AT HOME ON THE HUDSON
COASTING ALONG THE TACONIC STATE PARKWAY, a 170-kilometer stretch of highway running north from New York City, it’s easy to see what inspired early American landscape painters like Thomas Cole and Frederic Edwin Church. Each break between the rolling hills and granite peaks reveals a beguilingly bucolic scene: the cerulean-blue waters of a rambling creek; a tilting clapboard grain silo; the delicate, pink-slippered petals of a copse of magnolia trees.
Extending from Westchester County to the limits of Albany along the banks of its eponymous river, the Hudson Valley has seen its fortunes rise and fall under many banners since the English explorer Henry Hudson arrived on the scene in 1609. During the American Revolution it became a whaling hub, at a time when the British were terrorizing the New England coast. After the decline of whaling in the mid 19th century, cotton mills arrived, followed by brickworks and cement plants and the summer retreats built by New York City’s elite. More recently, the valley has been welcoming a wave of creative and entrepreneurial-minded city-dwellers in search of an alternative to urban life—and who are reinvigorating local communities with art studios, sophisticated farm-to-table restaurants, and stylish places to stay.
Urging my not-so-sophisticated rental car up one more crest of the Taconic, I land at the former estate of the region’s most cherished artistic luminary, Frederic Edwin Church. Now a state historical site, the 100-hectare grounds are capped by Church’s wildly eclectic residence, Olana, built in a mix
