Rhinebeck Village’s Living History
by Rachel Cavell

On December 8, 2009, the Village of Rhinebeck finally adopted a law protecting its historic structures. It had been a long time coming—in fact, almost exactly 30 years. It was then, in August of 1979, that the Village’s central core (which came to be called the Historic District) was placed on the National Register of Historic Places, the nation’s official list of resources considered worthy of preservation.

This new law, fashioned after a law adopted by the Town of Rhinebeck in 2004, protects our historic buildings from the whim of the wrecking ball, a fate that many of these buildings only narrowly dodged countless times. Many, in fact, didn’t. Reviewing the archives of the buildings that didn’t make it (Tammany House on Montgomery Street, torn down in 1962 for a parking lot; the old Town Hall on East Market Street, razed in 1938 for a car dealership) one is struck by the random, careless acts that depreciate communities. Rhinebeck Village’s Protection Law may play a large part in keeping our Historic District intact as a model of 19th century American architecture.

As seen on a map, the Village’s Historic District has a boat-like perimeter. The bulky hull of it runs through South, Center, East Market, Mulberry, Livingston, South Parsonage, Chestnut and Beech streets, with the mast extending from the Landsman’s Kill up Montgomery Street to just before the Northern Dutchess Hospital at its north end.

Moving to our house on Livingston Street in 1992, I was initially struck by the way the earliest years of our colonial history rested casually alongside our daily lives— that a neighbor’s garage had rusty bridle hooks and empty hay racks from its earlier hoofed residents; that access to the basement in our house required the hoisting of a trap door in the middle of our living room. (Though certainly apocryphal, legends of the Underground Railroad running in and out of the basements on our block provided a world of fantasy for our small children.) For years, I assumed that the placement of my house within a Historic District carried with it certain privileges and responsibilities, as does coming upon some handsome family heirloom in your aunt’s attic. It was disheartening to learn that my house had stood for 160 or so years by luck alone. While a humble example of late Greek Revival architecture, it nonetheless stands as a concrete and vivid representation of the time just before America’s Civil War.

The fact was that apart from certain arcane tax advantages and a heightened scrutiny of governmentally-funded road widening projects, placement of this historic district on the National Register provided, in itself, few benefits and created almost no burdens. There seemed a disjunction between the pride that our community obviously took in having its buildings recognized nationally as an historic district of significance, and the lack of any local laws that might protect these buildings from either commercial speculation or thoughtless neglect.

Perhaps the wave of development that continued to wash away main streets all over America since 1979 finally eroded our notion that sentiment alone could preserve our history. Rhinebeck Town’s 2004 Historic Buildings Protection Law signified a sea change in the political landscape, a willingness to consider legislation that might have previously been anathema to a community predisposed to protecting the freedom of property owners to do with their holding whatever they wished.

Like the town’s sister law, the 2009 Rhinebeck Village Buildings Protection Law helps preserve historic structures by significantly limiting the conditions under which their demolition may occur. To come within the jurisdiction of the Village’s law, the building must be located within the historic district (significant portions of the Village are therefore entirely exempted), and it must have been built between the architecturally significant years of 1790 and 1930 (in preservation parlance, the “period of significance”). Buildings meeting these criteria (as well as portions of those buildings) may not be demolished unless the owner first receives a “certificate of removal” from the Village Planning Board. In considering whether to issue a certificate, the Board is to consider and determine whether the structure exemplifies an old, unusual or uncommon design, or is otherwise culturally or historically significant. The Board will only issue a “certificate of removal” if it finds that the structure is in such a condition that it is not feasible to restore; that the benefits of demolition outweigh any reasonable interest in preservation; and that the demolition will not result in significant loss to the community’s history. Once denied, the building owner has the option of appealing to the Village’s Zoning Board of Appeals on grounds of “economic hardship,” a process that essentially entails showing that the building is not financially supportable in its current “historic” condition, and that it cannot be adapted for any alternate legal use.

As much as it pays homage to the buildings themselves, this law also recognizes the hard work of those members of the Rhinebeck Historical Society who, 40 and 50 years ago, created Rhinebeck’s Historic District in the first place. The Rhinebeck Historical Society was founded in the early 1960s by Nancy Kelly and De Witt Gurnell in response to the destruction in 1962 of “Tammany House,” the 18th century Kip’s Tavern that stood opposite what is now Ruge’s Subaru Dealership, that had been a gathering place for Aaron Burr and his supporters. At the request of Lynn Beebe, regional director of the equivalent of today’s New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, the Historical Society undertook a survey of buildings in the historic portions of the Village.

Beebe’s NY State office had noted within Rhinebeck’s Village a group of contiguous streets with a critical density of significant American architectural styles prevalent during the period 1700 to 1930: American Gothic; Greek and Colonial Revival; Victorian; Italianate; Colonial Georgian; Federal; Queen Anne and Second Empire. From 1973 to 1978 Marilyn Hatch, her husband John (then President) and fellow society members surveyed every house within this fledgling district—approximately 388 structures in all. Following a set of criteria set forth by the state, Marilyn and her crew identified the architectural and historical significance of each building, noting dormer shape, roof material, window structure, door style, chimney location, porches and galleries. They spent endless hours sorting papers, cataloging, photo copying and entering data. The assembled documentation is archived and accessible in Rhinebeck’s Starr Library.

Reviewing those archives upon first moving to the Village, I was pleased to learn that Marilyn had credited our circa 1840 late Greek Revival house with “significant academic” detailing. (Though a layman in such matters, I understood this to mean that, while simple and basically boxy, my house has clearly defined receded classical columns astride its doorway with long, narrow, rectangular panes of glass on either side, and rather elaborate ridged trim running along the perimeter of its triangular roof.) Once alerted, I realized that I had seen versions of our house many times before in neighborhoods of Boston and on the streets of Newport, Edgartown, and Greenwich Village.

For obvious reasons, the dating of each structure within this district posed a particular conundrum. To solve the problem, Hatch and her crew located primitive yet detailed maps of the area dating 1798, 1850, 1863, 1876 and 1920. Where not otherwise determinable, Hatch narrowed down the approximate date of construction by locating the date of the map on which it first appeared. Folksy identification of certain houses within the village—“GW Schryver House”; Reverend H. Brownson House”; “J. Heeb House” —come from scribbled notations on these earliest maps.

Arguably, the Rhinebeck Buildings Protection Law is only a first step, and we won’t have truly evolved as a historic district until we form a standing historic preservation commission and enact additional legislation regulating not just the demolition, but also the exterior and interior alteration of historic structures. But the first step is sometimes the hardest and most important. It secures for the buildings that give our village its distinctive sense of place a permanent home with us, and provides a testament not only to this early settlement on the Hudson, but to the many hours of time and labor expended by its devoted late 20th century residents.