The Hudson River Valley
October 5-9, 2006

This five-day tour of America's most celebrated landscape in literature and art, which was co-sponsored by the Society of Architectural Historians and the Foundation for Landscape Studies, was led by Winthrop Aldrich, an advisor to the Hudson River Valley National Heritage Area and a member of the tenth generation of his family to own land at Rokeby, in Red Hook, Dutchess Country. Its focus was on the area's extraordinary architectural and landscape heritage. The sites visited included Lyndhurst, the Gothic Revival mansion designed in 1838 by Alexander Jackson Davis in Tarrytown; Rockwood Hall, William Rockefeller's Sleepy Hollow estate, now a state park; Manitoga, Russel Wright's modernist garden in Garrison; the extraordinary Hudson Highlands garden of Frederic Rich, chairman of the Foundation for Landscape Studies, also in Garrison; Downing Park in Newburgh, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux in 1889; the 1824 Lydig Munson Hoyt House by Calvert Vaux in Staatsburgh; Edgewater in Barrytown, the 1822 mansion owned by Richard Jenrette, the architectural preservationist whose avocation is collecting and restoring historic houses and refurnishing them with period furniture; Olana, the architecturally exotic "castle" designed and owned by Hudson River School artist Frederic Church; several historically important industrial sites in Troy; and in Albany a group of architecturally significant buildings, including the Capitol and City Hall by H. H. Richardson and St. Peter's Episcopal Church by Richard Upjohn.