There’s a nice piece in the Times about the Long Path, a very long hiking trail through New Jersey and New York running roughly parallel to the Hudson River: “Walking From Manhattan to the Catskills on the ‘Long Path’.” As it happens, I’ve walked a small piece of the path, from the Manhattan end of the George Washington Bridge, and then up through the Palisades in New Jersey. The trail is hundreds of miles long and I’ve walked maybe ten miles of it, so I don’t claim to know it well. The southern portion is the Palisades Interstate Park, originally created shortly after 1900 and expanded since. Here’s a view of the Palisades, some rather dramatic cliffs, around the time the park was created:
Based on the photos in the article, the views may get less dramatic further north, but the trail gets more secluded, which must be nice.
Manhattan is by far the densest urban area in the country; New York City as a whole is sixth, behind five small towns among its suburbs, because of the low density of Staten Island and the relatively low density of Queens. The New York metropolitan area as a whole is densely settled and large in area. So the presence of something like the Long Path and the Palisades Park (or the Gateway National Recreation Area around the harbor, or several other nature preserves) is not an accident but rather the result of a concerted effort to preserve some of the past landscape. That moment when you stumble into a piece of the old landscape so close to the modern city is jarring, but in my opinion worth it.
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