Ruins along the Hudson River.(Hudson Valley Ruins: Forgotten Landmarks of an American Landscape)(Book review)

When artists of the Hudson River school, starting with Thomas Cole, set off from a young United States for Italy to witness at firsthand the wonders of ancient civilization, they found the ruins of temples, aqueducts, and civic buildings to be more compelling than they had ever dreamed. Imagine, then, what they might have discovered as subjects for canvas and brush were they alive today to see the crumbling factories, derelict insane asylums, moldering country houses, and abandoned churches that now dot the majestic 130-mile landscape between Albany and Yonkers, New York, along the east and west banks of the Hudson River. These buildings, or neglected vestiges of them, are the subject of a fascinating new study entitled Hudson Valley Ruins: Forgotten Landmarks of an American Landscape, by Thomas E. Rinaldi and Robert J. Yasinsac. Rinaldi works with the capital projects office of the Central Park Conservancy in New York City, and Yasinsac is a museum associate at Philipsburg Manor (a property of Historic Hudson Valley) in Sleepy Hollow, New York.

This erudite volume is much more than its title would indicate, for in order to understand these architectural ghosts, the authors correctly assume that the reader must know how these buildings functioned originally, whether built when Dutch patroons owned vast tracts of thousands and thousands of acres; or in the Gilded Age, when wealthy robber barons erected enormous houses following the railroad boom; or during periods when the river's potential as a shipping route or for harnessing water power made it ideal for heavy industry. Sadly, the factories from this last period and other commercial endeavors stripped the forests and polluted the river until, over the years, it became thick with sludge and poisoned by PCBs.

Between the boards of this book, the authors treat twenty-eight imperiled or vanished structures in depth and another eighty-five more briefly. Besides the north and south terminuses, Albany and Yonkers, they define the geographic scope of their study as bounded by the Taconic State Parkway to the east and the New York State Thruway to the west. Their county by county survey moves from north to south following the flow of the river. Each chapter contains a brief history of one of the ten counties covered, as well as more comprehensive historical discussions pertinent to the individual buildings. There is also a section devoted to "maritime ruins," or the hulls of schooners, sloops, barges, scows, steamers, and other vessels, crumbling piers, and the like.

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The ebb and the flow of the economy of the Hudson River valley reflected the life cycles of its industries, which were often established, eclipsed by ...