Frog Alley filled with scarecrows, children
Festival draws crowd to Uptown ruins
KINGSTON, N.Y. >> The LouwBogardus House property was filled scarecrows, skeletons and the sounds of shrieking children Saturday during the 7th annual Scarecrows at Frog Alley family fun day.
Izzy Finno, 9, of Kingston, went to the event with her mother, Christine, to show off the picture she had made as part of her fourth-grade art class at Edison Elementary School.
She visited with Jumpstart, a goat that had been brought to the event from the Forsyth Zoo, laughed at the hay bail minions (the one-eyed minion, she said, was her favorite), and was admittedly a little “freaked out” by the nature explorer scarecrow and the large, albeit fake, owl that sat on its shoulder.
“I was going to take a picture of it,” she said, but the large, round eyes of the owl staring down at her from the scarecrow’s shoulder gave her second thoughts.
“It was scary,” she laughed.
Nearby, 2-year-olds Tilio Dallvechia and Luca Sakhnovskiy jumped in leaves, tossing them in the air and laughing as they came down around them.
Luca’s mother, Laurie
Sergei, said she was out running errands in Uptown Kingston when she saw the festival and went home to get her son.
“I just saw it,” she said as she watched her son run around the park. “He loves it.”
The event, co-sponsored by the Friends of Historic Kingston and the Junior League of Kingston, is a family-oriented fall festival of sorts and intended to help draw attention to the 17th-century ruins of a house that sits on the site.
“We really want people to know it exists,” said Anna Brett, a volunteer working at the festival.
“There’s a lot of people
here who have said ‘I’ve never even seen it before,’ so that’s exciting,” added Elenie Loizou, president of the Junior League of Kingston.
The house was built in the 1660s and remained in private ownership until 1962 when it was destroyed by a fire.
A stabilization project for the ruins has been included in the city’s Downtown Revitalization plan.