Two Hundred and Fifty Plus, 5

Old houses tend to pile up names, even more so than old buildings in general. An old office building in a downtown area might be known by the names of two companies that owned it, but even then one tends to be dominant in public perception. An old house that is not famous might have been owned for a long time by two or three or four different families, and in historic and preservation literature, they tend to get strung together. That brings us to today’s building older than the United States: the Vander Ende-Onderdonk House. There was little, if any connection between those two families: the Vander Ende’s were Dutch colonists who acquired, and rebuilt, the house in 1709, not quite 50 years after it was first built; the Onderdonks were Knickerbockers who bought it in 1821.

So far, a date in the seventeenth century, one in the eighteenth, and one in the nineteenth. I’m going to keep that trend going. In 1975, when the house had no legal protection as a landmark, it was damaged by fire. It was restored, properly in the historic preservation sense, by Giorgio Cavaglieri, one of the first specialists in preservation in New York. The building was put on the National Register of Historic Places in 1977, and made a New York City landmark in 1995. About 14 years ago, when the last restoration was about 40 years old, Old Structures worked with John G. Waite Associates, Architects on a restoration of the roof, which for us meant checking the condition of the roof structure. That structure was a mixture of material from three, maybe four centuries.