Home Run

Hal lives in a house across the street from where we grew up, in Kingston. The owner of the house I (we) used to live in is the president of the Hudson Valley Maritime Museum, and I haven't met him, but I hope he likes it. Here's what I liked about it: it's a Dutch Colonial revival style, built in 1928, from a design in a magazine (might have been Popular Mechanics--my brother Hal says it was "Sears kit house" and he just ran into the identical version in another Hudson valley town--local historians give 28 President's Place as the best of several versions around-kinda cool!). The original owner was a Doctor Alexander Stern, who supposedly planted 6000 tulip bulbs in the woods (now our woods, since when my father sold the place in 1985, he kept the quarter acre of woods and the garage/apartment). There was a CEE-Ment pond with a surrounding rock garden, once home to goldfish, in our childhood time home to a hornets' nest and a frog or two until a neighbor's kid decided to spray DDT--that was the end of the frogs, at least.

Things I loved about the house: it had a formal dining room with a chandelier, a kitchen with a butler's pantry, CEDAR CLOSETS (!), an art deco stained glass window in the dining room, a formal living room wainscotting, beamed ceilings and a fireplace, a sun room with a rock fireplace...even the maid's room, where I lived for a few years, had its own little porch. Oh, and the heaters had mahogany covers carved with grapes and the letter "S" (Stern, I guess) and in the entry, next to the beautiful curving stairs, was an oak wooden heater cover of carved INJUNS--I mean, folk art, no-waisted, fanciful head-dress, tomahawk wavin' INJUNS, about four feet high by five feet long.

From my parents' bathroom window there was an incredible view out over the Rondout to where it met the Hudson.

I miss it.