One artwork that remains in front of the courthouse: a monument to Sojourner Truth. Isabella Baumfree, as she was then called, walked to Kingston to see if she could get her son back after he was illegally sold into slavery. A friend had told her to seek the grand jury; in her reminiscences, she says that she searched the courthouse till she found some folks who looked grand. She found a hearing and won her case. Touch her monument for luck as you walk by.
No structure in the uptown historic district is allowed to be taller than the spire of the Old Dutch Church on Wall Street. Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Norman Vincent Peale are among the thousands who have been made welcome within the towering stones of the current edifice, built in the style of Sir Christopher Wren. The congregation was ardently abolitionist ardent abolitionists, and quickly raised a regiment of its own to fight in the Civil War. And today, the church opens its vast archives to historians and its sanctuary to artists, entertainers and community groups.
The Ulster County Office Building on Fair Street, built in 1964, was designed by architects Augustus Schrowang, Jr. and Sr., an adaptation of something that Junior had developed for an undergrad assignment at Pratt University. Locals call it the Glass Menagerie. IBM helped fund construction, one of dozens of ways the company shaped the landscape.
Standing on the corner of Crown and John Streets in the Stockade, you're on the only corner in North America anchored on all four sides by original Colonial-era stone buildings. (Stone doesn't burn well.) To get inside a surviving stone structure and spend some time, you can have a drink or dinner at the Hoffman House.
