Dutchess County

The Poughkeepsie Bridge opened January 1, 1889 and was, briefly, the longest bridge in the world — 6,768 feet of riveted iron truss spanning the Hudson River 212 feet above the water at a height that let the largest schooners pass underneath with masts up. It was built for the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad to give New England a direct rail route to Pennsylvania coal and steel without rerouting through New York City. For nearly a century, freight trains rumbled across it day and night. In 1974, a fire on the eastern approach burned the wooden ties off about 700 feet of deck. The railroad had been struggling; it decided not to repair the bridge. Traffic stopped. The structure sat abandoned for 35 years — a derelict mile of rusted iron suspended above the Hudson, visible from Poughkeepsie and Highland but inaccessible. Local groups proposed various reuses; nothing happened. In 1998, Bill Sepe and a small group of activists incorporated Walkway Over the Hudson and began advocating for converting the abandoned bridge into a pedestrian span. The state, the Dyson Foundation, federal grants, and private donations eventually funded a $38 million conversion. The Walkway opened on October 3, 2009 as a New York State historic park. It is 1.28 miles long, 212 feet above the river, and at the time of opening was the longest pedestrian bridge in the world. (It has since been surpassed by several taller and longer pedestrian bridges, but it remains the longest elevated pedestrian bridge in the United States.) Walking the deck takes about 25 minutes one way. From the center, the Hudson opens north toward Kingston and the Catskills, south toward the Bear Mountain Bridge and the Highlands. The Vanderbilt Mansion and Springwood are visible 4 miles N on the east bank on clear days. Mid-Hudson Bridge — the working road bridge — is ~1 mile S; the trains still run on the eastern shore but no longer cross.

Poughkeepsie (KPOU) sits among three estates strung along the east bank of the Hudson, all within four miles of each other, all run by the Park Service. Springwood is where Franklin Roosevelt was born in 1882, where he died in 1945, and where he's buried in the rose garden with Eleanor; it holds the first presidential library in the country, opened in 1941 while he was still in office, built to his own design and packed with 17 million documents and the bed he died in. Two miles east is Val-Kill, the cottage Franklin gave Eleanor in 1925 so she'd have somewhere out from under his mother's roof; she lived there after his death and hosted Khrushchev, Kennedy, and Tito at it. Two miles north is the Vanderbilt Mansion, a Beaux-Arts pile McKim, Mead & White built in 1898 that the family considered a modest country house, gilded ceilings and a sixteen-car garage and all. Frederick Vanderbilt left it to the federal government in 1940 at FDR's urging; FDR figured the local economy could use the tourists.

The Hudson Highlands are the narrow rocky gorge where the Hudson River cuts through a granite ridge between Storm King Mountain (northwest, 1,340 feet) and Breakneck Ridge (east, 1,260 feet). The river bends sharply here through a passage barely a thousand yards wide. During the American Revolution, the bend made the Highlands the most strategic geography in the colonies — whoever held the river there controlled the only practical north-south military route between New England and the southern colonies. The British knew it. So did Washington. In 1778, Washington ordered Polish military engineer Thaddeus Kosciuszko to fortify the bend's western bluff. The result was Fortress West Point — a chain of redoubts, plus a 65-ton iron chain stretched across the river to West Point's east shore, designed to stop British warships from running up the Hudson. The chain worked. The British never broke through. In 1780 Major General Benedict Arnold, then commander at West Point, tried to surrender the fortifications to the British. The plot was discovered when his courier John André was captured carrying the plans. André was hanged; Arnold escaped to the British side; West Point survived. In 1802, the United States Military Academy was founded on the site by Thomas Jefferson. It is now the oldest continuously occupied military post in the United States, with 4,400 cadets enrolled across the four classes. Graduates include Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, George Patton, Douglas MacArthur, Dwight Eisenhower, and 2,506 winners of the Medal of Honor across all classes. Visitors enter via the West Point Museum (open daily, free) and can take guided bus tours of the campus on weekends April through October. Storm King Mountain across the river from West Point is now Storm King State Park. At its base sits the Storm King Art Center — 500 acres of outdoor sculpture by Mark di Suvero, Andy Goldsworthy, Maya Lin, Richard Serra, Alexander Calder, Louise Bourgeois, and others. It is one of the most important outdoor sculpture parks in the United States and was central to the 1965 lawsuit Scenic Hudson v. FPC, which established that environmental impact had to be considered in federal infrastructure permitting — a foundational decision for American environmental law. Bear Mountain Bridge spans the river ~7nm S of West Point, built 1924 as the longest suspension bridge in the world at the time.

In 1869, twin Quaker brothers Albert and Alfred Smiley bought a small ten-room inn and 280 acres surrounding a glacial lake atop the Shawangunk Ridge in New Paltz, New York. The brothers were 41 years old, recently retired from running a Quaker boarding school, and not really hotel people. They expanded the inn slowly. They added rooms in matching Victorian style. They preserved the surrounding forests instead of cutting them. By 1900 it had grown into a 261-room castle-style resort on Lake Mohonk, with stone towers, hand-stained-glass windows, and turrets that would have looked at home in the Loire Valley. It is still there. The Smiley family is now in its sixth generation of ownership. Mohonk Mountain House has been a National Historic Landmark since 1986. It has no televisions in the guest rooms; it serves three meals a day to all guests as part of the daily rate; men still wear jackets to dinner. The 40,000 acres of surrounding ridge are now the Mohonk Preserve and Minnewaska State Park. The Shawangunks ("the Gunks") are made of Silurian-era quartz conglomerate — extremely hard, cliffy, white-streaked rock that erodes vertically. They form some of the best traditional rock climbing in the eastern United States — the Trapps, Near Trapps, Millbrook Mountain — three or four cliff bands with hundreds of multi-pitch routes from 5.6 to 5.13. Trad climbers from around the world fly into Newburgh and Stewart to climb the Gunks for a week. Sky Top Tower (1923) is the stone observation tower at the top of Sky Top, a 1,500-foot summit ridge directly behind the hotel. From its top you can see the Catskills 30 miles W, the Hudson Valley 10 miles E, and on the clearest days the Empire State Building 70 miles SE. The Smiley Memorial Tower on Eagle Cliff and the hotel's Victorian gazebos and rustic-architecture summer houses dot the lake's perimeter. The hotel and the Mohonk Preserve operate parallel — the hotel owns the lake and the immediate property; the Preserve manages the surrounding wilderness, which includes 70 miles of carriage roads (built by the Smileys, restored for hikers, cyclists, and cross-country skiers).