7_TdSUW
your inner New Yorker
DISTRIKT HOTEL
NEW YORK CITY
342 West 40th Street
New York City . 10018
212.706.6100 .
888.444.5160
www.distrikthotel.com
The view of the Hudson as seen from the Vanderbilt Mansion.
William Vanderbilt, grandson of
Cornelius “Commodore” Vanderbilt
and son of William Henry Vanderbilt,
spent only a few weeks here each year.
The last stop on this leg of the
tour—though not the last big house
on the block by any means—is Montgomery Place. It’s not as grand as the
Vanderbilt Mansion or as historic as
Roosevelt’s, but there’s something
unique about how the home interacts
with the landscape. Every porch points
the visitor toward a breathtaking
view. The 380-acre property features
stunning perennial, annual and herb
gardens, working fruit orchards and
natural woodlands through which
century-old trails meander up to and
along the Saw Kill River, which tumbles
through a postcard-perfect waterfall
down to the waiting Hudson.
The Upper Valley
Frederic Edwin Church was perhaps
the premier artist of the Hudson River
School of 19th-century landscape painting. And many of his paintings were composed right here at his hilltop estate.
He called it Olana, which means
“treasure house” in ancient Persian,
and designed every last detail in
Persian-Moorish style—right down
to mixing the paint colors himself. He
also meticulously oversaw the landscaping on his 250-acre spread to frame
and highlight the views of the river
and mountains.
“I can make more and better land-
scapes in this way,” Church wrote,
“than by tampering with canvas and
paint in the studio.”
The shorter family tour points out
all the bric-a-brac Church collected
over 30 years of world travel, including
furniture, tapestries, rugs, bronzes,
paintings, sculptures and even sombre-
ros. Best of all is looking out the wide,
Middle Eastern–style windows and see-
ing the very vistas he painted. Taking a
long walk over the roads Church him-
self cut through the woods and then
along a ridge overlooking the river,
you get a small sense of what it must
have been like to live like the rich and
famous in New York’s stunning Hudson
Valley 150 years ago.
