Ed Ford's Kingston, part 2

K76+

This is the second of two parts of a 1997 interview with City of Kingston Historian Ed Ford.

Part Two covers Kingston from the 1800s til the 1990s when this interview took place.

[Click here to read Part One]

[Click here for K-76 Table of Contents]

Adam: Let’s get back to Kingston. In the early-to-mid 1800s, we had the canal coming into what was then Rondout. What was going on at that time in what we now consider uptown Kingston?

Ford: Well, Kingston still had all those farms. Some of the rich landowners had farms all up and down the Esopus Creek, where we have all the corn growing now. During and after the Revolution they sold an awful lot of wheat and corn and whatever they grew to New York City and those areas, so it became a huge business. That’s basically what Uptown was doing.

Also, being the seat of government of Ulster County, the banks would start here before they started in some other communities, and they would have courts here and all those kinds of related things.

There was no street here, no Wall Street from North Front to John, until 1830. You figure, that’s almost 200 years after they got here in 1652, and they hadn’t even thought about putting a street through here all that time. There were stone houses along here and on North Front Street. And these people were fairly rich, they didn’t have to sell this land off here, they didn’t want to sell it. Till some businessman by the name of Joseph S. Smith came here from Delhi and set up a business over on Clinton Avenue, then got the idea that he could develop this street.

He finally talked some of the descendants of the earlier landholders into selling this land here for a street, and he built about three brick buildings here. Whether they’re still standing or not I’m not sure. And the whole street, it wasn’t paved, it was dirt, of course, the contractor made this whole street here for 35 dollars.

Adam: So around 1830 is the first time we see what we now call “Uptown” emerging as kind of like a business district.

Ford: That’s right. Before that, a lot of the businesses were in the stone houses, adjacent to them, or on one side of them. And that wasn’t working out very well.

The lucky thing about the whole thing is this: if they had not extended Wall Street up to North Front*, they might have had the business district on, say, Crown Street or Green Street over there, and we would’ve lost all the stone houses. Because they would’ve eventually built a business district one way or another, those houses would’ve lost out, they would’ve been torn down. As it is, we’ve lost them on North Front for parking lots, and several different places over the years. We wouldn’t have the heritage of the early stone houses that we have now had they not put this street through here.

So that’s the way uptown Kingston developed into a business area, and at the same time, 1828, the Delaware and Hudson Canal came into Rondout.

Adam: Which was farmland at the time.

Ford: Yes, there was not much of anything. There were maybe 50 families living down there at the most, and by 1870 there were 10,000 people. That’s how fast it grew because of the canal and all the related industries. Shops, stores, all kinds of things.

Adam: So, in the 1870s, we have two towns, Kingston and Rondout.

Ford: Both were villages. Yes.

Adam: And they decided to merge.

Ford: Yes, well, they didn’t decide it easily. The first one that decided that they wanted to be a city was Rondout. And when they petitioned the New York State Legislature to become a city, Kingston up here heard about it and they said, “Well, we don’t want Rondout to become a city and we’re only a village,” so they also petitioned the legislature for Kingston to become a city. They would have two cities right next to each other.

The state legislature discussed it at some length and finally decided to make it all one city: Kingston and Rondout and throw in the Wilbur area besides. And as a result, Kingston has got over 100 miles of streets**, which is twice as much as what Newburgh or Poughkeepsie in their city limits have.

So it’s really a spread-out city. And by 1870 it had started to spread out in between, you know, where the high school is and all along there. Factories were being built in the central part of Kingston. That came about at about that time.

Adam: Now, even when IBM was here, in my lifetime I don’t recall ever seeing Uptown, Midtown, Downtown all kind of thriving simultaneously. Was there ever a time when all parts of Kingston were thriving simultaneously?

Ford: Oh I’d say around 1870 they were all thriving. You had the canal down there. Uptown here you had a business district. There were 8,000 people living in uptown Kingston. You had the agriculture. And then you had the bluestone industry coming down from West Hurley, Sawkill and Saugerties and all those areas. In fact, they were so proud to see that bluestone come down, they made the turnpike come down North Front Street and go down Wall Street and then go all the way down Wall and Wilber Avenue to the creek. And they wanted them to come by because they thought that was good for business.

Adam: I’ve seen a picture of this one big chunk of bluestone coming down Wall Street.

Ford: Yes, well, they got sick of that, because when these wagons would rumble by the courthouse they would shake it and disrupt the court hearings. But by the time they got around to complaining about it, the bluestone industry was kind of phased out anyway. So that was that.

Adam: When you have a town as big as all that, what makes it work?

Ford: Well, obviously you had to have a lot of business to make it work. Downtown there was plenty with all the shipping and everything. And Midtown a little later on they started to have cigar factories, things of that kind. They had so many workers around here. There was even a cigar factory on North Front Street at one time, I can even remember that one. You added it all together and it was enough for people to have a livelihood.

Adam: What do you think made it stop working?

Ford: I guess the same old thing which happens in a lot of communities. There’re all kinds of stories how, we’ll say General Motors, General Electric, any of them, wanted to come here, and they were discouraged because some of the people here didn’t want to disrupt their bucolic life. You know, they figured it was a nice life here and they didn’t want to disrupt it.

Well, by 1952, when IBM started to expand, one of the local businessmen around here, who was a friend of Thomas Watson, I guess, thought that it would be a good idea if they were to locate here. And that started that.

The mistake that was probably made was when IBM was here they figured, “What else do we need? We got that, we don’t need anything else.” And so I think a lot of smaller businesses, unless they were related somehow to that, didn’t locate here. You go through some towns and you see a big diversity of small industry, even if it isn’t great big, and we didn’t have an awful lot of that here.

Then, of course, the Depression had been a very bad time here, but I’m sure it was like that for a lot of places all over the country.

Adam: What can we do now that IBM has left the community?

Ford: Well, as far as I’m concerned the more tourism, the more historically-related we are, I would figure that’s a plus.

It’s something that we have, that we can expand on, and the great waterfront down there, that’s almost unbeatable—between New York and Albany certainly. We have that and it is continually growing all the while.

I was at a meeting of the Urban Cultural Park Commission. They’ve got themselves on the Web, they put ads in once in a while like the county does for tourism, and they send people packets of local attractions here, whether it’s the Senate House or the Trolley Museum or the Maritime or Fred Johnston House or whatever it is, people will get a packet of information and hopefully they’ll come here. If they do, they spend their money. That’s basically what I hope, I hope we just keep increasing on that, because I think it’s great.

I know whenever my wife and I, when we travel around New England and all that, we stay overnight, you eat someplace, you go and you see whatever you want to see, you spend some money. That’s all fine because you don’t have to provide those people with any services. They’re here to spend their money, but you don’t have to educate their kids or any of that so it’s a plus. It’s money coming into the community, and of course money has to go for salaries of people that work towards this. But still and all, to me it’s great.

If you have the potential, and we have it here, Uptown and Downtown***, and we play it up in every way we can, by publicity and whatever, I think that, certainly in the short term, it’s the way to go. And hopefully out in Town of Ulster and wherever they have these economic development areas they’ll get some medium-size businesses, like what they’re talking about, so that if one goes out then you haven’t lost everything, like we did with IBM. That’s what I hope.

Adam: Let me ask you one last question and we’ll wrap it up. If some young person reading this article thinks that someday he or she might like to grow up to be Kingston city historian, what advice would you give them?

Ford: Oh, the best advice I can give them is to keep your eyes open. Look around Kingston and see what interests you, and when you find something that interests you, look it up. There are records in the library you can find. There are history books on early Kingston history. You can’t know it all, but you can find a great deal of information. Go to the local museums, wherever they are, and find out all you can.

*We were sitting at Wall and North Front streets, doing the interview.

**For more info on Kingston’s 100 miles of city streets, see “Street Whys,” Ed Ford’s comprehensive guide to every single street in Kingston. Ed Ford also wrote the volume about Kingston for the popular “Images of America” series.

***1997 predates the NeoBrooklyn model that helps make Midtown attractive in its own way.

Tune in next Wednesday for more serialized fiction that takes place in Kingston!