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Never Say Never A Manhattan couple builds a getaway on an "unbuildable" site.
That may not sound attractive. But, as locations. go for weekend houses commutable from Manhattan, it’s actually quite the plum. The flood plain is less than a hundred miles from New York City, along the Roeliff Jansen Kill, a tributary of the Hudson River, that flows through wooded, rural Columbia County, N.Y. Like a moat, the floodplain keeps people at a distance. No one can build nearby. So, Jerry and Elaine have lots of privacy. When the couple – he a retired engineer; she a retired mezzo-soprano who now teaches voice – are in residence, their view is of the water, the forest and each other. "We look out at a waterfall," said Jerry Carrington. "From there, you can see a half mile downstream and three-quarters of a mile upstream. And you can’t see a single thing put there by man." And the hump? Ah, that lovely hump is what made it all possible. The hump was Jerry and Elaine’s get-out-of-jail-free card when bureaucrats insisted that the entire area was unbuildable. Jerry – not one to take "No" for an answer – proved them wrong. The hump, it turned out, is high enough that the basement floor is 1.2 inches above the 100-year flood elevation. "Even so, it took three years to get approval," he said. Plus, the hump is historic: A gristmill stood on the site from about 1790 until 1869, when it was washed away in a flood. (A levee built subsequently now makes such devastating floods less likely.) Today, one of the property’s major features is the burbling old millrace, which does a dogleg turn just beneath the front deck. Ironically, Jerry and Elaine never really wanted to move. They’d owned a century-old Victorian about eight miles away since 1978. It was large – with a barn that was still larger – and they loved it. But the Victorian was out in the country. To shop, Jerry and Elaine regularly drove to and from Red Hook, the nearest town. On the way, they passed a site along Route 2 that, in the mid-1990s, finally caught Jerry’s attention.
A representative for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said the site was unbuildable, but had no flood elevation data to prove it. However, data was available for more populated areas upstream. Challenged, Jerry decided to survey the site himself. He acquired the upstream charts and extrapolated from them to the downstream site. "If I didn’t have an engineering degree and, therefore, been able to do some of this work myself, this would never have happened," he said. Having confirmed to his satisfaction that the old mill site was above flood plain, he paid a licensed engineer to confirm his work. Meanwhile, Elaine was shaking her head. "Playing around" with the site was OK, she told Jerry, if it gave him something to do. But she loved the Victorian and wasn’t moving. "After six or eight months, though, she came to me and said if I really wanted to do this, it was OK," said Jerry. "Later, she got excited about being able to choose the house we wanted." That wasn’t quite the end of it. Between the hump and the road was a wetland. Regulations permitted filling up to a half-acre of wetlands for a homesite; Jerry limited the fill to .32 acres to create a driveway, deliberately staying below the limit to avoid official sanction. Then there was a required historical survey. Archaeologists turned up dozens of clay pipe fragments discarded by millworkers, as well as several millstones and stone gears. One millstone now serves as the front step. According to local historian Mary Howell, the property – indeed, the entire southern third of Columbia County – once belonged to the Livingstons, a family of Scots who emigrated to America about 1690. One descendant, Philip Livingston, signed the Declaration of Independence. "The Livingstons’ habit was to build things and lease them out," said Howell, who consulted on the site’s historical assessment. A 1743 Livingston mill survives elsewhere on the Kill – named, by the way, for Roeliff Jansen (1602-1637), an early Dutch settler who once sheltered there after finding the Hudson blocked by ice while paddling his canoe home to Albany. The house was almost an afterthought. "I’d been preoccupied by the site, so I really had no mental picture of what the structure would look that," said Jerry. The couple’s son suggested a log home. They ordered some brochures and browsed them until Elaine saw what a house she liked. The house, an 1,800-square-foot model from Kuhn Bros., features three bedrooms, a steeply pitched roof and massive windows facing the kill. They moved in in 1999. "We like it very much," said Jerry. "Elaine is constantly reminding me of how wonderful it is. But, to me, a lot of how wonderful it is is the site."
Log Homes Illustrated / September 2005
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Jerry
Carrington and Elaine Bonazzi’s log home sits on a hump in a floodplain.
"The
falls were magnificent," he said, but the 28 acres of swampy land between
the Kill and the highway were littered with beer cans and other trash. "My
impetus was to buy the property and clean it up. Then, I realized that it was a
fantastic building site."
Mark
E. Dixon
757 Upper Gulph Road
Wayne, PA 19087-2022
USA
610-971-0649