Hudson River 2022

Daniel Emberley, August 2022

My brother John made a bench for Michael for Christmas.  It’s beautiful, maple, Mission, fits perfectly in our front entrance.  Unfortunately it was in New Hampshire, we’re in D.C., and it is too big to mail.  So we rented an SUV and drove up, stopping in the Hudson River Valley for three days to see places we’ve missed in the past.  Fun; no roads, restaurants, or hotels too crowded; and got to see family and friends en route. 

Rather than my usual day-by-day slog, I’m going to highlight places we saw.  Y’all know how we travel, you don’t need a review of Holiday Inn Express breakfasts up the East Coast.  Spent our first night in White Plains, catching up with friends Bonnie, Caleb, and Laila in Manhattan.

The Usonia Historic District is a Frank Lloyd Wright-planned suburban community.  The neighborhood is a couple of curving roads in the woods of Mt. Pleasant, NY.  About thirty modest homes, most lived in by their original owners until fairly recently.  To our surprise you can see almost all the houses from the street.  They discourage tourists, so we did not get out and walk, but it is a pleasant drive through. 

West Point would be a top site for most folks in the Valley, but eh.  The campus is more like Cornell than Annapolis; lots of stone Gothic Revival buildings sprawling on a surprisingly steep hillside.  Dan liked the bureaucracy of getting credentials in the concrete-block Visitors Center.  Decent story of the Army at the West Point Museum; it was both history and a recruitment device.  The Cadet Chapel by Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue is one of the few buildings you can easily get into.  He designed this in 1906, decades before St. Bart’s in NYC, Rockefeller Chapel in Chicago, and the National Academy of Sciences in D.C.  It was one of his first collaborations with Deco sculptor Lee Lawrie.  Brilliant glass that commemorates the most martial saints and parables the Army could disinter from Christianity.  The Chinese restaurant across from the main entrance is surprisingly good, and doubles as an antique shop.  Next to a branch of Navy Federal Credit Union, which seems incongruous.

We were based out of Poughkeepsie for three days, so Vassar College was an obvious stop.  Lovely campus that doubles as an arboretum.  We parked at one end and walked east through a residential quad by York & Sawyer, who also did the Commerce Department and the Riggs Bank opposite the White House.  They call it Collegiate Gothic, but it seems more boxy English to me, pleasant.  Their Old Main is by James Renwick, and the Loeb Art Center by Cesar Pelli.  The latter has one of the better college collections we’ve seen, a comprehensive look at art history from ancient Greece to recent Modernism, with a strong showing from the Hudson River School.

Locust Grove Estate was just across the freeway from our Holiday Inn Express.  It was the Italianate riverside mansion of Samuel F.B. Morse, the artist who invented Morse code.  The house was closed for renovation, but the visitors center and gardens open.  Terrific hiking trails conquer the slope down to the river and back.  That elevation change is an issue for most of the mansions along the Hudson.  Cool loops along ponds and through marshes to the river, well enough marked so even we urban explorers were not intimidated by the forest. 

Stonecrop Gardens in Cold Spring is built on an old quarry; lots of Alpine and rock gardens on a French-country-themed estate.  Anne & Frank Cabot, the creators, were founders of the Garden Conservancy, which preserves great works of landscape around the world.  Stonecrop was one of their personal gardens, but also a resource for the Conservancy.  In our favorite part, the Systematic Order Beds, they created almost a periodic table of every plant that can grow in North America, organized alphabetically by phylogenetic order on square beds.  Landscape planners can use this as a resource for determining what they might be able to use to solve different problems, and seeds and plants are available for propagating.  Fascinating, and lovely. 

Innisfree Garden in Millbrook is the masterpiece of Lester Collins, equally beautiful but in a different fashion.  Collins and his sponsors, the Beck family, created a Modern landscape design inspired by Chinese “cup” gardens.  The best way to translate that is to think of each vista or “room” as framing a precious object: a waterfall, tree, view, or just an amazing lichen covered rock.  The vistas flow from one to the other; as you walk the path seems to end, but you get there and discover a whole other world opening to your left or right, or up a stair or across a stream.   It’s stunning.  We’d expected to spend thirty minutes here, but after circling their lake, climbing the hills and returning to the entrance discovered we’d invested three hours.  Totally worth it.  But realized we would not have time to see Martin Van Buren’s home an hour north in Kinderhook.  Kept the info for a future trip. 

Instead we headed into downtown Poughkeepsie.  They’ve turned their Hudson waterfront into a park, and a former rail bridge into the Walk Over the Hudson State Historic Park.  Again, the Hudson here is lined by cliffs, but they built an elevator up to bridge level from the riverside.  Unfortunately the city has not figured out how to keep it maintained and open.  We hiked up the hillside through their not-bad Amtrak/MetroNorth station and discovered we’d still have to hike another mile to get to where we could enter the bridge path.  Gave up on that to explore what was signed as their Little Italy.  Such a shame.  The worn out housing you expect from a Little Italy, but with no restaurants, stores, or life.  How can a city take such an inheritance (waterfront and ethnic neighborhood minutes from a major train station 90 minutes from Manhattan) and neglect it?  Poughkeepsie could be trendy Hudson, but instead is more like St. Louis.  A waste.

The Thomas Cole Historic Site, Cedar Grove, is on the west side of the river in Catskill.  We caught the Thruway up to discover a charming Jacksonian farmhouse with fantastic views of the Catskill Mountains; views which we’d seen before in art museums.  Cole was an English expat who created the Hudson River School of painting here, tutoring artists like Frederic Edwin Church, Asher Durand, and Martin Johnson Heade.  The home tells his life, the studio is preserved to talk about his painting, and the grounds remind us of when we thought America’s natural beauty was God’s compensation for our lack of cathedrals.  Cole is most famous today for his paintings in series; Google “The Decline of Empire” in the NY Historical Society or “The Voyage of Life” in the National Gallery for examples.

Cedar Grove is adjacent to the Rip Van Winkle Bridge; you can walk a path across to Olana, the Moorish fantasy home of Cole’s student Church.  We’d been to Olana before, and it’s a steep uphill slog from the bridge to the home, so we walked halfway across to make up for the previous day’s disappointment.  The views of the Hudson are sensational.  We got lunch at a bbq place in the town of Hudson, then drove down the eastern shore of the river.

Bard College is famous for its arts programs; they train a good chunk of America’s curators, designers, and Sotheby’s appraisers.  Steely Dan’s “My Old School” and “Ricky Don’t Lose That Number” were both inspired by their time here.  The campus extends across several 1800’s riverside estates, infilled with buildings by contemporary starchitects.  The Hessel Museum had two big shows of video artists that Michael appreciated and Dan hated.  Blithewood Estate, near the original campus, preserves a 1903 Italianate garden with stunning river views.  Further up-campus is Olafur Eliasson’s moated island with boulders, “the parliament of reality”, adjacent to Bard’s Frank Gehry performing arts center.  Appropriate to a collection of estates, the campus is too large to get around without a vehicle; we regret missing Montgomery Place on the southern end, house by Alexander Jackson Davis and gardens by Alexander Jackson Downing.  But we had a reservation for …

The Ogden Mills Mansion, at the Staatsburgh State Historic Site.  Ruth Mills was a Livingston, who contributed great tracts of land to the marriage.  Ogden inherited banks and mines from a California prospector made wealthy.  The old and new money combined into a comfortable Gilded Age estate above the river.  Heirs decided the house and grounds were superfluous, and gave them to the State of New York in the 1930’s.  They used the McKim, Meade & White house as an office building, but have restored most of it to a museum, a process they are still working on.  The home and furnishings are dark and in need of conservation, but were of top quality, so deserve the effort when New York can afford it.

Boscobel, in Garrison, is a Federal mansion that was submerged by a VA hospital in the 1950’s.  The VA had begun demolition when Lila Acheson Wallace, of Readers Digest, offered to move and reconstruct it a few miles north.  She saved the home, but “restored” it in a faux-Colonial style that emphasized her favorite color blue over historic accuracy.  It was wildly loved by 1960’s design magazines, but by the 1970’s the foundation realized their error and began reversing the interiors to more appropriate period styles.  Today that work is complete, and the home holds one of the largest collections of Duncan Phyfe furniture in the world.  In contrast to the Mills Mansion, it is bright, colorful, and stylish.  The location is amazing, on a crag above West Point with a better view of the campus than we got when we were on it.  During the Revolution, George Washington had a chain made to block British ships from sailing on the river.  That never made sense to me, I was imagining chain from an Ace Hardware.  The chain went from Boscobel’s shore to the campus; one link of it on display is almost as tall as me.

Cold Spring has a charming and useful downtown.  We got lunch at their Cheese Shop, then began The Saga of the SUV.  A few blocks away we realized we had a flat.  Fortunately, we were in front of a garage, so I spoke to the kind mechanic who switched our tire for the spare (I am not the godchild of a tire dealer for nothing) while Michael contacted Budget’s roadside assistance.  The mechanic showed us that not only had one tire blown out, but another was about to also.  After many hours on hold with Budget, who originally directed us to just change the one tire, and then to drive back to Newark Airport for an exchange, we got to New Windsor’s Stewart International Airport, where the kind staff traded us a Toyota Corolla, the last car they had on the lot.  That allowed us to get to Tilton, NH, where we were booked for the night, but was too small to convey Michael’s bench to D.C.  The next morning, I hung out with my brother John and his wife Miho while Michael took the Corolla to Manchester Airport, where they traded us back an SUV.  Lots of aggravation because of bald tires that should never have been rented to us; we learned that Budget’s phone service is horrible, but live staff are very accommodating.  Travel is an education!

John’s daughter Laura arrived from Oregon, where she owns restaurants.  When Michael got back with the car we went exploring in Canterbury, NH.  This is the town John and I grew up in summers; our parents had bought into a land swindle on the far side of town.  Years later we learned that Canterbury is one of Concord’s affluent suburbs, and now has several high-end farm producers.  We had a great time exploring venues:

Sunfox Farm, whose fields of sunflowers were in brilliant bloom, for sunflower oil,

Fox Country Smokehouse, for smoked meat and cheese,

Shaker Village, where John and I have fond memories of visiting the Sisters when we were kids, and

Cold Garden Spirits, who gave us a tasting of bourbons and brandies.

We missed Just Maple, a store that sells just that, but will hit on a return run.

From here we visited friends and family.  Miho made an amazing Japanese dinner, brother Dave and Priscilla threw a cookout for everyone to get together.  Mom took us to two fantastic Italian restaurants, Fiorella’s in Newton, and Enzina’s on her block in Waltham.  We topped up our supplies of Italian groceries at Market Basket (picture an Italian Wegman’s or HEB).  Had lunch in Medford with friends Alice and KathyAnn.  Then we took our now over-loaded SUV back on the road south.

An 8.5 hour drive from Waltham to D.C. is too long.  We broke outside Princeton at the Leonard Buck Garden in Far Hills, NJ.  It’s a great space of glacial rocks and marshes.  Wrong time of year for this, they’re really designed for spring and fall flowers, but it’s been on our list for several years, so glad we got to see.  Checked to see if the Princeton campus had improved in the twenty years since we were last there.  It hasn’t: there are Ivies that are urban campuses, and other great schools that are rural and happily so.  Princeton, unfortunately, has an historic campus in Collegiate Gothic, but most of it follows a model of suburban research and office parks.  A shame, as the town itself has a sweet center.  The Bookstore sells everything except books: food, dorm furniture, laundry supplies, clothing with tigers on everything.  We suspect all the textbooks are now digital, but really, no one in Princeton reads anything not available in streaming? 

The Battle of Princeton is a pivotal episode in the American Revolution, but we learned nothing about it at the Battle Monument.  Design by Carrere & Hastings, sculpture by Frederick MacMonnies.  It’s Beaux Arts classicism that does not educate.  Perhaps there’s more at the actual battlefield, which is a park in a different part of Princeton. 

The last time we were in Princeton we went to fabulous yard sales, where we bought vintage games.  Their shopping is still the best thing; this time we found an Asian mall in Plainsboro, down the road from our Holiday Inn Express.  Delicious bulgogi at SGD Korean Bbq, and we stocked up on Chinese groceries at Asian Food.

The drive back to D.C. from there was uneventful; we unpacked ten days of purchases that had filled our SUV, which Michael then returned to the L Street Budget.  A fun and productive trip.

For future visits:

Arden, Arden Craft Shop Museum, 1807 Millers Road, Arden, DE, W 7:30PM-9PM, Su 1-3PM, Arts and Crafts suburb

Wharton Esherick Museum, 1520 Horshoe Trail, Malvern, PA, 610-644-5822, whartonesherickmuseum.org, Th-Su 10, 11, 1, 2, by reservation only, $20

Charles Demuth Museum, 120 East King Street, Lancaster, PA, 717-299-9940

Crozer Arboretum, Medical Center Boulevard, Upland, PA, 610-447-2281, 7-3:30 daily, free

Philadelphia Museum of Art, Th-M 10-5 (F to 8:45), no special shows

Joseph Priestley House, 472 Priestley Avenue, Northumberland, PA, 717-473-9474, Sa-Su tours 1, 2, 3PM, $8

Ellarslie Mansion/Trenton City Museum, Trenton, NJ

Lambert Castle, Paterson, NJ

Liberty Hall Museum, Union, NJ

John F. Peto Studio Museum, Island Heights, NJ, petomuseum.org

Wildwoods, NJ

Bronx, City Island

Manhattan, Judd Foundation, 101 Spring Street (reservations required)

Edward Hopper House Museum, 82 North Broadway, Nyack, NY, edwardhopperhouse.org, F 1-5, Sa 12-5, Su 12-5, reservation only, $8

Magazzino Italian Art, 2700 US-9, Cold Spring, NY, 845-666-7202, Th-M 11-5, free

Wethersfield, 88 Wethersfield Way, Amenia, NY, 845-373-8073, FSaSu noon-5, gardens $10, $20 plus reservations for house (Georgian, Impressionists, Chippendale)

Wilderstein, 330 Morton Road, Rhinebeck, NY, FSaSu, tours noon, 1, 2, 3, reservations recommended, Tiffany interiors, Calvert Vaux grounds

Clermont State Historic Site, 1 Clermont Avenue, Germantown, NY, 518-537-4240, house under restoration, gardens all year, $7, Livingston family, house contents original (Gilbert Stuart, Thomas Sully)

Opus 40, 50 Fite Road, Saugerties, NY, $11/person, stone installation, 10:30-5 F-M

Art Omi, 1405 County Route 22, Ghent, NY, sculpture park, daily dawn-dusk, $10

Lindenwald, Martin Van Buren NHS, 1013 Old Post Road, Kinderhook, NY, 518-758-9689, grounds open 7-sunset, house/visitor center tours daily 9:30, 11, noon, longer tours 10, 1, 2, 3

Shaker Museum, 88 Shaker Museum Road, Old Chatham, NY 518-794-9100 M-F 9-5, also 202 Shaker Road, New Lebanon, NY, both require reservations

Frelinghuysen Morris House & Studio, 92 Hawthorne Street, Lenox, MA 413-637-0166, Th-Su 10-4, $20, must reserve tours, Frelinghuysen.org