History for Sale

The historic Charles Alger House, at 59 Allen Street, is for sale.

Photo: Zillow

Acquired by Hudson Collective Realty, LLC (Galvan) in early 2016, the house underwent an extensive and lavish restoration and renovation, carefully overseen by the Historic Preservation Commission, between 2021 and 2023. (Search "59 Allen Street" on this blog for accounts of the restoration.) In September 2023, the house was sold to Water Canyon, LLC (the partners in Helsinki Hudson) for $1.65 million. Since that time, the house has been visited periodically but never actually occupied.

The house is now for sale, and, according to Zillow, the price is $1.7 million. The description of the house on Zillow includes some interesting misinformation. It identifies the architectural style of the house as "Italianate," when it is actually Gothic Revival. It also describes the house as "dating back to 1880," despite the fact that an engraving of the house (shown below) appears on an 1858 map of Columbia County. (Historian Walter Ritchie, who studied the house's history and presented a lecture about Charles Alger and the house in 2016, set the year of construction as 1851. Walter Chatham, the architect for the restoration, believed it was built much earlier.)

Perhaps my favorite bit of misinformation on Zillow is contained in this final sentence: "Outside, there is a private backyard and side patio and a staircase to lower Hudson." The "staircase to lower Hudson" is also mentioned as one of the things that is special about the house. The implication is that the staircase is part of the property when in fact it is the Second Street stairs, a public walkway, newly rebuilt as part of the one of the City's Downtown Revitalization Initiative (DRI) projects.

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