Tag: Rockland

High Tor – Haverstraw, NY

This will be my last post from the Rockland side of the Hudson, at least for a while. But this may well be the most spectacular hike of the two I’ve recently blogged — the first mile of the hike is a bit of a scramble, but the view from the top is not to be equaled:

New York City from the top of High Tor; Lake DeForest in the foreground (Photo by the author)

High Tor has a long history — as the highest point on the Palisades, it likely was an important site for the Lenape (possibly the Rumachenanck?) tribe.

During the American Revolution, High Tor was apparently used as a place to send signals up, down and across the river.

In fact, if you look around carefully, you’ll see some very old graffiti carved into the rocks. Here’s a cool one:

Looks like this says “Crocheron 1862” (Photo by the author)

Also, note the wavy, scratchy lines all over the rock? Pretty sure that’s evidence of the Laurentide ice sheet that covered this whole area up until about 20,000 years ago. (Here’s a link to another blog post about that time.)

Later, during WWII, according to Wikipedia, High Tor was used as an air raid lookout point. Supposedly Kurt Weill, the composer, was a volunteer air raid warden. (Fun fact: Weill wrote the score to Maxwell Anderson’s “Knickerbocker Holiday.” More on Anderson anon . . .)

Artistically, High Tor has been quite inspiring: The New York Historical Society has this John William Hill painting from 1866 — he is considered one of the “American Pre-Raphaelites,” devotees of England’s famed critic John Ruskin. He made this watercolor, likely whilst sitting atop High Tor, and then completed the larger painting in the comfort of his studio.

And then in 1936, Maxwell Anderson, a playwright of some renown at the time, wrote a three-act play called “High Tor” in which he describes the trials and tribulations of Van Van Dorn, the poor scion of a Dutch family who had owned the peak since the 1600s. Evil agents of a trap rock company keep trying to buy the land out from under him for a pittance to “chew the back right off this mountain, the way they did across the clove there. Leave the old palisades sticking up here like bill boards, nothing left.” (Actually, you will see a mountain that, sadly, looks EXACTLY like that just south of High Tor when you head back to 9W.)

The plot is melodramatic, with characters such as a ghostly, shipwrecked Dutch crew, an Indian, the evil trap rock men — oh, it’s a bit tedious to recount it all. Yet this play won the New York’s Critic Circle Award for the 1936-37 season.

Image Courtesy of Work Projects Administration Poster Collection – Library of Congress

Fantastic comedy? I think not.

I will say, though, Anderson gets in a couple of nice observations about the area. For example, Lise, the ghostly, shipwrecked Dutch lady who speaks in verse, laments the scourge of quarrying that is destroying the area:

Only five thousand for this crag at dawn

Shedding its husk of cloud to face a sunrise

Over the silver bay?  For silver haze 

Wrapping the crag at noon, before a storm

Cascading silver down the black rock’s face

Under a gray-sedge sky?  For loneliness, here on this crag?  

Anderson lived nearby in Rockland at the time he wrote this play, and was instrumental in saving the peak from certain destruction by helping form the Rockland County Committee to Save High Tor – they raised money, purchased the land, and turned it into High Tor State Park. (Fun fact, the actor Burgess Meredith, whom you might remember from the original “Rocky”, was a neighbor of Maxwell Anderson’s and played the character of Van Van Dorn in the original production of “High Tor.”)

One of my favorite bits about the play is the final speech, said by the dying Indian:

There’s one comfort.  I heard the wise Iachim, looking down when the railroad cut was fresh, and the bleeding earth offended us.  There is nothing made, he said, and will be nothing made by these new men, high tower or cut or buildings by a lake that will not make good ruins . . . When the race is gone, or looks aside only a little while, the white stone darkens, the wounds close and the roofs fall and the walls give way to ruins.  Nothing is made by men but makes, in the end, good ruins.

Nothing is made by men but makes, in the end, good ruins.

Hiking along the Rockland Side of the Hudson River

Okay, so this is definitely NOT within the jurisdiction of OssiningHistoryontheRun because it is across the Hudson River. But I feel I can squeeze it in here because you can SEE Ossining clearly from this side of the river, so . .

There are several trails to choose from here – Google Hook Mountain, Nyack Beach, and or Rockland Lake Park and you will find one that suits you.  I parked at (more or less) the black and green dot below, at the intersection of Landing and Collyer Roads.  

From there you can take your choice of trails – a six-mile loop south down towards the Mario Cuomo Bridge along the river and then back by way of Hook Mountain, or north six miles along the river, up to the steep, switch backed Treason Trail, so-called because it is where the traitorous Benedict Arnold met British Major John Andre to complete the deal that would surrender West Point to the British, in exchange for £20,000. 

Both trails are about 6-mile loops

Check out the link from the NY/NJ Trail Conference here for more details. Go either way and you will pass the ruins of old quarries, beach houses, docks, ice houses, an inclined railroad and even a cemetery, plus see some spectacular views of New York City, the Hudson, Ossining and Croton Point Park.  So follow along for a little forensic hiking . . .

First, I think it’s important to note that all of these trails are within the Palisades Interstate Park Commission that was created by NYS Governor Theodore Roosevelt and NJ Governor Foster Voorhees in 1900 in response to the rampant quarrying activities that were seen to be destroying the Palisades.  We’ll be walking above and by many of these quarries – you decide . . .

Now, let’s start at the top, where the Knickerbocker Ice Company stored its ice and transported it down to the river.  

Note that Rockland Lake was originally called Quaspeck Lake by the Munsee-speaking Lenni Lenape Indians who were here first. Henry Hudson sailed past here in the Half Moon in 1609, and the first Europeans to settle here were the Dutch.  But by the 1660s, the Dutch had handed off the land to the British.

By 1831, the lake was renamed Rockland as the Lenni Lenape had been displaced (or Ramapough Mountain Indians, or Ramapo Lenape Nation or Ramapo Lenape Munsee Delaware Nation – no one seems to be able to agree on exactly who they were, probably because their land was stolen out from under them so long ago.) 

Hook Mountain, in fact, gets its name from the Dutch – they called this area of the Hudson Verdrietige Hoogte, or “Tedious Hook” because I guess it was tricky to navigate a boat past it due to unpredictable winds and currents.

Next, rock quarrying is much of the reason that the Palisades look the way they do, especially north of the Mario Cuomo Bridge.  Hook Mountain, in fact, jutted much farther towards the Hudson in the eighteenth century than it does today, thanks to decades of quarrying in the mid-1900s.

First accomplished through sheer manpower, then through steam-powered stone crushers and dynamite, today’s bucolic surroundings bear little resemblance to the bustling, noisy, dangerous areas they once were.  

In those years, instead of serene trails alongside the Hudson, 

Photo credit: Sharon Edmonds

there were docks and piers all along the riverbank – landings named Sneden’s, Tappan Slote (Piermont), Rockland Landing, Waldberg (or Snedeker’s) that received ferries and barges which took on rocks, ice and later people, conveying them either across the river or down to Manhattan. Check it out (and note that you will be walking right THROUGH where all of this once was):

Thanks to Scott Craven for this photo

This New York Times article from October 1899 gives a sense of the dangerous conditions the quarry workers faced:

  • We don’t need no stinking OSHA when we have disposable Hungarians . . . Horrible story, no?

The Rockland Lake Trap Company, mentioned in the above article, owned and quarried much of these riverside hills.  Can you imagine what it was like to hear the blasting of the rocks once at noon, and again at the end of the workday? Can you imagine what is was like to work in one of these quarries? Apparently work of this nature was going on all up the Rockland side of the Hudson from Piermont up through Nyack and as far as Haverstraw.  Here’s a postcard of the above stone crusher:

Thanks to Scott Craven

No wonder the locals started complaining.  Over thirty companies were blasting away at the mountains from about the 1870s until about 1920, when the Palisades Interstate Parks Commission bought up the final parcels of this land, under the watchful eye of Commissioner George Perkins and thanks to donations from the likes of the Harriman and the Rockefeller families. 

You can see the scars from these quarries as you walk along the riverside trails:

In addition to the quarries, whose products were used for macadam roads and for foundations for many New York City buildings, the Knickerbocker Ice Company was also a bustling and lucrative business.  

Back before the Revolutionary War, in 1711,  a man named John Slaughter had purchased land at Rockland Landing that extended up Trough Hollow and back to Rockland Lake.  He build a dock and pier there which was for years called Slaughter’s Landing before being renamed Rockland Landing in the early 1800s.  

By 1805, ice harvesting began on Rockland Lake and it proved so popular that by 1831 the Knickerbocker Ice Company formed.  Ice began to be harvested in a systematic and efficient fashion to serve New York City’s ice boxes and restaurants.  Rockland Lake, you see, was said to have the “cleanest and purest ice” in the area.  During the coldest months of winter, ice was sliced up into blocks, and stored in icehouses in the area. Check out this Edison film from about 1905 showing the horse-drawn ice cutters:

 By 1856 an incline railway was built in Trough Hollow, the ruins of which you can see as you start your hike (look for the crumbling stone walls to your right as you head down to the river.  Imagine small rail cars filled with blocks of ice rolling down to the river to be loaded onto barges and steam ships and transported to the most august eating establishments in New York City.)

Here’s the lower part of what’s left of the incline railway. There are still pier footings in the river below.

With the advent of refrigeration, ice harvesting ended here in 1926, but the land around the lake was developed, and bungalows, resorts, hotels and even casinos for New Yorkers took up the slack until the late 1950s when the entire area was purchased and converted into Rockland Lake State Park. Check out these drawings of the Rockland Hotel (also see here for more information.)

Once the quarries were stilled, beach side parks were developed and Hook Mountain Beach Park was quite elaborate.

Overview of Hook Mountain Beach Park, in use from about 1920 – 1941
Steamboats docking

Sadly, this delightful beach park was shut down in 1942 due to WWII (I don’t know what the connection was, but apparently there was one) and a hurricane in the late 1940s destroyed the park, never to be rebuilt again. By the 1950s, no one wanted to let their kids swim in the Hudson anyway because it was so polluted.

As you walk along, you’ll see ruins of old stone buildings – some of which were from the beach park era, some of which are from the quarry period and served as storage sheds for dynamite or offices.

Last but not least is a beauty shot of the spectacular view you will see when you climb to the top of Hook Mountain:

I’m glad Theodore Roosevelt et al had the foresight to protect this land. What do you think?