Where in the Hudson Valley…?
You don’t need an eagle eye to spot photographer Emile Brunel’s tremendous totem pole just off Route 28 in Boiceville, Ulster County. “My grandchildren were so surprised to see this,” writes Suzanne Rowan of Suffern, frequent traveler and this month’s winner, “they’re always looking for the unusual when out with Grandma and Grandpa.” We hope aspiring Valley adventurers can identify this month’s landmark — a peaceful stone Buddha — pictured here.
I used to baby-sit for the Lynch boys, Drue and Sean, during my high school years. Ann Lynch, their mother and the granddaughter of Mr. Brunel, taught me how to play the guitar. I still have a seed necklace and turquoise ring I purchased from the trading post.
Kathy (Burkhardt) Schoonmaker
Stone Ridge
I do a lot of work on Wikipedia articles about the Hudson Valley’s listings on the National Register of Historic Places, and I always appreciate that so many of your Back Page choices come from that group. In late summer I visited the Brunel studio and took some pictures of the totem poles. Great pick!
Daniel Case
Walden
Picturing the Past
Your exceptional article Then and Now (December) created a wonderful buzz around here. We also have a love of the history of our area and have donated historic lithograph reproductions to many organizations through our Community Heritage Initiative. We maintain thousands of historic postcards on our Web site, www.realesolutions.com. They are free for anyone to preview or print. The feedback from our initiatives has been wonderful.
Dave Smith
Real Estate Solutions
Pine Bush
Then and Now was very interesting. The vintage photos were fascinating and the copy was informative. Too bad you didn’t include even one photo of Albany. It seems as if your magazine thinks the Hudson Valley ends at Kingston. It’s incomprehensible that you would omit what is the oldest and most historically rich city of them all.
Michael Howard
Albany
You’re absolutely right. While our editorial content generally focuses more on the mid-Hudson region, we should not have omitted Albany from our article. Please look for some historic shots of Albany in an upcoming issue. — Ed.
Corrections
Our December On The Town page pictured the groundbreaking ceremony for Larkin Plaza, a green space to be constructed adjacent to St. Luke’s Cornwall Hospital in Newburgh. There are no plans for a new outpatient care center at the site, as we mistakenly reported.
Susan Smith of the Palisades Interstate Park Commission wrote to clarify some information in “Pleasure Park” (Then and Now). Bear Mountain State Park was first established in 1909 along with Harriman State Park; it opened to the public in 1913. The parks’ lands were secured through a combination of public and private donations of both acreage and funds. One photo — which we identified as Boy Scouts camping near Hessian Lake — actually pictured a group of newsboys brought to the park by journalist Jacob Riis in 1919.
Word Wizard
Congrats to Robert Huber of Hopewell Junction, who solved our crossword puzzle (November 2008) and won our raffle. Click here for the original puzzle (and here to check your answers).
