Rondout-West Strand Historic District

Rondout-West Strand Historic District covers 278 buildings on roughly 57 acres of steep hills above Rondout Creek in Kingston, New York. It makes up most of what survives of the nineteenth-century village of Rondout, which began as Kingston's landing, called the Strand. Commercial buildings cluster along lower Broadway and the West Strand, many with original storefronts and cast-iron columns, sills and lintels from local foundries. Residential streets are mostly two-story, three-bay houses in brick and frame, with some double houses and row houses. Styles range from Federal and Greek Revival to Italianate, Second Empire, Romanesque and Queen Anne. The village prospered through canal shipping, bluestone, cement, shipbuilding, brickmaking and ice-cutting, and declined after the Delaware and Hudson Canal closed in 1899. Notable survivors include the Freeman Building at 3 Broadway, two firehouses built around 1860, and Romanesque churches built for the German community. Twentieth-century intrusions are minimal, and demolition from 1960s urban renewal lies mostly outside the boundary.