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...
Monthly Archive: June 2018
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...
Old Tory Fort
We entered the woods armed with a treasure map of sorts. Or rather, we had a professional surveyor’s map to guide us to our destination. The spot we were seeking was high on an...
Apple Blossom Time
Now is when they come into their brief visibility, the fragrant ghosts of May. They hover along the periphery of mountain roads and in the thick of second-growth forests where once the orchards grew....
Casa Susanna
No historical marker stands in front of the ramshackle boardinghouse formerly known as Casa Susanna. Perhaps that’s for the best. After all, this is more a place of memory than a site of history....
A Tale of Two Lean-tos
The old lean-to. For more than fifty years it stood, alongside the trail, near the headwaters of the Batavia Kill, providing shelter to innumerable backcountry travelers. In recent years it had been showing its...
Excursion to Shew’s Pond
I hadn’t been to Shew’s Pond in more than forty years. But after reading “Trouting Among the Catskills”—a little essay by Charles Lanman—I wanted to revisit the place. Born in 1819, Lanman was an...
Helderberg Castle
From a certain vantage point along the road coming out of New Salem in Albany County, you can catch a glimpse of them up there—the castle ruins. Perched on the rim of one of...