Rye wasn’t immediately on the radar of Kelly Mitten Waring and husband, Toby Waring, when they were looking to leave New York City.
Raised in Ridgefield, Conn., the couple first looked to the Nutmeg State, renting an apartment in Stamford.
When that commute proved too much, they started thinking lower Westchester.
“We visited various towns and ended up in Rye, looking at the Edith Read Sanctuary and the Marshlands Conservancy, and we thought, what’s not to love about Rye?” said Kelly, 32. “With its quaint downtown and beautiful waterfront, it hit all the marks for us.”
Toby, who is 35, stumbled onto a Craigslist posting for a house that sounded interesting.
“I initially thought it could be a little sketchy, but it turned out the owners just didn’t want to deal with a realtor,” Kelly said. Her mother, Patricia Mitten, 60, who still lives in Ridgefield, had lived in Rye as a little girl, so Kelly called her to see what she knew about the neighborhood.
When Kelly mentioned the address, Patricia gasped.
“What are you talking about? I lived there until I was 12, and Grandpa grew up there, and Grandma Jennie raised her family there!” she said.
Armed with this new information, they went, saw, and fell in love with 219 Central Ave. On Nov. 2, 2024, Kelly returned to the home she never knew she had.
“Unbeknownst to me at the time, Donato Mainiero, my great-great grandfather built this four-family house in 1923 right in the center of Dublin,” as the neighborhood is known, Kelly said. “It remained in the family until 1979. This house is where my grandfather was raised as well as my mother until she was around 12 years old. This is the house my ancestors built and raised generations of my family in.”
The Dublin neighborhood sprang into life in the mid-1800s, when Irish immigrants, escaping the potato famine, moved into the area. They prospered there and were able to create one of Rye’s first subdivisions. In the late 1800s, the neighborhood was taken over by immigrant Italians. Today it still retains its quaint charm.
“A lot of the houses are unchanged, similar to ours,” Kelly said. “There are pieces of this neighborhood that seem like they are frozen in time. We love the feeling of it.”
The family has been thrilled to be able to return to the ancestral abode.
Kelly’s grandfather, John Grippo, 82, has been especially emotional about revisiting his past. He told Kelly that long after they had moved away, when he used to have painting jobs in Rye, he would sometimes park in front of the house and look at it.
“You never think you will be able to go back to your childhood home one day,” said Patricia, Kelly’s mother. “When I was able to walk around the house for the first time by myself, I couldn’t believe all the memories that came back to me. My grandmother living below us, where my sister Lori and I would watch soap operas and dance the polka with her, and in my daughter’s living room thinking of my Christmas mornings spent there. Countless birthdays and holidays in the kitchen. When I visit, I still can’t believe it every time. I am sure Kelly and Toby are very well protected by our family there.”
Kelly happens to be a big believer in ghosts. She said she sometimes gets “that sense, that feeling that someone just walked by, and I look and no one’s home. I get that a lot, but I’m not scared. It feels fine.”
The couple has since learned that Kelly’s roots run deep in this historic area. Donato’s father, John, was an Italian immigrant. When he had lived in Italy, he suffered from seizures. He prayed to Saint Donato and believed the saint had cured him. When John moved to America, he dedicated his life to honoring the saint.
Later in life, John started losing his vision, so he built a chapel dedicated to Saint Donato at 109 Maple Ave. That church burned down in 1925, and John died a few weeks later. It was said he had died of grief. John’s daughter had the church rebuilt out of stone in 1926; it is now an electrician’s office.
Kelly said the most fun discovery was that John and Donato (named for the saint) were also behind the Feast of Saint Donato, which first began in 1890. Held at the Maple Street church, the annual event grew each year. At one point, in the 1950s, it was attracting 6,000 visitors and featured band concerts, food, and a procession with a statue of the saint.
Even with all that history, neither Kelly’s mother nor her grandfather had ever mentioned the feast or the house to Kelly.
“My mother moved to Harrison when she was around 12, so she never really talked about her Rye past,” Kelly said. “She thought of herself more as being from Harrison.”
John’s daughter swore that “if there’s one drop of my blood in America, the festival will go on,” according to a 1947 newspaper article. Unfortunately, the last time the festival was held in Dublin was around 1962, Kelly estimated.
Will the family revive the tradition?
Kelly paused.
“Toby and I are thinking we might have to investigate this,” she said. “I might have to go to the religious store and buy a saint statue. Maybe we’ll start slowly this year. Maybe we’ll celebrate in the backyard here and see where that goes.”
She added: “We feel blessed to have this home brought back into our family and can’t wait to one day raise our own family here and keep it for generations to come.”
