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Kingston Preservationist
By Hildegard Pleva
Kathryn L. Heavey in her home office at 238 Smith Avenue c. 1965. Private Collection.
They were hard times. The financial system had collapsed in October of 1929 creating disaster for most families in the country as banks closed, businesses folded and unemployment rose. Yet, at Kingston High School students in the Class of 1930 continued to pursue their dreams, some completing a rigorous curriculum to attain an academic diploma necessary for college admission.
Over the years, personal papers and memorabilia of some of these Depression Era graduates have found their way into the archives of Friends of Historic Kingston. They allow the researcher to enter more deeply into the life experience of these young people. What became of them? What path did they take into an uncertain future? What part did they play in our community?
One of these graduates, Kathryn L. Heavey, drew attention when Herbert Van Wyck Darrow III, a friend of her family, donated her papers and photographs to the archives of Friends of Historic Kingston (FHK) because he knew of her devotion to historic building preservation and the role she had played in the earliest days of that movement. Close examination of her extensive memorabilia containing letters, clippings, flyers and a huge collection of her own photographs, revealed that she was the creator of an ambitious program of walking tours of the Stockade area of uptown Kingston, New York well before the inception of Friends of Historic Kingston (FHK). That fact brought her into clear focus and served to encourage creation of a complete picture of her devotion to the welfare of the Kingston community.
Childhood on Smith Avenue. Private Collection.
Kathryn Louise Heavey of 238 Smith Avenue graduated from Kingston High School (KHS) in 1930 as second in her class and graduation salutatorian. She attended Barnard College in New York City from which she graduated in 1935 having majored in journalism and poetry. She was born the only child of James S. and Mary Young Heavey in 1912, and lived all of her 99 years in the #238 half of the duplex he had built on Smith Avenue. Her father, who worked until retirement for the West Shore Railroad as a telegrapher, lived with a disabling arm injury received in a railroad accident. Her mother died in 1925 just as Kathryn was preparing to enter high school. We owe a debt of gratitude to Shirley Darrow, the widow of Herbert (Bert) Darrow, who graciously filled in many of the blanks in Kathryn’s story.
Kathryn Heavey, Senior Portrait, Kingston High School Class of 1930.
Upon graduation from Barnard, Kathryn’s plan was to put her literary skills, particularly that of writing poetry, to good use. However, it seems that the economic realities of the Depression and general difficulties of earning a living in the arts came to bear compelling her to seek employment elsewhere. She became assistant to Dr. Elizabeth Moore in her offices on Maiden Lane. Dr. Moore maintained a family and obstetrics/gynecology practice and found Kathryn so adept at learning the requirements of various procedures that she encouraged her to pursue certification as a registered nurse.
Dr. Moore’s office shared the Maiden Lane building with Dr. John R. Roberts. Like many professionals in Kingston, he employed the bookkeeping services of Marjorie Darrow who had graduated from KHS in 1928. Kathryn and Majorie probably renewed their acquaintance at this time forming a lifelong friendship.
Kingston Hospital Graduating Class 1947. Friends of Historic Kingston Archives.
When Kathryn’s father’s health began to fail in 1944, she was unable to tend to him due to the strict schedule for nursing students at Kingston Hospital. Marjorie moved to the Smith Avenue house to assist. It is through this friendship that Bert Darrow, cousin to Marjorie, came as a teenager to live with them and over the decades to know Kathryn and eventually to assist in managing her affairs. Kathryn’s father died in 1945 as she was completing training in the third class of Kingston Hospital School of Nursing from which she graduated in 1947. Her first nursing position was at the Ulster County Tumor Clinic. Later, she moved to the Ulster County Infirmary, now Golden Hill Health Care Facility, from which she retired as Night Supervisor in 1974.
Kathryn L. Heavey – Kingston Hospital School of Nursing Class of 1947. Private Collection.
In spite of the volume of correspondence and other materials left by Kathryn Heavey, no documentation has appeared to explain her growing focus on historic preservation in Kingston. Early in her life she was drawn to photography. With the eye of an artist she went about taking pictures not just of events and groups but of sights and buildings that interested her. Moving into the 1950s, her vocational path established, she began to pay more attention to what was happening in the city she knew so well. Perhaps she was influenced by the knowledge of how many 18th-century buildings in the uptown Kingston area had been destroyed in the 1940’s. She may also have become aware of the slowly percolating conversation concerning Federal government urban renewal grants which allowed cities to consider removal of old and deteriorating structures in a process otherwise known as slum clearance often motivated by plans for urban highway infrastructure requiring the demolition of entire neighborhoods.
These factors may have motivated her to explore what was being discussed for the future of Kingston’ historic areas. While lacking specific documentation, it is clear that following the death of her father and the establishment of her nursing career, she began to eye her surrounding community with greater interest. A small example is that she and Marjorie began the annual tradition of hosting a Christmas party for neighborhood children.
Christmas at 238 Smith Ave c. 1950 – Peter Roberts with Barbara Buddenhagen Cloonan (far left), Bert Darrow with Darrow twins (front), neighbor Dorothy Dumond (right), Marjorie Darrow (rear). Private Collection.
Further broadening her community interests came with membership in the Senate House Association. By the late 1950s their membership included a number of well-known local historians and others who eventually formed a new group specifically dedicated to historic building preservation, Friends of Historic Kingston (1965). The idea for such an organization first appeared in March 1954 when a letter from the Senate House Association invited recipients to become Associate Members. The stated objective was “to foster interest in the Senate House and Museum, the American Arts, the preservation of historic houses and beautiful shade trees of our city of Kingston”.
The group began its outreach with a bronze marker program for noted buildings and, in cooperation with the Kingston Garden Club, tree planting throughout the city. Later, in response to the pressures of the Kingston Urban Renewal Agency plans to redesign uptown Kingston, a special meeting was held June 1965 to more closely focus their purpose on historic building preservation and eventually to choose the new name of Friends of Historic Kingston (FHK).
General George H. Sharpe Residence (demolished 1967). Kathryn Heavey Collection, Friends of Historic Kingston Archives.
Kathryn clearly made every effort to keep herself well informed about all of these developments but it seems that she was not willing to sit back and wait for prime movers to set the course in a meaningful way. Not only well-educated, she had very specific literary gifts which she had been putting to use in other community organizations such as the Kingston Hospital Nursing School Association, the Young Men’s and Young Women’s Christian Associations (YMCA/YWCA), and Fair Street Reformed Church.
Kingston Hospital Nursing Association Anniversary Celebration with Eleanor Roosevelt at Governor Clinton Hotel. Friends of Historic Kingston Archives.
In addition, there was her growing collection of photographs of historic structures. Pooling these resources, she began to utilize them in service of the publicity arm of the Senate House group and later for FHK. From this was born her vision for a unique form of publicity promoting historic preservation by educating the public in a program of walking tours of the uptown Kingston Stockade area historic sites. The first of these tours was offered in 1964.
Stockade District Walking Tour map, 1965. Friends of Historic Kingston Archives.
Examination of the papers and memorabilia of Kathryn Heavey reveal how zealously she applied her free time and skills to developing and publicizing the Walking Tours in the 1960s and 1970s. It is probable that the demolishing of the West Shore Line Railroad Kingston Station, the old Central Post Office on Broadway and uptown buildings making way for a new County Office Building occurring during this period provided further impetus for her effort. A sense of even greater urgency came into play when an infusion of Federal Urban Renewal Funds led to the removal of over 600 structures in Kingston’s Rondout area in the late 1960s. Heavey’s concerns are obvious in a letter she wrote to the Chairman of the Kingston Urban Renewal Agency which was turning its attention to the uptown Kingston area. She wrote, “Kingston has a unique opportunity to become a ‘City of Four Centuries’ and attract a wide tourist enterprise if we plan well. Let us not be guilty of gaining a ‘lot of real estate and lose a historic city.'” A few years later she would again write to the Urban Renewal Agency declaring that her initial doubts about the wisdom of the Pike Plan for development of the uptown business area had disappeared. She enclosed a map of the business district on which she had drawn a proposal for a new traffic pattern in the area.
Letter to Kingston Urban Renewal Agency, February 1968. Kathryn Heavey Collection, Friends of Historic Kingston Archives.
For over a decade during the early years of FHK, Heavey served as a very active publicity person for the group with great attention to promoting the Walking Tours. The archives include two pocket notebooks containing docent scripts for the tours with detailed information about each building. She created an album of large photographic prints for each building arranged according to their order on the tour. Gradually, an impressive collection of photos grew documenting all the historic buildings in the uptown area which included her own photos and many from other preservationists. Eventually over 1,200 of her own color slides became part of this documentation.
West Strand from the Wurts Street Bridge, c. 1975. Kathryn Heavey Collection, Friends of Historic Kingston Archives.
In addition to creating a photographic record for the future, she never ceased in her efforts to promote the tours by writing to governmental agencies, preservation groups, museums, tourism companies, and publications with the purpose of advertising the availability of Walking Tours. Those contacted included NYS Council on the Arts, National Geographic, NYS Department of Commerce, Thruway Travel Service, Hudson River Valley Association, NY, NY Times, National Trust for Historic Preservation, Department of the Interior Register of Historic Places, and many more. In 1964 Heavey sent a letter to a Pittsburgh, PA official asking detailed questions regarding the consequences of their Federal Urban Renewal Project for which she received a lengthy and thoughtful response. In cooperation with William Skilling, Kingston radio broadcaster, she prepared an hour long program script about the Walking Tours and the buildings featured.
Clearly a lifelong learner, Heavey, acknowledging her lack of formal education as an historian and preservationist, applied to the Cornell University Department of Architecture to attend their 1968 Historic Preservation Seminar sponsored by the NYS Council on the Arts. Never missing a chance to make connections, much correspondence followed her seminar experience.
After devoting twenty seven years to her nursing vocation, Heavey retired from the Night Supervisor position at Golden Hill Infirmary in 1974. Granted a long life, she had many more years to continue her dedication to community organizations and rarely missed an opportunity to do so. An illustrative example is how merely meeting a woman vacationing in the Kingston area led to an international connection. Denise M. Abbey, the assistant cultural affairs officer at the American Embassy in Paris, took part in a Stockade Walking Tour. The chance acquaintance led to the presentation of a set of Heavey Walking Tour slides to Abbey for US history and culture programs offered at the Paris Embassy. The slides were accompanied by the Walking Tour script based on “Kingston Harvest of Stone,” the leaflet describing historic buildings featured on the tour produced by Heavey with sponsorship from the YWCA public affairs committee.
Kathryn Heavey (left), Reba “Betty” Eighmey (center), and Mayor John Schwenk presenting a “color slide collection of Kingston’s old stone houses” to Denise Abbey (right), October 1964. Private Collection.
Kathryn Heavey’s name first appeared in the Daily Freeman when she was 7 years old in 1919. It was reported that she had won 1st prize for her tomato in the annual District School Garden Show. It seems to have established a publicity pattern which ran throughout her life marked by dozens of mentions in the paper.
Published items document the variety of her activities in both the social and public service realms: Executive Board member and Chair of Publicity Committee of the YWCA, giving an illustrated talk about the buildings on the tour she designed, hosting a bridal shower, serving on the Landmarks Commission, membership in Friends of Historic Kingston, creator of a photo exhibit of Kingston featuring area doctors and nurses displayed at Artcraft on Broadway, or traveling with the NY State Nurses Association to Russia in 1974.
West Strand, c. 1975. Kathryn Heavey Collection, Friends of Historic Kingston Archives.
At the age of 84 she participated for the twenty-fifth time in the Cancer Society Bike-a-Thon. Having given up on biking, she pledged to walk 4 miles for the cause close to her heart.
Many consider civic involvement a responsibility of citizenship. At times, circumstances thwart the inclination. Material held in the archives of Friends of Historic Kingston has revealed a number of Kingstonians, members of what has come to be called “The Greatest Generation,” who found ways to follow their civic impulse in spite of factors that might have held them back. Kathryn Heavey lost her mother when she was a young teen, lived through the Depression, was frustrated in her pursuit of a vocation surprisingly switching gears in the middle of World War II and, given what was typical in her time, dealt with sexism as a single professional woman. Yet she found a way to apply her skills and her generous willingness for the good of her community.
Today we admire Kathryn Heavey’s determination, preserve the documentary record she left for the future, and tell her story as encouragement to current generations whose efforts enrich our community.
Research and article by Hildegard Pleva, 2025
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