Randi Minetor - New York Off the Beaten Path®: Discover Your Fun

A lifelong Rochester resident, Randi Minetor has written more than a dozen books about hiking, driving, and exploring New York State, including the best-selling first and second editions of Hiking Waterfalls in New York in collaboration with her husband, photographer Nic Minetor. Together, the Minetors created the books Hiking through History New York, Scenic Driving New York, Hiking the Lower Hudson River Valley, and five Best Easy Day Hikes books on Rochester, Buffalo, Syracuse, Albany, and the Hudson Valley. They also collaborated on two editions of The New York Immigrant Experience in the Historical Tours series. Randi writes extensively about Americas national parks, birding, and other nature topics, and she is delighted to have the opportunity to update, revise, and refresh New York Off the Beaten Path.

Named for the English navigator who first explored its waters in 1609, the Hudson River has been the lifeline of New York from its earliest days as a royal colony to its emergence as a world center of commerce and culture.

These days, of course, railroads and highways handle the bulk of commercial traffic, and the river is less of a thoroughfare and more of an escape for pleasure boaters, a way to savor the enduring beauty of the Hudson Valley. Its not hard to see how this majestic landscape inspired the artists of the Hudson River School of painting, who portrayed a vision of the pristine American landscape as the new Garden of Eden. In addition to artists like Jasper Cropsey and Frederic Church, the area east of the Hudson has plenty of famous names to dropRoosevelt, Vanderbilt, and Rockefeller among them.

Over the years, many of the writers, artists, inventors, political leaders, and business tycoons who shaped this stateand the nationhave called this area home. The grand and historic country estates they left behind make a drive along the scenic Taconic Parkway a weekenders delight.

This chapter starts in the crowded bedroom communities of Westchester County. From there, like Friday-night weekenders, well travel north.

Just beyond the New York City limits, in Yonkers, the Hudson River Museum occupies the magnificent 1876 Glenview Mansion. As the preeminent cultural institution of Westchester County and the lower Hudson Valley, the museums resources reflect the natural, social, and artistic history of the area.

A visit to the Hudson River Museum (HRM) includes a walk through the four meticulously restored rooms on the first floor of the mansion itself. Youll hardly find a better introduction to the Aesthetic Movement in residential design, perfected by Charles Locke Eastlake and marked by precise geometric carving and ornamentationfrom floors inlaid with contrasting wood to straight lines and decorative tiles that echo a medieval influence.

Aside from the furnishings and personal objects that relate to the period when the Trevor family lived in the mansion, the museums collections have grown to include impressive holdings of Hudson River landscape paintings, including works by Jasper Cropsey and Albert Bierstadt.

The HRM offers as many as thirty special art, science, and history exhibitions each year, centered on the work of American artists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Summer concerts in the outdoor amphitheater and a Victorian Holiday celebration each December round out the calendar of events and entertainment. In contrast to the period settings and historical emphases of the older parts of the museum, the state-of-the-art Andrus Planetarium features the Definiti 4K Hybrid System, with Ohira-Tech Megastar II computer-controlled optical star projector. The system projects the millions of individual stars of the Milky Way with gasp-inducing realism.

AUTHORS FAVORITES EAST OF THE HUDSON

Croton Gorge Park

Culinary Institute of America

Locust Grove

Olana State Historic Site

Old Croton Aqueduct Trail

Roosevelt Farm and Forest

Top Cottage

Val-Kill Cottage

Walkway over the Hudson

The Hudson River Museum (511 Warburton Ave., Yonkers; 9149634550; hrm.org) is open Wed through Sun, noon to 5 p.m.; Fri until 8 p.m. Admission to the museum galleries is $8 for adults, $5 for senior citizens, and $4 for children 3 to 18. Admission to the planetarium is $5 for adults, $4 for senior citizens, and $3 for children 3 to 18.

Hundreds of years before Glenview Mansion was built, the Philipse family assembled a Westchester estate that makes Glenviews twenty-seven acres seem puny by comparison. Frederick Philipse I came to what was then New Amsterdam in the 1650s and began using his sharp traders instincts. By the 1690s his lands had grown into a huge estate, including a 52,500-acre tract that encompassed one-third of what is now Westchester County.

In 1716 Philipses grandson Frederick Philipse II assumed the title of Lord of the Manor of Philipsborough, greatly enlarged the cottage built by his grandfather, and used Philipse Manor Hall as a summer residence. Col. Frederick Philipse (III) rebuilt and further enlarged the Georgian manor house, planted elaborate gardens, and imported the finest furnishings for the hall. His tenure as Lord of the Manor ended when he decided to side with the Tory cause at the beginning of the American Revolution.

Confiscated along with the rest of its owners properties after the war, Philipse Manor Hall was auctioned by the State of New York and passed through the hands of a succession of owners until 1908, when the state bought the property back. The state has since maintained the mansion as a museum of history, art, and architecture. Home to the finest papier-mch rococo ceiling in the United States, inside and out it remains one of the most perfectly preserved examples of Georgian style in the Northeast.

Philipse Manor Hall State Historic Site (29 Warburton Ave., PO Box 496, Yonkers; 9149654027; parks.ny.gov/historic-sites/37/details.aspx) is open Apr through Oct, Tues through Sat, noon to 4:30 p.m.; Nov through Mar, Tues through Sat, noon to 3:30 p.m. Admission is $5 for adults, $3 for students and seniors, and free for children under 12. Group tours are available by appointment.

The Real FDR Drive

The Taconic Parkway offers motorists the most scenic of several routes along the east side of the Hudson River. Begun in 1927, the road was planned as an offshoot of the Bronx Parkway, but even before ground was broken, officials began planning a major extension. In 1924 they formed the Taconic State Park Commission, and its commissioner, Franklin D. Roosevelt, pushed to lengthen the parkway north as far as Albany. It didnt get quite that farin 1963 the Taconic eventually reached its northernmost point at the intersection with Interstate 90 in Chatham. It was FDR, however, who insisted on the roads scenic path through some of the most majestic portions of his beloved Hudson Valley. He even prescribed the rustic, thickly mortared stone bridges that help make the Taconic such a handsome rural thoroughfare.

Happy Holidays East of the Hudson

The holiday season is a perfect time to explore the great houses of the region, decked out in festive finery throughout the month of December. Sunnyside, Philipsburg, Lynd-hurst, Boscobel, Van Cortlandt Manor, and others offer such events as candlelight tours, bonfires, carols, storytelling, and dancing. Check hudsonvalley.org/calendar and the individual websites of the manor houses for information on specific events.

Fans of the nineteenth-century New Yorkborn Hudson River School painter and architect Jasper F. Cropsey will want to make appointments to visit