Hudson Valley
"The river is wide and slow and silver here, and the whole valley leans toward it."
Lia and I drove up out of Manhattan on a grey October morning, and somewhere around Cold Spring the city fell away and the valley opened and the leaves were on fire. We pulled over at a bend in the road because we had to — the Hudson lay below us broad and pewter, the Highlands rising steep and blazing on the far bank, a single freight barge sliding downstream leaving a long silver wake. Lia got out with the camera and then just stood there not taking the photo, which is how I know she was actually seeing it. “The painters weren’t lying,” she said. They weren’t. This is the exact view a hundred nineteenth-century canvases were built from, and it’s still here, still doing the same trick to people who stop.
Storm King and the art in the fields
Our first full day we spent at Storm King, an art centre that isn’t a building but five hundred acres of meadow and hill scattered with enormous sculptures. You walk it, or you hire a bike, wandering between Calder’s great red arcs and Serra’s rusted steel walls that lean over you like weather, the mown grass rolling away to the mountains. It rearranges your sense of scale — a sculpture that would fill a gallery here just punctuates a field. Lia lay down in the grass under one of the huge pieces to look up at it, ignoring my nervous glances at the guards, who didn’t care in the slightest. We stayed until the light went low and gold and the shadows of the sculptures stretched across the fields like sundials.
The great houses on the river
The valley is lined with the mansions of people who once had absurd amounts of money, and several are open to walk through. We toured Vanderbilt’s estate at Hyde Park, a beaux-arts pile with a lawn sloping to a view of the river the family clearly considered part of the furniture. But the one that stayed with us was Olana, the Persian-fantasy home the painter Frederic Church built on a hilltop to frame the exact landscape he painted — every window a composed picture, the whole house a machine for seeing the Hudson. Lia, who paints a little and pretends she doesn’t, went quiet in there. Standing at Church’s studio window looking down the valley he loved, I finally understood the Hudson River School wasn’t just a style. It was a love letter to this specific water.
Beacon, Dia, and dinner
We based ourselves in Beacon, a former factory town on the east bank that has reinvented itself around Dia Beacon — a vast old printing plant now filled with minimalist art, natural light pouring through the sawtooth roof onto Richter and Flavin and rooms of Judd’s plain plywood boxes. It’s the kind of place that either bores you rigid or quietly takes you apart, and it took us apart. Afterward we walked Beacon’s long Main Street, all brick storefronts and independent shops, and ate a slow dinner at a restaurant in an old firehouse where the vegetables had names of farms attached. Lia raised her glass and said we should come back in every season, and for once I didn’t argue about the practicalities.
Getting There
The Hudson Valley is gloriously easy to reach without a car, which is rare in America. Metro-North trains run right up the east bank from Grand Central in Manhattan, hugging the river the whole way, with stops at Cold Spring, Beacon, and Poughkeepsie — the Beacon line to Dia is a genuine day trip from the city. To roam the west bank, the mansions, and Storm King, though, you’ll want a car; distances between sights are short but scattered. Autumn is the headline season, and rightly so, but spring blossom and summer green are quieter and lovely too. If you come for the foliage in October, book ahead and expect company — the whole city has the same idea.