Waiting for the crisis to pass, our thoughts go out to friends and loved-ones who also shelter in place. Old friends pass away, people we loved and admired. Immobilized for the time being, we can revisit destinations, near and far. join me in celebrating the joys of Quaranteam travel, the hope that these diversions might inspire us to value things we had taken for granted, to draw strength, wisdom and compassion from deeper engagements with nature.
The Palisades from Below The Met Cloisters, Fort Tryon Park. Northern Manhattan. Wednesday August 3, 2016
. (Image and text were featured in the exhibition James McElhinney. Discover the Hudson Anew, curated by Laura Vookles. Hudson River Museum. Yonkers, New York. September 13, 2019 to February 16, 2020. Published also as a limited-edition in Hudson Highlands. North River Suite Volume One. Needlewatcher Editions. New York. 2018)
From a shaded esplanade running along the bluff, is a spectacular view of the Jersey Palisades—a sheer wall of basaltic diabase sill. Denoting a defensive wall constructed of upright poles, the word palisade is French, a military term also known in English as a pale, derived from the Latin pälus. Wall Street in lower Manhattan traces the course of such a defensive barrier from the East River to the Hudson. In places the cliffs have collapsed, undermined by the freezing and thawing of brooks and rivulets descending from the heights. These clefts appear as triangular patches of vegetation reaching to the summit, above the wooded shoreline. Extending into the the river at the foot of one of these formations is Ross Dock picnic-area, which accessible by car via Henry Hudson Drive. Further upriver at Alpine Landing, Charles Lord Cornwallis had disembarked with six thousand troops, to capture George Washington at Fort Lee. The operation was a tactical success. The fort was taken and destroyed, but the quarry had escaped.
Crown forces under Charles Lord Cornwallis ascending the Palisades at Closter (Alpine Landing) November 20, 1776.
Drawing by Thomas Davies/. Collection New York Public Library (Reproduced under Fair Use, etc.)
The rocky margin of natural rip-raps was formed by rock-fall over the millennia. These events are not uncommon, though seldom witnessed. Working at our desks a few years ago both Kathie and I heard a tremendous explosion, followed by a loud crash. Curiously, this was not followed by the familiar wail of police-sirens. Walking to the post office a few days later I approached a large sheet of gneiss, rising eighty feet above the street-level. Resting nose-down on the sidewalk was a massive rock. Crushing a retaining-wall in its descent, the stone was comparable in size to a Chevy Suburban. Traversing the rock-face above it was a large crack, next to which the surface was a lighter shade of grey. Police had enclosed the scene with a cordon of concrete traffic-barriers. Along the Palisades escarpment. light patches of yellowish stone signal recent losses. Decades may pass before exposed rock develops a patina.
A hundred yards to the southeast of this prospect stands The Cloisters—a facility operated by the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a museum of medieval art. Comprised of reconstructed enclosures, gardens and chapels collected by sculptor George Grey Barnard that later were acquired by John D. Rockefeller Jr. and reassembled atop North Hill in Washington Heights by architect Charles Collens, the site was previously occupied by an estate owned by industrialist, harness-racing enthusiast and art-collector C.K.G. Billings. Opening in 1938, the museum building became the centerpiece of Rockefeller’s vision for parklands he had first acquired in 1927. Known today as Fort Tryon Park, the land is rocky and vertiginous, crisscrossed by stairways, trails and terraces, woodlands and clearings that had been laid out by Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. Trails descend to Broadway and Dyckman Avenue, anchored at Tubby Hook on the Hudson, with access to a pedestrian and bike-path that follows the river downstream to The Battery. This view is from a ledge on the northwestern shoulder of North Hill, near the route taken by Johann Rall’s Hessians, advancing against Fort Washington on November 16, 1776. Wildlife has returned to the park. Visiting the park, I have beheld many species of raptors including Bald Eagles, as well as woodchucks, skunks, raccoons and a baby timber rattlesnake.
The Palisades. William Guy Wall. Hudson River Port Folio. Megary. New York. 1825. Collection Metropolitan Museum of Art. (Reproduced under Fair Use, etc.)
Revisit April 2020 Quaranteam Traveler Dispatches
(A preview of SKETCHBOOK TRAVELER by James L. McElhinney (c) 2020. Schiffer Publishing).
Copyright James Lancel McElhinney (c) 2020 Texts and images may be reproduced (with proper citation) by permission of the author. To enquire, send a request to editions@needlewatcher.com