Call it Old Europe and the Dutch colonies meet the early 20^th century. The Wiltwyck Inn is a petite building, by no means grand. This two-and-a-half story structure, tucked among plenty of historic buildings in the Uptown Stockade neighborhood of Kingston, conjures up faraway places and times long ago, thanks to its personality and out-of-the-ordinary, even inviting, shape.

During the many times I’ve walked by this building I’ve marveled at its warm, quirky looks and wondered where it came from. The Wiltwyck Inn looks the way it does because of the vision of one architect who sought, when he designed it, to connect the structure to the Hudson Valley’s Dutch ancestral roots. Completed around 1910, it opened as an inn, and its early years were steeped in both the graciousness of home and the adventure of the road, catering to women as a gathering place and those out “motoring” and touring in the early days of the automobile. Today, its identity as a commercial building is more pedestrian, since it includes law offices and an insurance agency, but the Wiltwyck Inn’s sweet design and history easily allows one to picture those days and its beginnings.

Located at 48 Main St., this building is a piece of Holland in Kingston, especially its distinctive features, design, and welcoming appearance. Befitting the Dutch style of architecture, it has a steep roof, rough and variegated brickwork, and stepped gables, which are the “stair steps” atop the gable ends. With its many gabled angles, it feels right out of Old Europe.

The Wiltwyck Inn building, on Kingston’s Main Street

The Wiltwyck Inn building’s many angles

Its pleasing design is set off by delicate features that help give the Wiltwyck its “inn” feeling. They range from a portal window near the top and a curved second-floor balcony to dormer windows and wrought-iron embellishments. I find myself looking often at the inn’s adornments and different angles, as much for the images they generate of being transported to another time or place as for their intrinsic interest. Similar-looking buildings abound in the Netherlands, from a building along the canal Galgewater in Leiden to row houses in Haarlem.

Ancestry and Architecture

Whoever named the Wiltwyck Inn decided to name it after the 17^th century Dutch village that later evolved into Kingston – the third major settlement of the Dutch in New Netherland after New Amsterdam (New York) and Fort Orange (Albany). But architect Myron Teller’s design most makes this place Dutch. As author William B. Rhoads explains in his book, Kingston, New York: The Architectural Guide, Teller chose to create a “stately Dutch inn” that would be associated with 17^th century Dutch architecture and suit its location facing the Old Dutch Church and its historic burial ground.

Teller’s choice of a Dutch style wasn’t surprising. One of the most prominent architects of the Hudson Valley in the early 20^th century, Teller had a “lifelong love of colonial Dutch architecture,” according to the newsletter of the Society for the Preservation of Hudson Valley Architecture (June-July 2007), though he designed highly regarded buildings in other styles as well. He possessed pride in his Hudson Valley Dutch ancestry, Rhoads writes.

Anyone who appreciates centuries-old stone houses owes a debt to this architect, who was a Kingston native. Among his many major accomplishments and commissions in Kingston and Ulster County, Teller restored various stone houses from the Dutch colonial era. He also developed a business of hand-wrought hardware in colonial patterns, at a blacksmith shop he established in Kingston. As Rhoads explains in his book, Teller’s skill in restoring colonial stone houses became so admired that the author and historian whose work was associated with such houses, Helen Reynolds, recommended that Teller be welcomed as a member of the Holland Society. Such a designation linked Teller by blood to the Hudson Valley’s Dutch colonists.

Bridging the Colonial and the Modern

But if the Wiltwyck Inn recalled the 17^th century days of Dutch settlers, it embraced the new norms and finer things of the 20^th century. The inn’s proprietor and Teller’s client, Mary Kenney, sought to “provide women with intimate and refined places for tea and luncheons,” part of a movement in the early 20^th century, Rhoads writes in his Kingston guide. It also made a pitch for the newly touring crowds seeking the freedom of the road in their cars. A display advertisement on page 239 of the 1921 Automobile Blue Book – the “standard road guide of America” – shows a full photo of the Wiltwyck Inn, touting its “New Colonial Building” and “Dining and Tea Room.” The ad advertises that the inn is “Noted for home cooking and quick service. Assorted Chocolates and Bon-Bons. Salted Nuts. Open Sundays. All Conveniences.”

Bonbons, salted nuts…just the mention creates the sense of a cozy place, a relaxing time, the small things that weren’t luxuries but still meant a lot. In fact, it jogs a childhood memory of my mother in the early 1960s, gathering with the other ladies in her card club. They would set out small china and glass bowls of nuts and mints on the card tables. Perhaps that’s what the sight of the Wiltwyck Inn’s quirky, old-fashioned, and stepped-gabled old building conveys – times gone by that live in sweet thoughts and memories.

The building also brings up images of those odd-angled commercial buildings in the Western Pennsylvania towns near where I grew up, the structures along a railroad or business street. Often, the shape, personality, and aura of buildings resonate with our own experience. Our mind’s eye will even see the places in our past.

In designing an unpretentious Dutch-style inn, Myron Teller linked the Wiltwyck Inn to the Hudson Valley’s roots. In reaching across the ages, Teller was definitely onto something. We also come to love buildings for how they connect, quite spontaneously, with our own roots.

More Views

A close-up of the stepped gables

Beautiful detailing in the front room’s ceiling

Front and side view of the gables

Further Exploration

The former Wiltwyck Inn, as a part of Kingston’s Stockade Historic District, is included in the National Register of Historic Places and the New York State Register of Historic Places. Mindfulwalker.com plans to focus periodically in future posts on additional places and buildings in Kingston, which contains a rich treasure of architectural landmarks and structures.

To find out more, also check out:

Friends of Historic Kingston

The Society for the Preservation of Hudson Valley Vernacular Architecture

Kingston, New York: The Architectural Guide

Visit the slide show larger in Flickr.