Two wooden towers keep people guessing
KINGSTON, N.Y. >> A recent inquiry about a mysterious structure just off East Strand had some local residents wondering if it played a role in Kingston’s history.
Two wooden structures stand in the woods off the street, between the Rondout Creek and the old trolley tracks.
“They are approximately 25 feet tall,” Kingston resident Chris Nilan wrote to the Freeman, and they look like “undersized, decrepit water towers … resting upon steel support beams.”
The support structures themselves rest on sturdy cement foundations.
“Most mysterious of all to me,” Nilan wrote, “is the hanging ‘bridge’ connecting the two towers.” The bridge is supported by two heavy chains connected by wooden slats.
It’s notable that the structure is on the site of the Newark Lime & Cement Manufacturing Co., Kingston’s “largest manufacturing establishment” in 1880, according to the Friends of Historic Kingston website.
The company’s plant, the website states, extended from its Rondout Creek wharves to its quarries tunneled into the hillside. A ruin left from Newark Lime & Cement, a mule barn, still stands at the end of nearby Yeomans Street.
Nilan’s inquiry to Friends of Historic Kingston about the towers prompted that organization to call local historian Lowell Thing. Thing didn’t have an answer, and he posted the question on the “I’m from Kingston NY” Facebook page.
Responses ranged from “Penthouse outhouses” to “duck blinds.” The consensus, however, was the structure is an artwork, constructed some time ago, perhaps for a Kingston Sculpture Biennial. The biennial was an every-other-year exhibition in Kingston featuring public art pieces displayed in various outdoor and indoor locations.
Nilan said the structure apparently went up after 2009.
Nancy Lindberg Kell posted on the “I’m from Kingston NY” Facebook page that the structure was an artwork “built by a woman who was a welder on ships.”