Good Neighbors: Cold Spring, Garrison, and Putnam County

by Max Watman and photographs by Steffen Thalemann, February 24, 2011

Before we moved to Cold Spring, my wife and I lived in Brooklyn. (This is actually a joke in Cold Spring, because if you moved here in the last seven years, there’s an 80 percent chance you moved from Brooklyn.) We had a beater car, an old Mercedes diesel that looked as if it had driven through a roadblock to get out of a city under siege—holes in the grill, the hood ornament gone, streaks of grime—and on the weekends we’d cruise two-lane roads, looking at the scenery and stopping for lunch. One day we found Route 9D, which hugs the river south of Beacon and heads through Cold Spring and Garrison. We must have had a moment of confusion as we drove past the gravel parking lots just north of Breakneck Ridge, where a throng of hikers walked along the shoulder to the trailhead to climb the steepest terrain in the Hudson Highlands. The dramatic rocky cliff is pierced by a narrow strip of asphalt, the tunnel itself so short as to give the impression that the ridge above it must be a veritable knife-edge of granite. I remember clearing the tunnel, and hitting the flat stretch of byway that hugs the shore of the Hudson and grants a view of Storm King and Crow’s Nest mountains across the water. It took our breath away.

“Holy shit,” I said. “Who gets to live here?”

We imagined, at the time, that the area must be full of railroad tycoons. Who else would have access to a place of such arresting physical beauty, devoid of the sprawl that plagues so much of America? This impression is enhanced by the long driveways and distant mansions of Garrison. Not so much the sweeping lawns and fences of Boscobel—that’s obviously public, with a big sign announcing the summertime Shakespeare festival—but the towering stones of Castle Rock perched high atop a hill certainly look imposing. Castle Rock was, in fact, the home of Illinois Central Railroad president William H. Osborn and his family. They also built another grand, rocky house nearby (now available for weddings) called Cat Rock.

In Cold Spring, however, the houses are small. They are not extravagantly expensive. When we decided to move out of the city, we wanted most of all to live within walking distance of the train station, and we made that our highest priority. I work at home, but my wife works in the city, and we knew that her trip to town could define our life. Because of that, the vibe of the town was almost an afterthought, though it quickly enchanted us.