Driving to distraction

By DENIS HORGAN
HARTFORD COURANT
They must have wondrous powers of concentration, these people of the Hudson Valley.
How else would Washington Irving have been able to scribble even a single tale of hobgoblins and headless horsemen when he was surrounded in Tarrytown by so much beauty as the great river flowed by outside his window, the hills beyond looking so beautiful? How else could today's congregation of the tiny Union Church of Pocantico Hills heed the wisdom from the pulpit when they pray amid the glories of truly astonishing stained glass windows by Henri Matisse and Marc Chagall?
Magnificent scenes
Simply driving down the streets and lanes of New York's Hudson Valley could be menace aplenty if you are one of the woolly minded sorts easily distracted by magnificent views, incredible architecture and the broad paintbrush of history.
For centuries the Hudson Valley has been home, workplace and retreat for some of the nation's most solid citizens. Great barons of industry, agriculture, literature, art and finance created dazzling humanscapes to rival the dazzling landscapes. Regular people like the rest of us, too, have been there in abundance to make it all go.
In geographic terms, the valley is a modest-enough place. A broad river has carved the 40 miles of valley on its last leg to the sea. Henry Hudson thought it might go all the way to the Pacific. He was wrong. The farms can be lush but do not run to the "plantation" size so common in grander places. This is the Northeast, after all. There are heights, which are amused to be called mountains, but they are hills at best. It is all very pretty -- but there are many places that are very pretty.
Yet from Washington Irving's nearly modest Sunnyside in the south to artist Frederick Church's palatial Olana in the north, the valley is one spectacular sight (and site) after another. You cannot drive a mile or two along its Route 9 spine without encountering yet another estate, another park, another bridge, another cliff, another farm, another lovely town, another vista, each of which would alone be worth the trip.
Shaped by wealth
The beauty is in the land, the forests, the architecture, the wealth and the spirit of the place. From the nation's earliest times it has been home to the towering figures of commerce and creativity who shaped the country's destiny. Blending the richness of the farming with the majesty of Jovian amounts of money spent on castles and manors, the Hudson Valley shouldered aside the grabby development that has spoiled less blessed places.
And it's all ours for the viewing.
So many of the private estates have been converted to public treasures. Sunnyside, draped in boas of wisteria, sits on a cliff's edge over the river. Set amid picnic grounds and general natural beauty, its serenity is unfazed by the passenger trains that zip by below or the stretching Tappan Zee Bridge off to the north. For $4, you can wander around the place to your heart's content.
Just up the street -- a very lovely street -- is Lyndhurst, a Gothic revival palace, once owned by tycoon and railroad magnate Jay Gould, sitting on 67 acres of park greenery. Mowing the lawn would wreck your weekends. Dandelions are forbidden, but a few sneak in anyway. Good for them.
It would be a help to be a Rockefeller to be able to afford the $20 tab to tour the Rockefellers' estate Kykuit (pronounced Kee-quit, which means "Hill Top" in Dutch), but it's worth the price. If you are extremely lucky, you, too, might get Mary Lou Walker as guide -- herself a treasure to rival the breathtaking artwork, engineering, landscaping and history collected at this amazing place.
It is several tours rolled into one, as Kykuit is a tremendous collection of art, a masterpiece of the gardener's art, an encyclopedia of America's powerful of the past 150 years. The separate tastes of "JDR," "Junior" and "The Governor" contribute remarkably different qualities to this grand estate.
Old JDR likely spun in his Ohio grave that the descendants actually had wine -- and, worse, danced! -- in his deep Baptist haven. (He liked golf, the horses and the gardens most, paying more for the landscaping than even for the building itself.)
Works of art
Then there are the windows at Union Church. Passing by on Route 448 east of Sleepy Hollow, you would never imagine that such treasures shone within the small frame of the Union Church of Pocantico Hills. There's a sign out front alerting folks to a bake sale. You'd easily drive past without a thought that within that small building are housed works of art of value beyond calculation.
Commissioned by the Rockefellers, Matisse and Chagall produced glorious stained glass windows -- Matisse's last such project, Chagall's only one. For $4 we can admire the masters' work from as close as you might ever get to such things outside a museum. It is truly an amazing experience.
Back up Route 9, Philipsburg Manor, the living museum of Van Cortland Manor, the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, the Roosevelts' Hyde Park homes, Mills Mansion, Wilderstein, Montgomery Place, Clermont and Olana offer their own distinct pieces of art and history to the curious visitor.
But the Hudson Valley is not just grand estates from a long-gone era of extravagance. There's a living agenda of fairs, festivals and events of all sorts to bring to life the mere masonry. There's almost always something going on.
With all the historic attractions, with the variety of events and the glorious natural beauties of the regions, you could wonder how it was that Rip Van Winkle managed to stay asleep for so long.
XFor more information, visit www.hudsonvalley.org on the Web.