Mountain Landscape with Plane Wreck
The wreckage is still there, high on one of the higher peaks in the Catskills, just below its summit, in balsam-brake and moss, close by Rip Van Winkle’s depleted spring. Broken wings, battered fuselage,...
Author: John P. O'Grady
Our Banner in the Woods
It hangs conspicuously in an inconspicuous spot. Measuring twelve by eighteen feet, the flag is suspended between a pair of trees at the edge of the woods where Maplecrest Road meets County Route 23C...
Maverick Concert Hall
The Maverick Concert Hall still stands in the isolate woods just north of the drowned towns of the Ashokan Reservoir. Built over a ten year period by poet-philosopher Hervey White, the Maverick opened its...
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...
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...