Hometown, Kingston

As I frequently do before heading out to a faraway place, I went to Uptown Kingston for lunch. Instead of meeting friends I took my copy of Alf Evers’s new book, Kingston: City on the Hudson. I passed many old stone and Victorian buildings on my walk up John Street. I also ran into many old friends. Uptown still is a place where it can take time passing because you do run into friends.

Over my lunch I thumbed through the pages and it occurred to me that over the past 250 years if I had taken that same walk I might have run into many great characters from the past. People such as Peter Stuyvesant, George Washington, George Clinton, Sojourner Truth and Franklin Roosevelt have all walked the streets of Kingston. Even now I know relatives of the old Dutch settlers from their names. One of America’s first travel writers William Darby had this to say in 1818, “ no traveler ought to pass without visiting Kingston and every stranger will be pleased with the soft beauty of its scenery, and with the plain, but affable manners of its inhabitants”. I couldn’t agree more.