By the time you read this, we’ll be gone. The house at 27 Jarrold Street is empty now. The walls, once adorned with the artwork of friends and painted in idiosyncratic hues of Tuscan orange and monkey-shit brown, have been scrubbed blank with past-obliterating white. The driveway is littered with remnants of our former life—a rickety futon frame, a beat-up bookcase, a rusty pasta maker. The vegetable garden is waist-high in weeds, waiting for one final mow before we list the place.
To be clear: It’s all going according to plan. This is what we wanted. Jarrold Street was supposed to be our “starter home.” We just stayed through the starter phase, blew through the middle, and found ourselves deep in the “I guess we’re dying here” years. We stayed for 21 years.
In the early aughts, Lee Anne and I were living paycheck to paycheck above a deli/video-rental store in High Falls—content renters, if chronic DVD return offenders. Then our friend Tim, a smart cookie about things grown-up and financial and also a realtor, told us it was time to buy a house.
“You’re joking,” we told Tim. “We can’t possibly afford to buy a house.”
“You absolutely can,” Tim told us.
“We’re in nonprofit admin and magazine journalism,” we said. “Our only asset is a fondue pot.”
“The banks are handing out money like parade candy,” he assured us. “No income verification, no problem.”
“We don’t have money for a down payment.”
“You’ll just borrow that too.”
Which is how we ended up at P&G’s in New Paltz, swilling beer with my college buddy Sven, now a mortgage broker, and signing papers to borrow more money than either of us had ever seen in a bank account. It was 2004. What could possibly go wrong with no-doc loans handed out to anyone with a pulse and a dream?
The house itself is a modest structure, a 1,000-square-foot space with a tiny bathroom, built in the late 19th-century to house the then-burgeoning Polish community in the area. In fact, I recently came across a reference to our street as I finally got around to reading Alf Ever’s magisterial history of my adopted home, Kingston: City on the Hudson.
A Rondout writer, Ernest Jarrold, who became a reporter for the New York Sun, achieved popularity with his Mickey Finn tales dealing with the adventures of a fictional and mischievous Rondout Boy, using a name for his title character already well known as that of a knock-out drink. The Mickey Finn stories were published first in Harper’s magazine and other magazines, and then in book form. The stories affectionately showed the Irish with kindly humor, and are still read with praise by Kingston people. [Not sure about that bit.] A distinctive Ponckhockie street was named for Jarrold’s family, which developed it with creative taste but at a loss.
Two things to note here. One: Jarrold Street was named after a writer, a fellow language laborer. Two: It was “developed with creative taste.” Whatever vestige of creative taste had faded by the time we moved in, but I do love a good nod to former glory from the point of view of contemporary degradation.
When we moved in, our neighbors were mostly white, blue-collar folks—people like Derek, the handyman across the street who snow-blew our sidewalk and dropped off Danish butter cookies at Christmas. We weren’t pioneers, exactly, but we did suspect we were part of the first wave of the so-called creative class, cresting just ahead of Hudson Valley’s full-blown knowledge-worker, yoga-studio, oat-milk revolution. (Just don’t call it gentrification.) We even floated a rebrand: NoPo—North Ponckhockie. Branded merch was considered. Trucker hats. Softball tees. Sadly, it took another 20 years before the neighborhood landed a Pilates studio and a gourmet pizza place that serves cocktails.
We had a good, long run on Jarrold Street and made so many memories there. In every corner of that little house—now cloaked in ghost-white paint—echoes of our lives linger: coat hooks still bearing the weight of Lee Anne’s many parkas, the faint scent of oregano from the garden, the hardwood floors we painstakingly uncovered. A house is built of a thousand forgettable moments that become unforgettable simply by repeating. You can pack up the objects, but the shape of a life remains.
Still, houses are meant to be lived in, not haunted. If you’re lucky, you outgrow them. And we were lucky—so lucky—to have had 21 years inside that modest brick box on a street once known for its creative taste.
And where are we living now, you ask? We moved a mile across town, in what I’m told is the Hutton Park neighborhood. The house is slightly bigger than our starter home—okay, it’s more than twice the size, with three bathrooms—and sits across from a war memorial parklet on Highland Avenue. As the street name suggests, the house is perched on a hill, with sweeping views of the city we still call home. I haven’t yet polled the neighbors, but I’ve already come up with a slogan for our new enclave—Hutton Park: We Look Down on Kingston.
This article appears in August 2025.
