Hyde Park

Lia and I drove up to Hyde Park on a crisp October morning, following the river road north from Poughkeepsie past stone gateposts and long allées of maples that hinted at the estates hidden behind them. This stretch of the Hudson Valley became, in the late nineteenth century, a kind of country retreat for America’s wealthiest families, and Hyde Park still holds three of their houses within a few miles of each other — the modest, in Gilded Age terms, home of a president, and two mansions built with money that made the presidency look understated. We hadn’t expected the day to feel so much like time travel through American class.

Springwood and the Roosevelt legacy

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was born, lived, and is buried at Springwood, the family estate that anchors the National Historic Site here, and walking through its comparatively unpretentious rooms — the study where he broadcast his fireside chats, the wheelchair tucked discreetly beside his desk — gave a strange intimacy to a presidency I’d only known from photographs. Lia was drawn instead to the rose garden out back, where FDR and Eleanor are buried beneath a plain marble monument, no epitaph beyond their names and dates. The adjoining Presidential Library, the first ever built by a sitting president, held letters and campaign ephemera that made the man feel newly, oddly human.

The Vanderbilt Mansion and the river

A short drive north, the Vanderbilt Mansion made Springwood look positively humble. Built by Frederick Vanderbilt as a fifty-room Beaux-Arts “country home,” its formal Italian gardens terrace down toward the Hudson, and we walked the riverside path as the afternoon light turned the water the color of hammered pewter. Lia pointed out that the mansion was used only a few weeks a year, which somehow made its scale more absurd rather than less. We ended the visit at the bluff behind the house, looking out over the river toward the Catskills, and agreed that whatever else Gilded Age money bought, it bought unbeatable real estate.

Getting There

Hyde Park sits about ninety miles north of New York City, roughly two hours by car via the Taconic State Parkway, or a similar journey by Amtrak to Poughkeepsie followed by a short taxi ride, since Hyde Park itself has no train station. Stewart International Airport near Newburgh is the closest regional option, while most travelers fly into New York City and drive north. A car is genuinely useful once there, since the historic sites are spread a few miles apart along Route 9.