The Hudson Valley: Cool Old Buildings That I Did Not Photograph

Some slight changes are going to be made here at COB. Although the original concept was to take all the pictures for the blog myself, I've found that I just don't have the time to go on photography escapades every single week. So in the interest of keeping COB current and updated I'm going to begin finding some photos on the internet to use. I'll still limit them to pictures of buildings I've actually seen in person.

So with that, here are some cool old buildings from the Hudson River Valley of New York State.
The Hudson Valley is in my humble opinion one of the most beautiful places on Earth. I went to school there, in a little spot called Annandale on Hudson, New York. It's not really a town -- just the Bard College campus and woods -- but it sits right in between Red Hook and Tivoli, two very different but equally quaint little towns. As the name suggests, the Hudson Valley is the lush indentation of land that surrounds the Hudson River on each side. It's one of the oldest parts of the country, not to mention the most literary. This is where the Headless Horseman rode through Sleepy Hollow, where Rip Van Winkle slept for twenty years, and where Edith Wharton's doomed heroine Lily Bart did her most ambitious social climbing. Many of the towns have Dutch or German names (such as Saugerties, the town next to Woodstock and the place where the iconic rock concert actually took place, or Rhinebeck, where the uppermost classes of the early 1900's kept their grand country estates), reflective of the area's long history as New Netherland, before the English came to colonize it.

I could probably go on and on about this area -- having lived there for four years I'm very attached to it, and as a writer I found myself continuously inspired by it. The buildings make up no small part of the inspiration factor. If you drive through Tivoli, or down River Road into Rhinecliff and Rhinebeck, or to a greater extent through formerly booming port towns like Kingston and Hudson, you get this sense of decaying elegance, of a once grand area being gently washed away by time and water. This great photograph by Virginia Wilcox below is a nice example of what I mean (see more of her work here). The houses you see are inarguably beautiful, mostly spacious Victorians loaded with wraparound porches and bay windows and other architectural details, or simple upright Colonials, like the one in Kingston with a plaque commemorating the night George Washington spent there. But the damp valley climate is not ideal for preservation, and wood begins to warp, and paint chips, and once spectacular estates, like Edith Wharton's family's, fall into ruins. So everything has an aging, wet, shabby beauty to it. I guess what I like about the Hudson Valley aesthetic is that you can see the history in a building -- you can tell what it looked like when it was new and you can see how that newness has faded. Like I said, I could go on and on.

That said, there are also a number of those elegant riverside mansions that have been beautifully preserved -- in fact, visitors to the Valley can go on a number of historic house tours. The building below is called Olana, and is located right on the river, near the town of Hudson. It was the home of Frederick Church, a famous painter from the Hudson River school. He wanted to build his house on the spot with the most beautiful view of the Hudson, and he did, but today that view is marred somewhat by power cords and the white towers of a factory next to the water. The house was designed by Calvert Vaux after Church, who had originally intended to replace his cottage on the hill with a French-style manor on the hill, went on a tour of the Middle East with his wife and son, and came back so impressed with the Islamic art and architectural styles he had seen on his trip that he decided to reimagine his house on the hill as a Moorish palace. He filled the house with his extraordinary art collection: paintings, sculpture, artifacts and antiques from all over the world. Olana's website calls the house "a Persian fantasy adapted to American tastes and manners." Indeed the collection, not to mention the house itself, is a crazy mixture of periods, styles and cultures: Arabic oil lamps sit on mantles next to busts of French aristocrats, and neoclassical bronze statues stand on Persian carpets. Church's daughter-in-law, who inherited the house along with her husband and lived at Olana until 1964, was adament about keeping the house and collections exactly as Church left them. As a result the Olana you can visit today is virtually unchanged from the Olana that Frederick Church lived in and meticulously, eclectically decorated.

Stay tuned for more Hudson Valley cool old buildings. There are a lot of them.