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STILL STANDING "Gallery Talk" event with exhibit curator Dean Engle and photographer Tim Burger

Saturday August 26th 3:00 PM

The Friends of Historic Kingston Gallery 63 Main Street Kingston, NY

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Friends of Historic Kingston's STILL STANDING exhibit, on view May - October 2023. Gallery open Fridays and Saturdays, 11 AM to 4 PM.

More info at fohk.org

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STILL STANDING in Kingston's Daily Freeman

KINGSTON, N.Y. — The Friends of Historic Kingston’s latest exhibit, “Still Standing,” recognizes 12 buildings and structures in the city as examples of successful historic preservation and shares stories of the efforts to ensure their survival.

Featured landmarks range from well-known preservation stories like City Hall to lesser-known accounts like RUPCO’s Lace Mill and Uptown homes like the early 19th century Amelia Westbrook House on Clinton Avenue.

Some of the preserved buildings were threatened by the urban renewal-era wrecking ball that saw more than 400 homes and businesses torn down in the Rondout Area. More recent preservation fights include efforts in the 2010s to save the Alms House, now incorporated into RUPCO’s Landmark Place affordable housing development, from potential demolition. There are also current efforts to rehabilitate the historic Kingston-Port Ewen Suspension Bridge, officially known as the Rondout Creek Bridge.

Dean Engle, a New Paltz Middle School reading teacher, helped set up the exhibit and produced a short film that accompanies it. He said while conversations around preservation in Kingston often lament the loss of landmarks such as the former Kingston Post Office, the Friends wanted to focus on success stories with this particular exhibit. “We’re celebrating the people in their time who made often lonely arguments for preservation and now we’re reaping the benefits,” he said.

A Poughkeepsie native who now lives in Midtown, Engle recalled how he joined the Friends as a volunteer after touring the Modjeska Sign Studio exhibit on the very day the museum reopened after the pandemic in 2021. He later went on to help with the expanded version of the exhibit that ran last year.

Engle also leads the Friends Uptown Walking Tour, which takes place on the first Saturday of each month, with the first tour of this year set for July 1. He explained how they selected the 12 buildings. “We didn’t want to just show the oldest buildings,” he said. “Friends of Historic Kingston has a diverse perspective and is interested in all historic buildings, not just the colonial-era stone houses.”

That said, the exhibit does feature the ruins of the Louw-Bogardus House on Frog Alley. Engle said the ruins are believed to be the oldest extant building from the European-settlement era in present-day Kingston. It stands just outside of the 1658 Stockade District. The exhibit also features 20th-century photos that show the home before it was gutted by fire in the 1960s, a period when it was abandoned.

“The fire revealed older construction techniques,” Engle said. “That made us realize we had the remains of the oldest extant building in Kingston, if not the larger area.”

While preservation efforts at the stone ruins are ongoing, including stabilization of the walls, there have been instances of vandalism at the site, including the removal of stones and damage to the remains of its period jambless fireplace, Friends of Historic Kingston Executive Director Jane Kellar said. The work is being funded through state Downtown Revitalization Initiative funds received by the city in 2017.

Kellar showed off an exhibit case featuring newspaper articles and other items chronicling the decades-long fight by preservationists to save the circa 1872 City Hall. The exhibits chronicle those efforts, which started after the building was abandoned by the city in 1972 up to 2000, when it reopened after extensive restoration work carried out by Robert Carey Construction. “They did a wonderful job,” she said.

Kellar believes preservationists succeeded in saving City Hall because they argued that the building had value as an anchor of Midtown. Kellar said she hopes to add more elements to the exhibit in the future. “We have oral histories for each, but we’re not sure how to make it work,” she said. Exhibit hours are Fridays and Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. through the end of October. For more information about this exhibit and other Friend’s programming, visit the organization's website.

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Spoke to Susan DeMark at Hudson Valley One about the new Friends of Historic Kingston exhibit "Still Standing," opening May 2023.

Full article PDF

Web Link

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Gallery video I edited for Friends of Historic Kingston's 2021-2022 exhibit "Signs of the Times: The Modjeska Signs Studio."

Exhibit walkthrough video

Hudson Valley One article

Daily Freeman article

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Full page Daily Freeman ad, September 1972, promoting The Friends of Historic Kingston's (ultimately successful) campaign to save the city's 1875 City Hall building.

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This 1969 single by the Country Cavaliers put me on the trail of a forgotten Dutchess County cowboy. I pulled songwriter Dominic F. Cavalieri’s full legal off the copyright cards, but most initial searches turned up info on his father. Dom, Sr. led an orchestra-for-hire in the 40s, founded a tool manufacturing operation, a childcare center, and (back to topic) a successful dude ranch.

Ponderosa Ranch opened in the mid-60s near the Cavalieri’s home in Salt Point, ten miles northeast of Poughkeepsie. Local officials shut down a racetrack proposal, but the ranch hosted many rodeos and riding competitions. Poughkeepsie Journal advertisements from ’67 and ’68 announce appearances by the Lone Ranger and Honey Girl the Wonder Horse. If the Country Cavaliers played, they weren’t billed.

Four years before his studio debut, Cavalieri married Gloria Adriance, one of his father’s employees. She also rode horses (power couple alert) and won several awards at Ponderosa competitions. After a couple years of regular newspaper references, I couldn’t find any record of Gloria after 1967. Dominic was only 36 when he died in 1981, and no spouse is mentioned in his obituary.

We wouldn’t speculate as to who or what inspired the bitter A side, but safe to say someone had DC steamed. The two-and-a-half minute avalanche begins “You sit back in your easy chair / And look out at the sun / You never had a single care / Your life has all been fun / You don’t know what it is to hurt / Or what it is to cry / You had no mercy on my heart / You sure can hurt a guy.” Whoever she was ruined his life just sitting in a La-Z-Boy. Lord she must have been bad…

Previously unavailable digitally, both “You Sure Can Hurt a Guy” and “A Chance Tonight” are up on my YouTube channel.

#Youtube

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Signs and trucks from my homeward commute, in the order that I pass them.

#1 Moriello Pool - 32 Mulberry St, New Paltz #2 Clarkson's Appliances - 249 Rt. 32, New Paltz #3 Turco Brothers Pool Water Truck - 636 Rt. 32, New Paltz #4 Bird Watcher's Country Store - 848 Rt. 32, Tillson #5 B and S Plaza spinning sign - 2039 Rt. 32, Rosendale #6 Bloomington Fire Department - 14 Taylor St, Bloomington #7 Cuties Sports Entertainment - 2608 Rt. 32, Kingston #8 Funway's Party Room - 177 Greenkill Ave, Kingston #9 Kingston News Service - 59 Greenkill Ave, Kingston #10 Wonderly’s - 25 Cornell St, Kingston

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Yours Are The Only Ears (Susannah Cutler) performing live at Kingston Point Rotary Park in Kingston, NY on July 20, 2022. Free acoustic show with Slaughter Beach, Dog (Jake Ewald). Filmed on Hi8 tape with a Sony Handycam.

#Youtube

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This museum season, I contributed modern comparison photos to @fhkingston’s “Signs of the Times” exhibit. These pictures are displayed alongside Kingston street views from the 1920s through the 1970s, photographed by the Modjeska Sign Studio to catalog their neon signs, billboards, and painted wall advertisements. 

The exhibit includes the company’s original photo albums, a refurbished neon sign, and hundreds of never-before-seen images.

I love this collection and was proud to edit the gallery video, assist in installing panels, and even help dig through a New Jersey storage unit to unearth new pictures.

The Friends of Historic Kingston Gallery is open Fridays and Saturdays, 11 AM to 4 PM, at 63 Main Street uptown. Make sure to stop by sometime this summer!

Photo locations (all in Kingston)

#1: 344 Broadway #2: 51 N Front Street #3: 478 Broadway #4: 600 Broadway #5: 467 Broadway

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Today’s my 31st birthday and I’m feeling unrestrained so here’s ten film pictures of Ulster County buildings, taken over the past two years (mostly from the driver’s seat of my car). #1 - 203 Newkirk Street in East Kingston #2 - 43 Abeel Street (viewed from W Union St) in Kingston #3 - Corner of Downs Street and Broadway in Kingston #4 - 67 O’Neil Street in Kingston #5 - 26 Gill Street in Ponckhockie #6 - 5 Broadhead Ave in New Paltz #7 - 58 Harwich Street in the Town of Ulster #8 - 111 Downs Street in Kingston #9 - 18 Ponckhockie Street in… Ponckhockie #10 - Abraham Hasbrouck House (94 Huguenot Street) in New Paltz

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When filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich (Paper Moon, The Last Picture Show) died two days ago it was strange to see the local press claim him as a “Kingston native.” A little skeptical and blessed with a snow day, I slid around town investigating PB’s connection to our city.

Bogdanovich lived in Kingston… for the first year of his life. His parents Borislav Bogdanovich (Serbian) and Herma Robinson Bogdanovich (Austrian) fled the former Yugoslavia in 1939. That same year, Peter was born in Kingston. The family lived with Herma’s father, mother, and three siblings at 314 Main Street. The first three pictures show the house in the 1950s, late 80s, and today. The 1940 census lists baby Peter at the address along with his Austrian relatives. A Freeman article confirms they all arrived in America the same year and other sources suggest Borislav helped his wife’s Jewish family flee. But why would they land in a Kingston duplex? In November 1939, Peter’s young aunts and uncle got some press. The Freeman profiled six recent European immigrants now attending city schools. The Robinson sisters enrolled at Kingston High and 11-year-old John attended School No. 7 on Crown Street. The article mentions their father’s brother Conrad lives in town. It turns out great-uncle Conrad’s the reason Peter Bogdanovich boarded this mortal coil in Kingston.

Conrad immigrated two decades before his brother. He’s listed as a jeweler at 47 N Front Street on his 1917 draft card. By the late 1920s he’d moved to the Uptown pocket off Mountainview Ave and ventured into filling stations and heating oil. Conrad’s 1976 obituary notes he was “instrumental in bringing many refugees to safety” during World War II. At City Hall (where I got the first two photos), Kathy from the Assessor’s Office found an old deed showing Conrad owned the Main Street house, definitively explaining why Herma Bogdanovich’s whole family temporarily stayed at the address. Conrad and his wife Helen are buried at Montrepose Cemetery. Obviously, I tramped through the snow to Temple Emanuel’s plots and paid my respects to the man responsible for making Kingston Peter Bogdanovich’s hometown.

#Peter Bogdanovich

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In 1979, L.A. songwriter Brock Walsh released his debut single “Save Me” on Arista Records. Walsh got his start sitting in with Poughkeepsie’s Last Chance Jazz Band while still a student at Arlington High School, where he was class president and a major soccer star.  

After four years at Harvard, Walsh moved west. He played in Linda Ronstadt’s touring band and began collaborating with her guitarist, Andrew Gold.  Gold had a couple mid-70s solo hits and wrote the “Golden Girls” theme song. Walsh played keyboard in Gold’s band and started producing and writing songs for artists like the Pointer Sisters, Bette Midler, and Christina Aguilera. A yacht rock LP called “Dateline: Tokyo,” released 1983 in Japan, was his only solo full length until a 2001 CD, also import-only. In a 1979 Poughkeepsie Journal interview around the single’s release, Walsh reminisced about spending “summers at Baird Park [in LaGrange] singing songs to impress the girls.”  His parents remained in Red Oaks Mill and Walsh occasionally returned to play The Chance. He was profiled by the Journal several times ahead of these appearances, growing more self-deprecating as time progressed. In 1990 he told his hometown paper, “I made a bad record [in 1981] and was unemployed for a year. I put it back together, realizing that I wouldn’t be a recording artist.” Back in town to reunite with the Last Chance Jazz Band, the Journal writer Greg Goth refers to Walsh as a “semi-legend.” Walsh responds, “The responsibility of being a semi-legend is great. Actually it’s semi-great.”

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Obscure material, even by my standards, here’s “Harmony,” a 1974 LP featuring performances from M. Clifford Miller Junior High School’s orchestra, band, and chorus.  Miller Junior High, located in Lake Katrine right behind Kingston’s former IBM campus, first welcomed students in 1968. The building was designed by architect Harry Halverson and named after Melvin Clifford Miller, decorated WWII veteran and principal of Kingston High from 1955 to 1963. I found the record digging at the Ulster ReStore and was impressed by the program. Miller’s middle schoolers soulfully deliver some Bacharach and David and a Carole King tune before breaking out the electric piano on “Killing Me Softly With His Song,” a year after it hit number one. The ensembles on side B stick closer to expectations, though the band’s chunky “Yesterday When I Was Young” is a definite highlight, swelling with preteen pathos. I uploaded the audio to YouTube and shared the link in a Kingston Facebook group. The post prompted some reminiscing, including a comment from this solo’s singer. Along with the link, I’d also asked if any alum might want the record. A clarinetist from the concert band commented she was interested and hypothesized it could be her missing copy. I delivered the LP this afternoon and we chatted about her nearly four decades working in Kingston’s schools and her memories of Mr. Keehn the band director. Pulling the 47-year-old program from the cardboard cover, she felt almost certain it was her copy, so know as you listen this record’s safely back where it belongs.

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A short post to recognize, promote, and celebrate “House of Confusion,” eleven new tracks on wax from the Rondout’s own Trace Mountains. Photo locations (all in Kingston): #1 Immanuel Evangelical Lutheran Church, 22 Livingston Street #2 Garage near Kingston Point, 126 North Street #3 House at 94 Abruyn Street #4 Hudson River Maritime Museum mural, 50 Rondout Landing #5 Ponckhockie Congregational Church, 91 Abruyn Street #6 Behind the Wooden Boat School, 86 Rondout Landing #7 Dave’s apartment in the Rondout #8 My backyard in Midtown #9 Immanuel Evangelical Lutheran Church’s parsonage

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Wilfred Courtney aka Tex Larabey, Kingston's great cowboy crooner, was born 1930 in Springfield, Massachusetts. He recorded and self-released two albums of mostly covers and had a popular country radio show on Kingston's WKNY. At age 43, only five years after releasing his first album, Tex died in a car accident outside of Atlanta a few days before Christmas 1973.

The record points to early tumult. The 1940 census tallies Courtney among the residential patients in a children's hospital. At 21, he operated the "Relloplane" ride for a traveling carnival. He was charged with manslaughter when a cable snapped "hurling two plane-type cars against each other," killing a New Jersey teenager. Eventually acquitted, he settled in Troy, NY and started driving a taxi. In 1953, he reinvented himself as Tex Larabey, soundtracking square dances and usually billing his backing band as the Rhythm Riders.

In 1970, Kingston's Daily Freeman ran a profile about Tex and his 4 AM to 6 AM radio show. The article claims Tex moved to the area in 1959 "by way of the Carolinas," and his obituary notes he began driving for local company John Rapp Van Lines that same year. Nearly a decade later, Tex would record his two albums in Greenville, South Carolina at Mark V Studios.

Tex lived in Port Ewen with his daughter and wife (who sewed his flamboyant outfits), and drove a car with his name printed on the side. Beyond his charismatic reputation, he was a respected country music promoter and brought many national acts to the area. Tex appeared all over Kingston, performing at restaurants, the county fair, and the armory on Manor Ave. He broadcasted from car dealerships, department stores, and movie theaters. He was a community fixture and remains well-remembered. Wilfred Courtney is buried in Kingston's Wiltwyck Cemetery, his musical moniker and an acoustic guitar carved into his headstone.

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Influenced and inspired by Friends of Historic Kingston‘s current “Modjeska Sign Company” exhibit, I began wondering about the burned out neon sign advertising “Saccoman’s” above the grocery store at 10 Downs Street.

Searching the Freeman archives, I learned the sign belonged to Anthony Saccoman’s jewelry store, which operated three blocks away at 580 Broadway from 1952 until 1989. The storefront is currently vacant, last occupied by local conservative Ola Hawatmeh’s unsuccessful 2020 congressional campaign:

Saccoman opened the jewelry store a few years after selling the green-tiled Tony’s Pizzeria next door, our city’s first pizza spot, still open today under the same name and neon lettering seen in this 1950s photo. After almost four decades, his jewelry business moved to Downs Street where the sign still hangs, remaining open until Anthony’s passing in 1993.

Seeking a photo of the sign in its original location, I went to City Hall and got my first of two lucky breaks. Kathy Wisner at the Assessor’s Office, who generously pulled the 1950s property photos included in this post, had a personal connection to my query. The jewelry store’s manager Myron Oppenheimer was her uncle and she “worked” at Saccoman’s as a kid, wrapping packages in the back room with a string tying machine. Encouraged by the coincidence, I continued digging, cross-referencing phonebooks at the Kingston Library and finding Mr. Saccoman’s obituary in their microfilm archive.

A couple weeks later, while volunteering at the Fred Johnston Museum, a visitor named Joan brought some century-old photos of her ancestors’ Broadway businesses for the archive’s consideration. Among these treasures, Joan had a certificate from Ellis Island regarding “Gaetano Saccamano.” Descended from a dropped-O Italian family myself, I inquired whether she was related to Anthony Saccoman. She was his granddaughter! 

Joan confirmed that the store had operated on Downs Street at the end of Mr. Saccoman’s career. We discussed his leading the Midtown Business Association, their large family reunions in East Kingston, and the short street behind Tony’s Pizzeria named Saccoman Ave. Our conversation concluded the inquiry, and I wound down the summer-long search the same way it began, standing in the middle of Downs Street squinting up at the sign through my camera.