The Refreshment Pavilion at Kaaterskill Falls
In 1825, a fellow by the name of Peter Schutt acquired a piece of property in the still-wild woolly wags of the Catskill Mountains. The purchase included a prominent waterfall. Two years earlier, the...
Category: Landmarks Revisited
Artist Graveyards
Not long ago, I made a trip down the mountain and across the river to Columbia County to visit historic Hudson City Cemetery. I was looking for the grave of Sanford Robinson Gifford, who...
Fred the Artist
The artist Fred De Sawal had his studio in a ramshackle cottage along old Route 23 in Leeds, New York. It was located not far from the Jolly House resort, where some of his...
Hotel Kaaterskill
Hotel Kaaterskill was a house built of spite. Legend has it that in the summer of 1880, George F. Harding—a highly successful Philadelphia lawyer and habitué of the Catskill Mountain House—got into a row...
Poet’s Ledge
By John P. O’Grady At the annual exhibition of the National Academy of Design in 1861, Sanford Robinson Gifford’s latest artwork was hailed as “the great picture of the season, the crowning glory of...
An Artist’s Studio in Rondout
Hudson River School artist Jervis McEntee was born in the village of Rondout, New York in 1828. His father, James, was an engineer and prominent citizen in the community. In 1848, the elder McEntee...
Borrowed Scenery
Driving home from the other side of the river, I stopped for gas at a place close by Cedar Grove, the home of Thomas Cole—now a National Historic Landmark—in the village of Catskill. I...
The Greene County Nuclear Power Plant
By the early 1970s, the subway system in New York was consuming enough electricity to warrant its own nuclear generating station. The Power Authority of the State of New York made plans to build...
Kate Hill
The “Great Wall of Manitou”—otherwise known as the Catskill Escarpment—extends for more than twenty miles, roughly paralleling the course of the Hudson River. Nearly fifty years ago, historian Alf Evers noted that the “great...
The Grant House
Brooklyn Life was a magazine chronicling the activities of the borough’s blue bloods from 1890 to 1931. I came across a copy dated June 15, 1895, the annual summer “Outing Number.” Flipping through its...