Albany—Hudson—Kingston—Poughkeepsie—Newburgh—New York City; 141.5 m. Hudson River.
Hudson River Day Line, daily boats (May to Oct.), from Albany and New York City.
The New York Central System parallels the river on both shores.
For more extensive treatment of points of interest on the east shore see Tours 21 and 21B; for those on the west shore see Tour 21A.
When it becomes a tidal estuary at Troy, the Hudson River has already traveled half its full length. It rises in the clear, cold lakes of the highest Adirondacks, among them Lake Tear-of-the-Clouds on Mt. Marcy. A shallow, bouldered stream fished for trout, it splashes and twists through the mountains, marking with its tributaries the trellis-like pattern of the Adirondack fault lines. It picks up the waters of the Jessup and Indian Rivers, the Boreas, the Schroon, the Sacandaga; between Warrensburg and Glens Falls it curves widely around Prospect Mountain and Lake George; at Hudson Falls it settles down to an ever deepening, south-running channel. The Batten Kill and Hoosic River bring it the waters of the western slopes of the Green Mountains and the Taconics. Between Waterford and Cohoes it receives the drainage of central New York and the higher Catskills through the Mohawk, here as large and deep as the Hudson itself. South of Troy it flows both ways, rising and falling as much as four and a half feet with the tide. Between Albany and New York dredging has provided a 27-foot channel for ocean-going steamers. In its southern reaches the river falls between the high folds of Storm King, High Tor, Dunderberg, Overlook, and Indian Head on the west, and the Taconics, older than the Catskills, on the east.
‘We found a pleasant place between steep little hills. . . . And from those hills a mighty, deep-mouthed river ran into the sea,’ wrote Giovanni da Verrazano, Florentine explorer, who nosed the first ocean-going ship into the mouth of the Hudson in 1524. On September 2, 1609, Henry Hudson started up the river in the Half Moon, feeling his way north with the flood tide, anchoring during low water, stopping to fish and exchange knives for Indian tobacco and corn. ‘This is a very good land to fall with and a pleasant land to see,’ wrote Robert Juet, officer on the Half Moon. The Dutch called the river the North River, the Great River of the Mountains, and the River of Mauritius. It was ‘for the most part a musket shot wide.’
From the earliest days of settlement the Hudson and its valley have been the main thoroughfare into the interior of the State. Navigation was as difficult as on Mark Twain’s Mississippi: tides were erratic, wind currents temperamental, and the water was laden with hidden shoals. Dutch skippers measured the river by ‘reaches’—14 of them between Albany and New York; and as they plied its waters they peopled the valley with hobgoblins. Manorial lords built large private docks and carried on a brisk trade. Sloops, 70 feet long with rounded bow and high aft, carried livestock tied to the mast, grain, flour, lumber, pork, hay, cider, potash, potatoes, brick, stone, and slate. In 1785 the square-rigged, 80-ton Experiment, Captain Stewart Dean, loaded with ginseng and furs, nosed into the channel at Albany, and in 1787 returned after a trip to Canton, China; the Albany river front was named Dean Street in the captain’s honor.
The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 enormously increased freight and passenger traffic. Fulton’s Clermont introduced steam on the river, but the sloop was not eliminated until after the Civil War. Canal barges, cut loose from their towpath mule power, were towed down the river by steamers. Passenger boats, the pride of American inland waters, raced with one another for the blue ribbon of the Hudson until they burst their boilers. The river floated the products of a variety of industries. Hudson, supported by other river ports, challenged New Bedford as a whaling center. The river was fished for sturgeon and shad, and tons of ‘Russian’ caviar were prepared in Albany. Freighters carried raw hides to Catskill Landing to be carted up the mountains to the hemlock bark for tanning. Brick was shipped to New York City to erect its buildings and pave its roads. Boats for the thriving trade slid down the ways of river shipyards.
A century ago river towns were entertained by showboats that moved from one farm-banked shore to the other in one-night and two-night stands. Most popular play was The Rent Day, which depicted the deplorable conditions of English tenantry but in which Hudson River farmers read their own struggles against manorial rents. Where the Catskill Mountains rise above the river, American artists—Cole, Church, Bierstadt, and others—turned to painting the landscape, striving for naturalness, creating the illusion of looking upon the subject itself. Andrew Jackson Downing pioneered in landscaping river estates, and in architecture popularized the carpenter Gothic of the Hudson River-Bracketed.
Rapid transportation has robbed the river of much of its beauty and commercial importance. Ocean-going freighters loaded with lumber, pulp, and grain keep alive some of the tradition; in summer, day boats carry what little river passenger travel is left.
South of ALBANY, 0 m. (18 alt., 130,447 pop.), past the Albany Yacht Club pier, where the annual Albany-New York outboard motor race starts, and the Port of Albany (see Albany), the river divides farming and fruit-growing lowlands. The huge frame buildings that occasionally rise up out of the trees were storage houses for ice; many of them are now used as barns for growing mushrooms.
When shad fishing was an important river industry fishermen used SHAD ISLAND (R), 9 m., as a base. Nets were dropped as the tide began to rise, and were hauled in loaded with fish as the ebb set in. In recent years antipollution work by the State has revived fishing in the river.
COEYMANS (R), 12 m. (100 alt., 1,506 pop.), is marked by two widely separated brickyards almost flush with the shore, between which rows of dust-covered houses lean vertically up the slope.
On BARREN ISLAND (R), 13.5 m., Kiliaen Van Rensselaer’s agents collected tribute from passing ships; skippers were given a choice—pay or be fired upon.
In 1939 Hollywood producers of Little Old New York came to NEW BALTIMORE (R), 15 m. (100 alt., 734 pop.), for scenes reflecting life on the Hudson in 1807: sailboats riding lazily in the harbor, old village homes, and retired rivermen swapping stories. In 1800 Paul Sherman was building schooners in the New Baltimore shipyard. When the Erie Canal brought a demand for barges, the yards rang with hammer and saw. Soon after Livingston’s river steamboat monopoly was broken (see below), a steamer was launched out of a tangle of wood and iron. Later the local yard turned to building smaller craft and serving as a drydock for repairs and winter storage.
NOAH’S BRIG, a small rock-bound island in the ATHENS CHANNEL (R), 28.8 m., was named for Captain Noah, who one foggy twilight, approaching the channel with a fleet of rafts, sighted ‘a dark object riding the waters’; it looked like a brig under sail. ‘Brig ahoy!’ he shouted. No answer. ‘Brig ahoy! Answer, or I’ll run you down!’ No reply. Captain Noah kept to his course. Suddenly there was a crash and wood crunched on rock. Captain Noah had mistaken two trees on the island for masts with sails set.
On April 7, 1845, the Swallow, racing the Express and the Rochester, ran on the rocks of Noah’s Brig and 15 lives were lost. Ira Buchman hauled the wreckage seven miles inland and built himself a two-story home known as the Swallow House.
The water front of HUDSON (L), 28.8 m. (100 alt., 11,487 pop.), consists of a time-eaten dock framed by a semicircle of decrepit brick buildings and several gas and oil tanks. In 1783 a fleet of Nantucket whalers, with frames for new houses aboard, dropped anchor here; and in a few years Hudson was a major port of entry with 25 sails on the high seas, many of them built in the local shipyard. Whalers slid down the river and returned with whale oil, sealskins, and other cargo. The War of 1812 tied the ships up; later the industry revived, only to die in the panic of 1837. Many sea stories survive in local tradition: one about Captain Judah Paddock, whose ship ran aground off the Barbary Coast. Captured by Arabs, Paddock served as a slave for six months, then, with two of his crew, was ransomed by the British for $1,700 and made his way home.
Below Hudson the river flows under the Rip Van Winkle Bridge, connecting Hudson and Catskill. On CHURCH HILL (L), towering above the eastern end of the bridge, is the CHURCH HOME, a gaily colored Persian castle designed and built by Frederick E. Church, landscape painter.
CATSKILL LANDING (R), 33 m., is the river port for Catskill and its hinterland. Mountains loom in the background. Here in the early years of the nineteenth century ships brought raw hides to be transshipped to the mountain tanneries, and loaded for the return voyage with leather, brick, bluestone, and lumber. Here, too, New Yorkers disembarked for the stages to Catskill vacation centers. The CATSKILL MOUNTAIN HOUSE, one of the earliest and most popular of these, is visible as a white speck high on a mountain ledge (see Tour 7).
SAUGERTIES (R), 44.5 m. (100 alt., 3,918 pop.), once an important bluestone shipping center, is backed by an imposing cluster of Catskill peaks—Overlook Mountain, High Peak, and Sugarloaf Mountain. In James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers Natty Bumppo stood on the crest of Overlook and saw ‘The river . . . in sight for seventy miles under my feet, looking like a curled shaving, though it was eight long miles to its bank.’
In the North Bay cove behind CRUGER’S ISLAND (L), 46.8 m., on the Livingston estate, Robert Fulton’s Clermont tied up on its initial trip to Albany. Chancellor Robert R. Livingston, who had financed Fulton’s experiments, held a monopoly covering the making and operating of all boats propelled by ‘force of fire or steam’ on the waters of the State. That monopoly was broken in 1824 by Thomas Gibbons, who operated a steamboat between New York and New Jersey and whose case was successfully argued before the Supreme Court by Daniel Webster. After his victory, river commerce turned rapidly to steam.
KINGSTON POINT (R), 54.3 m., with picnic grounds, has been a favorite outing place since the days of side-wheelers. Today it is also a landing place for Father Divine’s peace-singing angels on their way to the many ‘heavens’ in Ulster County. The point marks the limit of the British advance up the river in 1777. From the dock the road winds up the slope to KINGSTON (see Tour 21A). Across the river is FERNCLIFF (L), the Vincent Astor estate.
Just south of the Point is RONDOUT (R), at the mouth of Rondout Creek, Kingston’s river front. The rotting hulls of boats and barges along the banks of the creek suggest the one-time importance of the port.
In 1861 the Mary Powell, for half a century ‘Queen of the Hudson,’ entered the passenger service between Rondout and New York. Captain Absalom Anderson kept the ship free of all unessential ‘tophamper,’ in order ‘to decrease the weight as much as possible and keep the hull near the surface of the water.’ Her hull was coated with paint mixed with whale oil—so the story goes—to reduce resistance. In May 1881 she boiled up the river from New York to Rondout, 96 miles, including eight landings, in four hours and twelve minutes. Captain Anderson kept the ship a ‘family boat,’ on which mothers could trust their children: he would not tolerate drunkenness, he refused to run her on Sunday, and every morning at Irvington newspapers were taken aboard to complete the home atmosphere. On July 11, 1885, the Mary Powell lost the blue ribbon of the Hudson to the steam yacht Stilleto. In 1918 she was nosed into Rondout Creek, where she swung idly until junked in 1920. Her whistle still echoes over the Hudson waters from the Robert Fulton; her bell rings loud and clear on another boat; her blower engines and pistons are in the Ford Museum at Dearborn, Michigan; and the gilded globes that topped her masts ornament the gateposts at the entrance to the J.P. Morgan estate in Highland Falls. The Mary Powell never lost a life.
On the eastern shore, beginning at 55.3 m., is a series of private estates: the estate of the late Ogden L. Mills, now a public park, with its marble palace, of which there is a momentary glimpse; Ellerslie, once the home of Levi P. Morton, Vice President of the United States and governor of New York; and the estates of the Huyler, Vanderbilt, and Rogers families.
RIVERBY (R), 64.2 m., was the river home of John Burroughs. Near the rambling stone house is THE NEST, home of Julian Burroughs, his son. In the BARK STUDY, visible through the trees, Burroughs wrote many of his essays and was visited by Walt Whitman, John Muir, and Theodore Roosevelt.
The ROOSEVELT ESTATE (L), 64.5 m., is the birthplace and home of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Opposite, at a turn in the channel, is the former estate of Howland Spencer, sold in 1938 to Father Divine for a ‘heaven.’ South of here is the LONG REACH, an eleven-mile straight sailing course, named Lange Rak by Robert Juet in his log of the Half Moon. The straight channel of the Long Reach is the course of the annual June intercollegiate boat races. Boathouses along the river are marked with college insignia and huge college letters have been blocked out on boulders by resting crewmen.
POUGHKEEPSIE (L), 70.6 m. (175 alt., 40, 237 pop.) (see Poughkeepsie), is marked by two bridges, the up-thrusting gray towers and harplike cables of the Mid-Hudson Bridge contrasting sharply with the black, underslung, crisscrossing girders of the Railroad Bridge. When the April run is on, small fishing craft speckle the water, hauling up nets quivering with shad.
Opposite LOCUST GROVE (L), 71.2 m., for 25 years the home of Samuel F.B. Morse, artist and inventor, is BLUE POINT (R), legendary anchorage of the phantom Storm Ship, which first appeared off Manhattan in the days of Wouter Van Twiller. During a violent thunderstorm burghers saw her come up the bay, her sails full-blown. Hans Van Pelt, harbormaster, fired a gun across her bow; the ship did not stop but sailed up-river dead against the wind. When a rowboat came within a few hundred yards, the ship disappeared. Thereafter she was reported hiding under bluffs, to appear only in unsettled weather, visible in flashes of lightning.
The DANSKAMMER LIGHTHOUSE (R), 80 m., sentinels Danskammer Point. It is said that when Hudson’s Half Moon rounded the promontory, the crew saw Indians dancing around a fire in a large cave and called it the Duyvil’s Dans Kammer (devil’s dance chamber). On the eastern shore, opposite the lighthouse, Baron von Steuben used to fish; arriving at Washington’s headquarters in Newburgh one day, the baron held up an eel and exclaimed, ‘A whale, nicht wahr?’ Hudson fishermen long called eels ‘Steuben’s whales.’
NEWBURGH (R), 85.3 m. (160 alt., 31,797 pop.), rises high above the water in a series of terraces that almost blot out the Shawangunk Mountains in the background. Like Hudson and Poughkeepsie, Newburgh was an important whaling port, the Portland and the Illinois floating in with cargoes of spermaceti. After the collapse of the whaling industry, Captain George Austin headed his ship, the Colonel Crockett, for Africa for a cargo of ivory. A year later, off the African coast, the schooner ran aground on a hidden shoal, and the captain was roasted by cannibals.
At the southern end of the city there is a fleeting glimpse of the white, drop-roofed, frame HASBROUCK HOUSE, Washington’s headquarters in the last years of the Revolution, and the TOWER, OF VICTORY, a 53-foot shaft.
On the opposite shore, BEACON (150 alt., 12,181 pop.), sprawls at the foot of towering MOUNT BEACON, from whose summit signal fires blazed warning of British movements during the Revolution to the rebels on the Dutchess County plains below. The narrow line of the funicular climbing the mountainside to the white casino on the first summit looks like a silver wire. Beyond, the high rampart of the Fishkill Mountains is lost in a pastel-blue haze.
On BANNERMAN’S ISLAND, 88.4 m., Francis Bannerman, starting as a dealer in munitions at the close of the Civil War, built himself a castle in 1900. Its towers, turrets, and battlements suggest the stronghold of a Rhenish robber baron. Since his death in 1918, his sons have carried on the business. Here they store their stocks of armor, guns, and munitions, which they buy at auction prices and resell as the demand arises. The island was once called Pollopel, for Mary (or Polly) Pell, who had two suitors, a farmer and a young minister. She preferred the former; her parents favored the latter. One day the minister took her sleighriding on the river; the ice broke and they fell in. The young farmer raced across the ice, jumped in, and brought them safely to this island. Polly embraced the young farmer so ardently that the minister saw the futility of his suit and married the couple then and there.
During the Revolution PLUM POINT (L), opposite, was fortified with a battery of 14 guns; now it is crowned by Alfred P. Sloan’s handsome Georgian Colonial mansion.
CORNWALL (R), 89 m. (167 alt., 1,966 pop.), is a fashionable summer resort hidden among the trees. From Idlewild, his home in the village overlooking the river, Nathaniel Parker Willis, the ‘dude poet of the Hudson,’ watched huge loads of fruit and vegetables leave the east-shore docks; in the middle years of the nineteenth century he found the west bank of the river ‘as much a wilderness . . . as any river-bank of equal length in the far west.’
Around a bend in the river the Hudson Highlands burst into view, gray rock cliffs, forest-crowned, on both sides of the river. STORM KING (R) rears its corrugated brow to a height of 1,340 feet, the Storm King Highway (see Tour 21A) making a deep crease across the ridge.
On the opposite shore are the twin bulks of BREAKNECK RIDGE and MOUNT TAURUS (Bull Hill). The story is that a wild bull once ranged this region, trampling farmers’ crops. Armed with pitchforks, the farmers chased the beast over the first hill, which became Bull Hill, and on up the second, where the bull fell and broke his neck and thereby gave the ridge its name, Breakneck. To satisfy Victorian propriety, Bull Hill was for a time called Mount Taurus, but locally the Anglo-Saxon name persisted and has been officially restored.
Between the two hills is COLD SPRING (200 alt., 1,784 pop.). Parrot guns used in the Civil War were made in the village. When President Lincoln came to inspect the guns, Colonel Robert P. Parrott, the inventor, demonstrated his cannon by firing them across the river; but Lincoln was bored. ‘I’m confident you can hit that mountain over there,’ he said, ‘so suppose we get something to eat. I’m hungry.’
Below Storm King is the bowl-shaped CROW’S NEST (L),
Where the moon looked down on Ole Cro’ Nest,
And mellowed the shade of his shaggy breast.
High on its face is CAPTAIN KIDD’S CAVE, one of the many traditional hiding places of the notorious pirate’s gold. William Kidd (1650–1701), one of the boldest sea captains sailing from New York, was recommended to the British as the man to send against the pirates. In 1697, carrying a Royal commission to exterminate pirates and prey on the French, he sailed his ship, the Queda Merchant, to Madagascar, and turned pirate himself, taking a number of rich prizes and amassing a treasure said to have amounted to £70,000 sterling. He made his way to America, was arrested and remanded to England, where he was convicted of the murder of a seaman and hanged. About £14,000 of his loot was recovered; the remainder has been a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow for treasure-hunters who have searched up and down the Hudson and elsewhere.
The remains of Fort Constitution on CONSTITUTION ISLAND (L) are visible only from the river among the jagged cliffs on the northwesterly side. Between the island and West Point an enormous iron chain, with links weighing more than 100 pounds each, was strung across the water along pointed timbers to prevent the British from ascending the river. This was the second chain, sturdier than the first, which the British had broken through on their advance to Kingston. At the north end of the island is FOUNDRY COVE, where cannon, shells, and shot were cast during the Civil War. The island is now a part of the West Point Reservation.
At WEST POINT (R), jutting into the river, the castellated buildings of the U.S.MILITARY ACADEMY (see West Point) rise in irregular tiers, the lower buildings appearing as if carved out of the rock on which they stand. Across the river are GARRISON (100 alt., 500 pop.), and the estate of Jacob Ruppert (1867–1939), brewer and owner of the New York Yankees. To the south is the tower of OSBORN’S CASTLE, home of William Church Osborn, foremost crusader against defacement of the Hudson Highlands.
South of Garrison rise FORT HILL and SUGAR LOAF HILL. In the Beverly Robinson House at the foot of Sugar Loaf, his headquarters as commander of West Point, on September 25, 1780, Benedict Arnold learned of the capture of Major John André. Washington and Lafayette were expected for breakfast, but Arnold mounted his horse and fled. Washington arrived to find the commander gone; from Alexander Hamilton he learned the details of Arnold’s plan to betray West Point to the enemy.
ANTHONY’S NOSE (L), 99.6 m., rising in the east, was named, according to tradition, for the nose of Anthony Corlaer, Peter Stuyvesant’s trumpeter, which was ‘of a vast lusty size, strutting boldly from his countenance like a mountain of Golconda.’ On one occasion as they were passing by on a galley, a sunbeam fell on Anthony’s gargantuan proboscis, ‘the reflection of which did shoot straightway down hissing hot, and killed a mighty sturgeon that was sporting beside the vessel.’
Across the river BEAR MOUNTAIN dominates the western skyline. At its base is the landing dock for the BEAR MOUNTAIN SECTION (summer and winter sports) of the Palisades Interstate Park, favorite outing place for crowds from New York and New Jersey. In the park are the remains of Fort Clinton, a Revolutionary earthwork.
Early in the Revolution General George Clinton strung a huge chain across the river between the base of Anthony’s Nose and Fort Montgomery, later called Fort Clinton, to block the river against the enemy. On October 7, 1777, a British fleet under Sir Henry Clinton attacked the fort; after hours of fierce fighting the Americans set fire to their ships, the Constitution and the Montgomery, and fled, General Clinton saving himself by sliding down a steep bank to the river and escaping in a waiting boat. By the light of the burning ships the enemy hacked away at the chain; the next day it gave way and the British continued up the river to Kingston.
Just south of Fort Montgomery is the GRAVE OF MARGARET CORBIN, Revolutionary heroine, who accompanied her husband as nurse; when he fell in battle at Fort Washington, she took his place until one of her arms was torn away by a cannon ball.
Rocky, wooded mountain heights crowding the ramps of the BEAR MOUNTAIN BRIDGE dwarf the two towers and the interlacing cables to make them look like slender spindles strung with black thread. On the left the toll road cuts like a sabre scar across Anthony’s Nose. South of the bridge is IONA ISLAND (R), Government arsenal and supply depot. The circular shot-tower, marked with red and white squares, serves as a danger signal to aviators, who are forbidden to fly over the island.
Directly south, at the RACE, narrowest stretch of the navigable Hudson and most dangerous part of the river in the days of sail, is the DUNDERBERG (R), dwelling place of the Heer, bulbous goblin of the Dutch imagination, who touches off summer storms. Belches of fire split the heavens; barrages of thunder from unseen batteries ricochet off Dunderberg up the river, bounce off Taurus, and re-echo through the Highlands.
At the base of Dunderberg is KIDD’S POINT, where the pirate is said to have lived and hidden his treasure. Toward the middle of the last century a river boat got its anchor caught here in a submerged cannon, which was immediately proclaimed as a relic of Captain Kidd. A speculator organized the Kidd Salvage Company capitalized at $22,000, which built a coffer-dam and a pumping station to explore the river bottom for treasure; but in the end the sheriff wound up the business.
PEEKSKILL (L), 102.5 m. (120 alt., 17,289 pop.), climbs up a narrow valley at a sharp indentation in the shore line; its factory walls and smoke cut off the hills in the background. Freighters are warped against the docks, loading and unloading. Across the river a quarry has carved a deep bowl into the rock wall near the water’s edge.
At INDIAN POINT (L), 103.5 m., long an Indian council place, the Hudson River Day Line has a large recreation park popular with New Yorkers.
STONY POINT LIGHTHOUSE (R), 106 m., guards a peninsula that juts like a crooked finger into the river from STONY POINT HEIGHTS, scene of a Revolutionary battle. During the Revolution the Point was connected with VERPLANCK’S POINT across the river by King’s Ferry, the main water link in the east-west military line of communications between the New England and Middle Atlantic States. This ferry moved Washington’s troops to Trenton and later to the decisive battle at Yorktown. While stationed at West Point, Baron von Steuben used the ferry frequently to reach the well-traveled Albany Post Road on the east shore, along which he preferred to ride his horse because there was less mud to stain his famous boots.
South of STONY POINT (120 alt., 1,000 pop.) is GRASSY POINT (R), another legendary cache of Captain Kidd’s gold. ‘Mad’ Anthony Wayne and his troops scaled the sheer heights above Grassy Point on July 15, 1779, and recaptured the fort that had been lost to the British a month earlier.
On TREASON HILL (R), 107.2 m., Arnold concluded his negotiations with André. The sloop Vulture, which had brought André up the river, awaited him in Croton Bay downstream; but American land forces began cannonading the ship and forced it down river. André, learning of the attack, crossed King’s Ferry and moved down the east bank. Near Tarrytown he was searched, and documents containing details of the plot to surrender West Point were found in his boots. When Arnold heard of the capture, he dashed from the Robinson house to the river, boarded a boat, and sped to the Vulture. Arnold wrote a plea to Washington that Mrs. Arnold, ‘one year a mother and not two a bride,’ be spared insult and injury because she had been ignorant of his plan. Alexander Hamilton wrote that when Arnold, about to flee, told her of his treason, she ‘instantly fell into convulsions, and he left her in that state.’ On the day André was captured, his poem The Cow Chase appeared in Rivington’s Royal Gazette in New York, with its prophetic ending:
And now I’ve closed my epic strain,
I tremble as I show it,
Lest the same warrior drover, Wayne,
Should ever catch the poet!
Anthony Wayne was charged with the execution of André on October 2, nine days after the jingle appeared in the Loyalist paper.
Silhouetted in the rear of HAVERSTRAW (R), 110 m. (20 alt., 5,906 pop.), fronted by sprawling brickyards, are the three prongs of LITTLE TOR, PYNGYP (which owes its name to its resemblance to a Dutch loaf of bread), and HIGH TOR, a sharp-pointed craggy pinnacle shaped like a Dutchman’s hat, which gave the title to Maxwell Anderson’s play. Against a background of Dutch folklore humor, the playwright castigates those who would despoil the beauty of the Hudson Highlands to quarry profits out of them. On the side of High Tor is a line of grey concrete silos, like a giant pipe organ—the storage tanks for crushed rock dug out of the hills.
South of Haverstraw the west shore of the Hudson remains rugged, thrusting up sawtooth peaks; on the east the rolling plain melts into the distant horizon.
OSSINING (L), 114 m. (100 alt., 15,976 pop.), rises abruptly from the water’s edge. Factories, coalyards, and docks hug the shore; church spires pierce the skyline. At the southern edge of the city is a flash of the hard walls of SING SING PRISON.
On the opposite shore (R) is the HOOK MOUNTAIN SECTION (summer sports) of the Palisades Interstate Park, a 1,000-acre craggy tract crowned on the north by Hook Mountain, goal of summer hikers, and on the south by Indian Head Mountain.
SLEEPY HOLLOW (L), 118 m., is the locale of Washington Irving’s legend of the Headless Horseman who scared the daylights out of Ichabod Crane.
Upon entering the broad expanse of the TAPPAN ZEE, 118.5 m., legendary abode of ghosts and goblins, Dutch skippers shortened sail and implored the protection of the patron saint of sailors. Best known is the legend of Rambout Van Dam, who one Saturday rowed up from Spuyten Duyvil to attend a party in the Rockland hills. He danced and drank all Saturday night, and on Sunday morning started back home despite the warning of his companions that rowing on the Sabbath was an unpardonable sin. He never reached home, but was doomed to row perpetually up and down the waters of Tappan Zee.
Before the Revolution, the good ship Pot Cheese, so called for her broad lines and slow gait, made laborious trips between TARRYTOWN (L), 119 m. (70 alt., 6,785 pop.), and New York. Across the river is NYACK (68 alt., 5, 167 pop.).
SUNNYSIDE (L), 119.5 m., was for many years the home of Washington Irving, who described the house as ‘made up of gable ends and full of angles and corners as an old cocked hat.’ In 1835 Irving wrote: ‘The Hudson is in a manner my first and last love, and after all my wanderings and seeming infidelities, I return to it with a heartfelt preference over all the rivers of the world.’
DOBBS FERRY (L), 123.5 m. (150 alt., 5,858 pop.), was named for Jeremiah Dobbs, who in 1698 hollowed out a log and started the first river ferry. Across the river the PALISADES (R) begin their 14-mile march. This front of solid trap rock separates the valleys of the Hudson and Hackensack Rivers, which flow parallel for 30 miles. The Mahican Indians believed the Great Spirit raised this rampart to protect his favorite abode from man.
Opposite the crowded water front of YONKERS (L), 128.5 m. (30 alt., 142, 404 pop.), is ALPINE GORGE (R), one of the few breaks in the Palisades.
On July 28, 1852, the Henry Clay, a 206-foot steamer, was plowing through these waters, putting on every ounce of steam to hold its lead over the Armenia. The race down from Albany had been packed with drama. The Henry Clay was well ahead when it docked at Hudson, but the Armenia passed it by omitting that stop. Near Kingston the Henry Clay came alongside the other boat; pilot Elmendorf gave the wheel a spin and cut across the bow of the Armenia; there was a crash of splintering wood—the Armenia was being shoved ashore. To avert being grounded, the Armenia cut steam and the Henry Clay moved triumphantly ahead. Women passengers begged the men to throw the captain overboard unless he stopped racing. At 3 p.m., a few miles out of Yonkers, a wisp of smoke curled from an awning amidship; suddenly the whole mid-section of the Henry Clay burst into flame. The pilot turned the ship and, full speed ahead, grounded it on the east shore, its bow rising out of the water. Andrew Jackson Downing, who had boarded the ship at Newburgh, stood calmly on deck giving orders and throwing buoyant objects to those struggling in the water; then he dove into the river, helped his wife and children ashore, and was drowned while helping others. Maria Hawthorne, sister of the novelist, went under. A Newfoundland dog seized a child struggling in water and bore it to shore. That night the coroner stood guard over 80 bodies, drawing his gun on pirates bent on plundering the dead. The next morning New York newspapers raged against this useless loss of life. The owners of the Henry Clay were acquitted of a murder charge; but public indignation resulted in legislation that ended steamboat racing.
Greatest loss to American cultural life was that of Andrew Jackson Downing. Only 37 years old, he had achieved a wide reputation with his Treatise on Landscape Gardening (1841), Architecture of Country Houses (1850), and Cottage Residences (1852), and his ideas had been applied in Hudson Valley buildings and estates. His principles were, first, fitness to use; second, truthfulness of expression; and third, beauty. Accordingly he ruled out the unpractical Greek Revival house, the use of the temple portico in place of the practical veranda, and the rustication of woodwork to make it resemble stone. He insisted that houses should be designed to harmonize with the country in which they stood, pointing out the fitness of high towers and peaked roofs for country mansions among the Highlands of the Hudson. He advocated the use of brackets, a novelty of the day produced by the application of steam power to millworking; but he used them with restraint.
Now a ship canal linking the Harlem River with the Hudson, SPUYTEN DUYVIL CREEK (L), 132.2 m., was so named, according to Washington Irving, because, when in 1664 Governor Stuyvesant, threatened by the British, sent Anthony Van Corlaer, his famed trumpeter, to arouse the colonists to the north, Anthony came to the creek and found it swollen by torrential rains but swore he would swim it ‘en spuyt den Duyvil’ (in spite of the devil). Halfway across, Satan seized Anthony’s leg; Anthony blew a mighty blast from his trumpet and scared the devil into letting go. But Old Nick recovered and pulled Anthony down. ‘His ghost still haunts the neighborhood, and his trumpet has often been heard of a stormy night.’
The GEORGE WASHINGTON MEMORIAL BRIDGE, 135 m., sweeps across the river between the sites of FORT WASHINGTON (L) and FORT LEE (R). After the Battle of Long Island Congress ordered General Nathaniel Greene to hold Fort Washington. In November 1776, General Washington looked on helplessly from Fort Lee as the American troops were decimated and Fort Washington was captured by Lord Howe.
South of the bridge there unfolds the New York City skyline. The river bustles with ferries, tugs, and freighters; transatlantic ocean liners rest at their docks. At 141.5 m. is the WEST 42D STREET PIER (L).