christopher, formerly of…Brooklyn!

The obvious place to begin a walking tour of vintage Troy is Monument Square, where a towering column topped by a figure of Liberty commemorates Civil War dead, and around which are a few thriving boutiques like Truly Rhe and a phenomenally unspoiled Victorian bar/cafe, Illium Cafe (photos below of the building that houses it and its wholly original interior). Try the strawberry mimosa.

The elegant 1904 McCarthy building on Monument Square, of terra cotta with a proscenium-style arched window, below, just waiting for the right tenant.

Angling off Monument Square toward the Hudson River — narrower here than in New York City, but the original source of Troy’s commercial success — is River Street, below. The spectacular wedge-shaped Rice Building, an 1871 High Gothic landmark at the corner of River at First, replaced an earlier structure wiped out in an 1820 fire that destroyed all the businesses and warehouses along River Street, which had been a busy commercial district since the 1790s.

River Street is optimistically dubbed Antiques Row. More buildings are vacant than occupied at present, though the potential in its sturdy, attractive building stock, below, is evident. One of the best stores now open: Country Charm at #188, where painted cupboards and iron bedsteads similar to those found in Hudson, N.Y., shops are offered at a fraction of the price. Another goodie: Playing on the Furniture, a place to find cheerily repainted and refurbished secondhand pieces.

Off Monument Square in the other direction, on River and Third Streets, are livelier boutiques, vintage clothing stores and flower shops (The Botanic Studio specializes in terrariums), and more fine commercial buildings in need of tenants.

Above, Dang! That’s Cherry, a vintage clothing boutique that also sells mid-century kitsch and kitchenware.

Troy seems to have no shortage of fine public buildings. Below, the interior of the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall, an 1870s auditorium with original pipe organ, long famed for its acoustics, has a full calendar of important names in classical, jazz and popular music.

Below, the Troy Public Library, remnant of proud bygone days, with magnificent iron sconces.

Below, two early buildings at Russell Sage College, founded in 1916 in a public park in Downtown Troy.

There are numerous blocks of well-preserved row houses — a few early Federal clapboards and many later homes of brick or stone, in Italianate, Romanesque Revival, and other fanciful late 19th century styles. The best of them seem to be along 2nd Street, which we wandered, admiring bay windows, cupolas, friezes, ironwork, cornices, and other details.

 

Above: the Federal style Hart-Cluett House, built in 1827 with a marble facade, now the home of the Rensselaer County Historical Society.

Eventually we came to Washington Park, below, established in 1840 and one of only two private ornamental parks in the state, open by key to residents of surrounding buildings (the other such park is Gramercy Park in NYC). Some of the homes are freestanding mansions, below; others are row houses.

Above, one of the last remaining cobblestone streets in Troy.

We returned to Monument Square along 3rd Street, where the homes are more modest. There are two interesting houses of worship: the 1827 St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, below, whose 1890s interior is all Tiffany; stained glass windows, woodwork, metalwork and lighting. And a cute blue-painted 1870 synagogue, in continuous use for the past 144 years.

      

Wherever you roam, there’s interesting stuff to see, like the leaded glass storefront and rusting Art Deco hotel sign, below.

That’s Troy 101 for you. What do you make of it?