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28 Oct 08
an Australian station
hudson_river hudson_valley new_york history interview writer war wall_street wealthy_and_decadent bridge poughkeepsie landscape
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The Puritans actually landed in Massachusetts, and closer to another river which is the Connecticut River But the Hudson Valley and the Hudson River was settled initially by the Dutch, and the Dutch were very, very different stock in the 17th century, from a 17th century English Puritan. The Puritans of course had come to this country to establish a religion, and to practice their religion in relative freedom. In the case of the Dutch, they came to the Hudson Valley to make money. And so it's a very, very different attitude that they brought to the river.
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The Hudson was the scene of the two greatest battles of the American Revolution, and those were the first and second battles of Saratoga, a place not very far from where I'm sitting right now. And what happened in those battles was that the American Generals made use of the remarkable topography of the river at that place, to halt the British advance down river. And the British had no choice but to meet the American rebels at that place, and on two occasions they fought, and on both occasions the British withdrew, and ultimately lost, and ultimately surrendered.
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The houses after the American Civil War, 1865 to about 1890, those houses were extraordinary. We would call those people today nouveau-riche. They were people who'd made enormous killings in stocks and bonds on Wall Street in New York, and the houses that I have seen, and I've seen probably all of them, are opulent. One of the Vanderbilt houses, one of the Vanderbilts said, 'Make it like the Trianon', that is in Paris, Versailles, 'only larger.' So it was just be as opulent as you can. There was the notion that great wealth and displays of great wealth knew no bounds in the middle and late 19th century. And especially after the Civil War.
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major bridges there are I think about eleven. But there's some wonderful ones that are strikingly beautiful, and the ones that I particularly love and care for, are the great suspension spans, the George Washington bridge, which some of your listeners might be familiar with, the Bear Mountain bridge (I'm working up the river), which is near West Point United States Military Academy, and then working further up the river, the Mid-Hudson Bridge at Poughkeepsie. These are wonderful suspension bridges, graceful, with wonderful catenary curves. And the bridges, don't forget, are the creation of the 1920s and 1930s. The width of the Hudson made it impossible to span it reasonably up until really the 20th century.
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We take things for granted, in all of your listeners and certainly anyone I know, and even myself, we look around and we don't really see things. We take our natural landscape for granted. And our landscapes should not be taken for granted. They are places of civilisation, they are places of history, and if we don't know that history, we're not just professing ignorance, we're actually professing a kind of rudeness.
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