house, the former Clark Van Vlierden House in West Saugerties. Photo by Barry Benepe.
I have been living in Greenwich Village since 1971 on the fourth floor of a five floor walk-up tenement built by Alexander Mactier in 1851; when Jane Street was home to grocers, butchers, bakers, clerks, accountants, tailoresses, dressmakers, carpenters, sash makers, blind makers, painters, masons, stonecutters, stone setters, machinists, gas fitters, brass finishers, boot makers, saddlers, boatmen, carmen, drovers and hundreds of horses for them to drive. The street leads four blocks to the Hudson River at the foot of which sits the former American Seamen’s Friends Society; where the surviving crew members of the Titanic’s sinking were brought by the ship Carpathia, disembarking at Cunard Pier 54. Now a hotel with affordable “cabins with bunks” it stood beneath four feet of floodwater during the tidal surge of Hurricane Sandy.
Alexander Hamilton, who looks supremely confident from the ten dollar bill in your wallet, was brought to a house no longer existing on Jane Street after being shot by Aaron Burr in a duel in 1804. He met his untimely death in a field in Wee-hawken across the North (now Hudson) River. The boat carrying his body landed where the shoreline was east of present day Washington Street. I pass along all this because it is comforting to be embedded in this historic community, wondering what dust particles underfoot contain the remains of these past events.
My wife Judith and I are also attached to history in our 1897 farmhouse in Saugerties, NY, owned by a descendant of the last Dutch speaking pastor of the nearby Katsbaan Church. I am chair of the Historic Preservation Commission and Vice Chair of the Comprehensive Planning Committee. We are both extremely active with the Saugerties Farmers Market, which is entering its 15th year serving farmers and residents of the Hudson Valley and Catskills. We will attend my 60th reunion of St. Andrew’s School founded by Felix du Pont in Middletown, Delaware. We will go from there to stay in the Whitehaven Hotel on the Wicomico River and visit the former family farm from 1938 to 1858. Named Melody Manor by its opera singer owner, it was designed by Stanford White in 1905, shortly before his assassination by Harry Thaw. We can kayak and bicycle to the farm from the hotel on level traffic free roads.
Here in the West Village I occasionally write a monthly column on planning and architecture for WestView News. This is a very vibrant community. Our two greatest assets are the Hudson River promenade and the High Line, a former elevated freight railroad, now one of the most heavily visited parks in the world stretching north from the Whitney Museum designed by Renzo Piano to Hudson Yards, slated to be one of the densest collection of buildings in the world.
