Art Trail
Here in the Land of Rip Van Winkle, an art trail begins or ends at everybody’s front door. Innumerable are such trails, and infinite the vistas. After all, to live in this place is...
Category: Landmarks Revisited
Red Apple Rest
Red Apple Rest was a famous highway stop along Route 17 in Tuxedo, New York. The cafeteria-style eatery opened in 1931 and for decades did a booming business. Several generations of vacationers regarded this...
The House in the Woods
The Land of Rip Van Winkle is well-supplied with haunted houses. At least one of these places is the subject of a book. At the time of its publication—in 1904—no mention was made of...
Catskill Game Farm
According to the handwriting on its faded blue cardboard mount, the slide was “Taken at Game Farm in Catskills, July 1954.” An item acquired off eBay for a few dollars. It was included among...
Resorts of the Catskills
He showed up in Windham—with his camera—sometime after Labor Day in 1977. That was the time of year he preferred to work. Most of the summer vacationers were back home by then, at their...
The Widow Jane Mine
The Widow Jane Mine. Nobody knows how it got its name. Jane—as well as any connection she might have had with this long-idle natural cement mine in Rosendale, New York—is lost to history. What...
Steepletop
Moldering books. The smell greets you as soon as you step into the house. Thousands of them are up there in the library, at the top of the stairs on the left side of...
Kindred Spirits
The painting is called Kindred Spirits. It was created by Asher B. Durand in 1849 to memorialize his close friend and fellow landscape artist Thomas Cole, who died unexpectedly the previous year. The two...
Saint Mary of the Mountain
The old cemetery sits on a small rise above the highway just east of the village of Hunter. Well over a century has passed since the last interment. The monuments—some of which are still...
Medusa Cemetery
A car pulls into the cemetery in Medusa, New York. Three people are inside the vehicle: two women—one younger, one middle-aged—and an old man wearing a hat. The middle-aged woman is driving, the old man...