Driving home to Massachusetts from the Hudson River Valley last weekend, I actually drove west, as my brother told me there was a village across the river which I might enjoy: Athens. All the day before when we were touring the riverfront estates of my last post we would look across and see some great house and every time I asked him where it was he would say Athens. I don’t think he was correct as it is a bit more to the north, but still I had Athens on my mind when I woke up the next day and was determined to go there. It’s just across the Rip Van Winkle bridge from Hudson, north of Catskill, which I visited last year, bordered by Cairo (of course) on the west. Apparently there is both a town and a village of Athens and I believe I was in the latter; no one has ever been able to explain the differing jurisdictions that you find in New York and New Jersey—hamlets, villages, boroughs, towns and townships—to me so I am perpetually confused. This seemed like a village, a river village, and it was absolutely charming. Probably the most famous building in Athens is its lighthouse, which really is a lighthouse, but my sentry was the 1706 Jan van Loon house: how different Dutch and English First-Period houses are!

There are several streets of historic houses clustered along the river and I immediately focused on the brick structures. The Northrup house (1803, first up below) is in need of some work but it features the characteristic elevated first floor that I saw on several Athens houses, an architectural feature which I always associated exclusively with southern houses for some reason. There were some lovely wooden houses, but the region’s clay banks supported as many as eight brickyards in nineteenth-century Athens, and fostered masonry construction: I just couldn’t capture enough of these old brick houses, glowing in the autumn sun.