CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND FOUR: ROLL ON, HUDSON RIVER MEMORIES

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND FOUR: ROLL ON, HUDSON RIVER MEMORIES

I know. I know. You haven’t read a new Blog since September 15, and here it is, September 23. What gives? Were the intervening 8 days so dull after the Manasquan Experience that there was nothing to write about? Not exactly. I got my first case of Blogger’s cramps – in the muscles of my fingers, wrists, forearms, upper arms, shoulders and neck. Washing all the isinglass and windows on Slow Motion several days ago helped me stretch out all these muscles in a different way. So then I had window washer’s aches and pains. Yes, I do windows. Most of the aches and pains are still with me – growing old pains, most likely. But shhh, there’s a 12 year old’s mind inside this body which does not like to be reminded of the A word – aging. And as another birthday approaches at the end of this week – well, we’re starting to count backwards this year, so not to worry. With my new subtraction theory of birthdays, next year I will no longer be eligible for Social Security and in two years, bye bye Medicare. In five years, no more Senior discounts. And in 16 short years, no more daily emails from AARP. It’s going to be great! Care to join me in going back to our youth? But this time we’ll have all the wisdom we need to enjoy it fully. I can already feel those years melting away. And with one good deep tissue massage, my muscles will be young again too.

In the meantime, my Kingston New York massage therapist told me to take lots of breaks and do lots of stretching in doorways, so I can Blog on. So here goes. I am so glad we toured the Hudson River Valley and went through the first six locks of the Erie Canal this summer. Sure, it would have been great to get to the Great Lakes and/or the St. Lawrence Seaway, but those adventures still await us. Just taking in the beauty of the Hudson River Valley has made this a memorable year – that and my friend Cathy’s visit to Harper Canyon in June, which was another high point of 2013. Cathy deserves a full Blog at some point. But I promised to write about Olana in this Blog and I’m going to keep that promise. Frederic Edwin Church and his wife, Isabel Carnes, built a Persian style castle overlooking the Hudson River after their marriage in 1860, and they called it “Olana”. Any castle deserves a name, and this name “Olana” was taken by Church from a Persian fortress treasure-house (source: Allison West, who grew up 5 miles from Olana and wrote a piece for the Web). According to Ms. West the word “Olana” is from the Arabic word for “our place on high”. West states: “The name “Olana” was very symbolic to Church; he viewed his family as his greatest treasure, and envisioned his home as a strong fortress to keep them safe from harm.” (August 11, 2007 article “In the Shadow of Olana”). In 1865, after Church had bought the 250 acres below the top of the hill where Olana is perched, his first two children died of diphtheria. He and Isabel had four more children, and ostensibly as part of their grieving process they began to roam the globe, traveling to the Middle East and staying there for an extensive period of time.

When they returned they began to design Olana, with the help of British architect Calvert Vaux, the co-designer of Central Park (with better known Frederick Law Olmsted). Vaux (pronounced like “hawks”) was part of Church’s inner circle, in that he had married Mary McEntee of Kingston, New York, the sister of Jervis McEntee, perhaps the most famous of Church’s students, who painted with him at Olana and was an integral part of the Hudson River School of landscape painting. Olana – you have to see it – I can’t describe all the artwork that is inside this structure. The building itself has beautiful tile work and mosaics. Then in every room open to the public there are Hudson River School paintings, many by Church himself. But he was a collector, so there are paintings by his mentor, Thomas Cole, whose more modest home is just across the river from Olana, and by his student, McEntee. There is also a bizarre collection of fake Italian masterpieces that fills the walls in the formal dining area. Church’s friends called them monstrosities, but he loved them. There are a number of paintings which he had given to his father and mother in their lifetimes and which he inherited upon their death – smart man. Thanks to one David C. Huntington, a Yale professor and Hudson River School devotee, Olana and all of Church’s household possessions were saved from sale to developers by a nephew, who inherited it upon the death of Church’s daughter in law in 1964. Governor Rockefeller had the State of New York chip in to buy the entire 250 plus acres for less than $500,000, and it became a public gem in 1966. When I say all of Church’s possessions, I mean ALL. When you walk into his studio, completed in 1888, his brushes and paints are sitting there, as though he had just finished for the day. The docent who showed a group of us around was top notch, her head just crammed with information about the structure, the possessions, Frederic and Isabel and Frederic’s works of art.

The Hudson River School painters were the first internationally recognized group of American painters in art circles. America in the mid 1800’s was still considered a wild, uncultured country with no fine arts worth viewing, let alone collecting. Church and his fellow artists changed that snobby bias. It’s interesting that many of Church’s most prominent works were not even Hudson River Valley landscapes. His “Heart of the Andes” (1859), which hangs in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, was one of his most successful landscapes. It sold for a record $10,000, the highest price ever paid for a painting by a living American artist (at the time). Church had made several journeys to South America. He was a great fan of Alexander von Humboldt, who had explored South America and who had exhorted artists to try to paint the “physiognomy” of the Andes. Church was clearly up to the task. He had already painted an incredible “Niagara” in 1857 (from the Canadian shore, of course). That painting is owned by the Corcoran Gallery. By the way, Church was one of the founders of the Metropolitan Museum in NYC. He was one of first American artists to prosper in his lifetime from his art. He was a very good marketer, and he had regular folks lined up around the block in New York City, paying fifty cents a person, to view his “Heart of the Andes”, when he first displayed it with dramatic lighting in a setting that was designed to look like a window on the Andes. He was a showman, no doubt.

What draws me most to his paintings and the paintings of the other Hudson River School artists is the light that seems to come from within the painting itself. This inner light is something I have always admired in every JMW Turner painting, but I wasn’t aware that Thomas Cole and his followers like Church had been able to capture light inside their landscapes just as beautifully. I guess that’s why their style is often referred to as “luminism”. The canvases of their landscapes are definitely luminescent. If you’re ever in the Hartford Connecticut area (where Church was born – Dad worked for Aetna), it would be well worth your time to visit the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, opened by Daniel Wadsworth in 1842 as the first public art museum in the United States. The Atheneum now has more than 50,000 works of art, but it started with 65 landscapes from the Hudson River School artists. Daniel Wadsworth himself both  collected and commissioned works from Thomas Cole, Frederic Church and Albert Bierstadt. I haven’t been there, and when I think of all the days I spent in Hartford when I was E.D. of CWEALF in the 1970’s – however, my focus at that time was gender equality, not the Hudson River School of artists. Fortunately, Daniel Wadsworth had the time, the money and the interest to foster the art careers of Thomas Cole and Fredric Church. He bankrolled Thomas Cole for a number of years, and then he introduced Hartford native, Frederic Church, to Cole and convinced him to take on Church as his student.

A word or two about Thomas Cole: Although he was born in England, he was perhaps the first American conservationist. He fell in love with the wild mountain and river landscapes of New York, Vermont and New Hampshire, and did everything in his power to preserve their natural beauty and fight any efforts to destroy this pristine wilderness. His landscape style was “romantic sublime”, and according to Elizabeth Kornhauser, who wrote about Daniel Wadsworth and the Hudson River School for the Hog River Journal, Cole broke from the European tradition of painting pastoral scenes to paint the wilderness he encountered in his new land. He also used his art “as a means of upholding traditional beliefs as he warned Americans against the dangers of material progress, unlimited democracy, and expansionism, which he believed were rampant in the Jacksonian era.” Cole died in 1848, the same year as Wadsworth. Church, his disciple, lived until April 7, 1900. Cole’s home, Cedar Grove, while not nearly as grand as Church’s castle, is well worth a visit – I went on a Tuesday, and it is open Wednesday through Sunday. My loss. His home is pretty much in the center of Catskill, New York, not high atop a mountain aerie, but it’s just a five minute drive across the Rip Van Winkle Bridge up the hill to Church’s Olana. Cole had introduced Church to the land he bought for Olana many years later (after Cole’s death), as they traipsed the countryside near Hudson, New York looking for landscapes to paint. This is still a very romantic, even sublime, place to visit.

Before we leave the Hudson River Valley, let’s talk a little bit about the mighty Hudson River. Some call it America’s East Coast fjord, which is defined as a long, narrow inlet with steep sides or cliffs, created by glacial erosion (Wikipedia). It has fjord-like features, but it is definitely a river, called “Muhheakantuck” by the Algonquians, “the river that runs both ways”. I can attest to it running two ways. And if you’re planning to cruise on the Hudson, know your current charts well. Plan your voyages around them. Going with the current is so much smoother, and it saves a lot on fuel. There is a lot of commercial traffic on the Hudson, particularly between NYC and Albany. Those commercial captains go with the flow all the time. They’re not dummies. Commercial traffic has been traveling up and down the Hudson River for centuries. The first traders on the Hudson River were the Algonquians, who used dug-out canoes and bark canoes to transport their goods. The Englishman, Henry Hudson, showed up in his schooner “Half Moon” in 1609, working for the Dutch East India Company and looking for a trade route to Asia. What he found instead was “as pleasant a land as one need tread upon. The land is the finest for cultivation that I ever in my life set foot upon.” (Hudson River Maritime Museum display, Kingston, New York).

When vast amounts of anthracite coal were found in 1825 in eastern Pennsylvania, the enterprising Wurts brothers (street in Kingston NY named for them), coal mine owners, were determined to find a way to get the coal to New York City. This led to the building of the Delaware and Hudson Canal, 108 miles long with 108 locks to negotiate. The canal started in Honesdale, Pennsylvania and ended at Rondout Creek in Eddyville, New York. Rondout Creek is the longest navigable creek which flows into the Hudson River. That’s where the Admiral and I spent several weeks (Rondout Yacht Basin), as I made my land excursions to Woodstock, Bethel, Yasgur’s Farm, Catskill, Hudson, and Hyde Park. Here’s a shout out to Cheryl and Jeff for making our stay at your marina so pleasant. The weekends are bearable; the quiet weeks are divine. At any rate, the Delaware and Hudson Canal opened in 1828 and turned the town of Rondout into a booming port. Millions of tons of coal passed through it for seven decades from 1828 until 1898. Then the railroad came along, the D & H Railroad in this instance, and took over the transportation of coal through New Jersey to New York. The D & H Canal became obsolete. At the end of the 1898 season the D & H Company opened all the overflow dams called waste weirs and drained the canal. One part remained in use, thanks to Samuel Coykendall (son-in-law of Thomas Cornell), who bought the canal and used the section from Rondout to Kingston to transport cement and other materials to the Hudson River. He stopped doing that in 1904.

The Hudson River Maritime Museum, which is right along Rondout Creek, provides a thorough history of commerce on the Hudson River. That’s where I got most of this information. One of the key players around the Civil War was Thomas Cornell, who put his money in steamboats which plied the Hudson River trade routes, and it paid off royally for him. He and his son-in-law, the aforementioned Coykendall, had a fleet of large steamboats which were used to transport food products down river to New York City. And they used their smaller steamboats and tugboats to move large barges lashed together down river to the City. The barges carried coal, bricks, ice, bluestone, cement, grain, hay, and crushed stone. Cornell and Coykendall took advantage of lax (or no) controls on business growth and their Cornell Steamboat Company gained a virtual monopoly over the towing business on the Hudson River in the years after the Civil War. This company owned more than 60 towing boats and was the largest towing company in the nation in its prime. Today there are tugboats pushing huge barges up and down the Hudson River at all hours of the day, but the peak hours are when the currents are favorable. It was pretty cool standing in the swimming pool at Shady Harbor Marina in New Baltimore, New York, watching the parade of tugs and barges – all color coded – chug up and down the Hudson. By “color coded” I mean that literally, if the barge was red and caramel colored, so was the tugboat. If the barge was teal, black and white (go Sharks!), so was the tugboat.

Now we can leave the Hudson River, also an estuary because it flows to the ocean. And we did in fact take our leave on September 14 with a marathon cruise from Half Moon Bay to Manasquan. Going through the New York Harbor at around 9:30 a.m., we were greeted by Miss Liberty, sailed past the Staten Island Ferry and shared the Verrazano Narrows Bridge with a gargantuan container ship. There was no Coast Guard boarding on the trip south, and I am happy to report there was no thunder and lightning. The day was perfect. At 12:45 p.m. on that day swimmers were entering the Hudson River at Liberty Island and swimming to the new Freedom Tower three miles away in Manhattan. We left Half Moon Bay at 6 knowing that we had to get through the Harbor before it was closed to boats for safe passage for the swimmers. I am still amazed that we had such relatively easy passage through one of the busiest harbors in the world – twice. The Admiral noted that the harbor in Hong Kong is so much busier all the time. That is not a place we would want to cruise. There are a lot of high speed ferries and commuter boats in NYC Harbor, as well as tourist boats, but it’s not a hectic place to be. You can still stand in awe looking at the Statue of Liberty from all sides as you glide by and snap your photos of the skyscrapers of Manhattan in virtually tranquil waters. We were lucky with both trips through the Harbor. The waters were especially calm on our southerly course. Thank you, New York, for your warm sendoff. And thank you over and over again, Mighty Hudson River, for letting us float with your currents to the Erie Canal and back again. Unforgettable.