Hudson River

• 1. Introduction

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  The Hudson River, which runs 315 miles through New York and along the border with New Jersey, carries a name that means the river that flows two ways. The Mohican people called it Muh-he-kun-ne-tuk, and the name has also been translated as waters that are never still. It describes the river's long tidal range, which the Mohicans knew well. Far upstream, the current still changes direction with the tides. A river like that raises odd questions. How does a stream that starts in the Adirondack Mountains end up taking orders from the Atlantic Ocean? Who fought to control it, and why did so many nations want it? How did one waterway reshape the trade of a continent? And what happened when factories turned its water toxic, and what swims in it now?

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• 2. Shape Of The River

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  At an elevation of 4,322 feet, Henderson Lake in the Adirondack Mountains is the source of the Hudson. Popular culture often prefers the photogenic Lake Tear of the Clouds. Water leaving that smaller lake is first called Feldspar Brook, then the Opalescent River. Only after it reaches Calamity Brook and the eastern outlet of Henderson Lake does the United States Geological Survey call it the Hudson.

  At Warrensburg the young river takes in the Schroon River, and farther south it receives the Sacandaga River from the Great Sacandaga Lake. It passes through Glens Falls, just south of Lake George, though it gets no streamflow from that lake. At Fort Edward it meets the Champlain Canal, which historically carried boats between New York City and Montreal. In Waterford it takes in the Mohawk River, its largest tributary. Then comes the Federal Dam in Troy. The bottom of the dam sits at an elevation of just 2 feet and marks where the tide begins to be felt.

  South of that dam, the river widens considerably and flows between Albany on the west bank and Rensselaer on the east. Between Gee's Point at the US Military Academy and Constitution Island lies a stretch called World's End. At 202 feet, it is the deepest part of the Hudson. Just beyond, the river squeezes through the Hudson Highlands, between mountains such as Storm King Mountain, Breakneck Ridge, and Bear Mountain. Below the Highlands it opens into Haverstraw Bay, 3.5 miles across, the widest point of the river. The Palisades, large rocky cliffs, line the west bank farther south. South of the Battery in Manhattan, the river proper ends. There it meets the East River and forms Upper New York Bay.

  Geologists sometimes call the Hudson a drowned river. When the Wisconsin glaciation, the most recent ice age, retreated, rising seas flooded the coastal plain and pushed salt water well above the river's mouth. The lower half now fills the Hudson Fjord, an inlet carved by glaciers. Out under the Atlantic, the old riverbed survives as Hudson Canyon, a rich fishing area. Its outline can be traced to the edge of the continental shelf.

  About 6,000 years ago, the river most likely took a very different route to the sea. Staten Island and Long Island were then joined, so the Hudson turned west through northern New Jersey. It ran along the eastern side of the Watchung Mountains to Bound Brook and out through Raritan Bay. Water built up in Upper New York Bay until it broke through the land linking Staten Island and Brooklyn. That breach is the Narrows, and it gave the river a shorter path to the ocean.

  The tide's effects reach far upriver. Because ocean influence extends to Troy, the average freshwater discharge there is only about 17,400 cubic feet per second. By the river's mouth it is roughly 21,900. There are about two high tides and two low tides a day, and the tidal current moves north slowly. As a result, one stretch can be at high tide while another sits at the bottom of low tide. Winter ice floes may drift south or north, depending on the tide. The salt line, where fresh water gives way to ocean water, usually lies near Newburgh. It can swing anywhere from Poughkeepsie to Battery Park.

  The Hudson and its tributaries drain 13,000 square miles. That watershed covers much of New York and parts of Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Vermont. The city of Poughkeepsie and several neighboring communities, about 100,000 people in all, draw their drinking water from the river.

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• 3. River Of Many Names

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  To the Haudenosaunee, the Mohawks among them, the river was Ka'nón:no, a name that simply means the river. The Lenape called it Muhheakantuck. The Delaware Tribe of Indians in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, considers the closely related Mohicans to be part of the Lenape people. For that reason the Lenape claim the Hudson as part of their ancestral territory too.

  In 1524, the Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano, sailing for King Francis I of France, became the first European known to have entered Upper New York Bay. He judged the river to be an estuary. The following year, the Portuguese explorer Estêvão Gomes, working for Spain, explored the Mid-Atlantic coast. His name for the river was the Rio San Antonio, the first known European name for it.

  The Dutch had several names of their own. One early name was Rio de Montaigne. Others were Manhattes rieviere, or Manhattan River, and Groote Rivier, or Great River. They also used de grootte Mouritse reviere, the Great Maurits River, in honor of Maurice, Prince of Orange. Most often they called it the Noortrivier, or North River, and they called the Delaware the Zuidrivier, or South River.

  The name that finally won out honors Henry Hudson, an Englishman sailing for the Dutch East India Company, who explored it in 1609. Hudson Bay in Canada is named after him too. It is believed that the cartographer John Carwitham first used the name Hudson River on a map in 1740. Even so, North River stayed in use around the New York metropolitan area until the early 1900s. It has not disappeared. Commercial shipping crews still use it in radio communication, especially below the Tappan Zee. It survives in the North River piers, the North River Tunnels, and the North River Wastewater Treatment Plant.

  In 1939, the magazine Life called the Hudson "America's Rhine," comparing it to the 760-mile Rhine in Central and Western Europe.

  The tidal Hudson is unusually straight for a river. The earliest Dutch charts gave names to its narrow, meandering stretches, which they called racks, or reaches. Four lower reaches run through the Hudson Highlands: Seylmakers rack, Cocks rack, Hoogh rack, and Vosserack. Four upper reaches run from Inbocht Bay to Kinderhook: Backers rack, Jan Pleysiers rack, Klevers rack, and Harts rack. The Englishman Robert Juet described a ninth as the long reach, which the Dutch designated the Langerack. A nineteenth-century guidebook for steamboat passengers later printed an embellished and partly erroneous list of these "Old Reaches."

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• 4. Dutch Gateway

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  Navish, a major settlement at Croton Point, overlooked the river long before any European ship appeared. The Lenape, Wappinger, and Mahican branches of the Algonquians lived along the Hudson, mostly in peace with one another. They lived in small clans and villages, in wigwams, though large families often shared longhouses that could be a hundred feet long. They grew corn, beans, and squash, and gathered hickory nuts, wild fruits, and tubers. They fished for striped bass, American eels, sturgeon, herring, and shad, and they harvested oysters from the river floor. On land they hunted turkey, deer, and bear.

  The Lenape held the lower river, while the Wappingers lived from Manhattan Island up to Poughkeepsie and traded with the Lenape to the south and the Mahicans to the north. The Mahican homeland ran from present-day Kingston to Lake Champlain, with a capital near present-day Albany.

  In 1598, Dutch men employed by the Greenland Company wintered in New York Bay. The decisive voyage came in 1609, when the Dutch East India Company financed Henry Hudson to search for the Northeast Passage. Sea ice blocked him, so he crossed the Atlantic westward in pursuit of a Northwest Passage instead. He sailed up the river to a point near Stuyvesant, then called Old Kinderhook. The ship's boat, carrying five members of the crew, pushed on to the vicinity of present-day Albany, where navigation came to an end.

  The Dutch then founded the colony of New Netherland, with three major fur-trading outposts. New Amsterdam stood at the river's mouth and would become New York City. Wiltwyck, roughly halfway up the river, became Kingston. Fort Orange, farther north, became Albany. The Dutch West India Company held a monopoly for roughly twenty years before other businessmen could start ventures there. Because the river was the gateway to the American interior, the English and the Dutch competed for years over control of it.

  In 1647, Director-General Peter Stuyvesant took over management of the colony. In 1664, he surrendered it to the British, who had invaded the largely defenseless New Amsterdam. The town and the colony were renamed New York, after the Duke of York. Under British rule, the valley became an agricultural hub. Manors spread along the east side of the river, while the west side held many smaller, independent farms. In 1754, the Albany Plan of Union was drawn up at Albany City Hall. It let the colonies make treaties with the Iroquois and gave the Continental Congress a framework to build on.

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• 5. Revolutionary Chokepoint

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  British general John Burgoyne planned the Saratoga campaign around the river's closeness to Lake George and Lake Champlain. Control of that route would let the British navy command the water path from Montreal to New York City. It would also cut off New England, the patriot hub east of the river, from the South and Mid-Atlantic regions to the west. With that done, the British could concentrate on rallying loyalists in the southern states.

  Battles followed along the river and nearby waters. The Battle of Long Island came in August 1776, and the Battle of Harlem Heights the following month. Later that year, British and Continental forces clashed in the river towns of Westchester County, ending at the Battle of White Plains.

  Also in late 1776, New England militias fortified the Hudson Highlands, the river's choke point. They built Fort Clinton and Fort Montgomery on either side of the water and strung a metal chain between them. In 1777, Washington expected the British to try for the river. They took Philadelphia instead and left a smaller force in New York City, free to strike the Hudson Valley whenever it chose.

  That strike came on the 5th of October 1777, in the Battle of Forts Clinton and Montgomery. The British sailed up the Hudson, looted the village of Peekskill, and captured both forts. The Continentals answered the next year. In 1778 they built the Great West Point Chain, meant to stop any British fleet from sailing up the river again.

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• 6. Canals And Steam

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  The Erie Canal, completed in 1825, joined Albany on the Hudson to Buffalo on Lake Erie. Through the Great Lakes, the Mohawk River, and the Hudson, it tied the Midwest to the Port of New York. Western settlers used it to travel west, and frontier cities used it to send goods to market and to export them through New York City. The canal made New York one of the most vital ports in the nation, surpassing the Port of Philadelphia and the ports of Massachusetts. Its original route emptied into the Hudson at the Albany Basin, just 3 miles south of the Federal Dam.

  Smaller canals soon branched from it. The Champlain Canal linked the Hudson near Troy to the southern end of Lake Champlain. The Oswego Canal joined the Erie Canal to Lake Ontario and could be used to bypass Niagara Falls. The Cayuga-Seneca Canal connected it to Cayuga Lake and Seneca Lake. Farther south, the Delaware and Hudson Canal ended at Kingston and carried Pennsylvania coal to New York, avoiding the dangerous coastal route.

  In 1807, the North River Steamboat, later known as Clermont, became the first commercially successful steamboat. It carried passengers between New York City and Albany. The Hudson River Day Line later offered steamboat passenger service on the same route from 1863 until 1962, when Circle Line Sightseeing Cruises bought it.

  During the Industrial Revolution, hundreds of factories rose around the river, especially near Albany and Troy. They also stood in towns such as Poughkeepsie, Newburgh, Kingston, and Hudson. The North Tarrytown Assembly in Sleepy Hollow, later owned by General Motors, was a large and notable example. The river's links to the Erie Canal and the Great Lakes let Midwestern manufacturers, including the automobile makers of Detroit, ship goods this way.

  Railroads followed. The Hudson River Railroad opened in 1849 on the east bank to carry passengers between New York City and Albany. The Livingston Avenue Bridge opened in 1866 and linked it with the New York Central Railroad, which runs west to Buffalo. On the west bank, the West Shore Railroad ran passenger service from Weehawken, New Jersey, to Albany and on to Buffalo. In 1889, the Poughkeepsie Railroad Bridge opened between Poughkeepsie and the west side of the river.

  Crossing the Hudson took longer to master. The first bridge over it was the Troy Union Bridge, built in 1804 and destroyed in 1909. Near New York City, where the river is wide, the great crossings came in the twentieth century. The Holland Tunnel opened in 1927 as the longest underwater tunnel in the world at the time. Its ventilation system was designed to prevent carbon monoxide from building up. The George Washington Bridge and the first tube of the Lincoln Tunnel followed in the 1930s. The original Tappan Zee Bridge, built in 1955 between Tarrytown and Nyack, spanned one of the widest parts of the river. Today the George Washington Bridge, joining Fort Lee, New Jersey, to the Washington Heights neighborhood of Upper Manhattan, is the world's busiest motor vehicle bridge.

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• 7. Painters And Writers

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  Washington Irving, the first internationally acclaimed American author, found both his subject and his inspiration in the Hudson valley and its inhabitants in the eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century, the same landscape gave its name to the Hudson River School of painting, an American pastoral style. The area also helped inspire the concepts of environmentalism and wilderness.

  Thomas Cole is generally acknowledged as the founder of the Hudson River School, and his work was first reviewed in 1825. Frederic Edwin Church and Albert Bierstadt were its most successful painters. Their canvases were detailed and idealized, and they often set peaceful agriculture beside the remaining wilderness. That wilderness was fast disappearing from the valley just as people began to prize its ruggedness and sublimity. The artists generally saw the American landscape as an ineffable manifestation of God, though their depth of religious conviction varied. Writers such as Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson shared their reverence for natural beauty.

  The river may have reached into literature in another way. On the 29th of March 1647, a white whale swam up the Hudson to Rensselaerswyck, near Albany. Herman Melville, author of Moby-Dick, lived in and near Albany from 1830 to 1847. He was also known to have ancestry from New Netherland, which leads some to believe that stories of the whale sighting inspired his novel.

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• 8. Poison And Return

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  Between 1947 and 1977, General Electric contaminated the river with polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs. These chemicals harmed wildlife and the people who ate fish from the river. Mercury and discharges of partially treated sewage caused further ecological problems. Most commercial fishing on the river was shut down in 1976 because of pollution.

  In 1966, a group of fishermen formed an organization that later became Riverkeeper, the first member of the Waterkeeper Alliance. The musician Pete Seeger founded the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater and the Clearwater Festival to draw attention to the problem. Activism in New York and across the country, along with growing interest in Congress, led to the Clean Water Act of 1972. Extensive remediation began in the 1970s, once wastewater discharge permits were issued and enforced. In 1984, the Environmental Protection Agency declared a 200-mile stretch from Hudson Falls to New York City a Superfund site, one of the largest in the country. It ordered General Electric to remove PCBs from its old factory site in Hudson Falls, along with millions of cubic yards of contaminated sediment. Removal work has continued into the twenty-first century. Christopher Swain became the first person to swim the whole river, in support of the cleanup.

  A 2020 report on the river's health states that "Water quality in the Hudson River Estuary has improved dramatically since 1972 and has remained largely stable in recent years." Warnings remain, though. The state Department of Health recommends eating no fish caught from the South Glens Falls Dam to the Federal Dam at Troy. It advises women under 50 and children under 15 against eating any fish caught south of the Palmer Falls Dam in Corinth.

  One fish carries the pollution in its genes. The Atlantic tomcod adapted resistance to the toxic effects of PCBs, and scientists identified the genetic mutation that conferred it. The mutated form was present in 99 percent of the tomcods in the Hudson, compared with fewer than 10 percent in other waters.

  The Atlantic sturgeon, a species about 120 million years old, can grow up to 15 feet and 800 pounds. It is the symbol of the Hudson River Estuary. Since 1779, people in the valley ate its smoked flesh, sometimes called "Albany beef." In the 1850s and 1860s, Albany was nicknamed "Sturgeondom" or "Sturgeontown," and its residents were "Sturgeonites." The nickname lost popularity around 1900. Fishing for the sturgeon has been off limits since 1998. The shortnose sturgeon, a federally endangered species, has quadrupled in number since the 1970s.

  The valley's economy changed as well. In 1993, IBM closed two plants, in East Fishkill and Kingston, after losing $16 billion over the previous three years. The East Fishkill plant had employed 16,300 workers at its peak in 1984. In 1996, the General Motors plant in North Tarrytown closed. Towns along the river then courted technology companies and built newer housing and office developments. In 2009, the High Line opened in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, and the abandoned Poughkeepsie railroad bridge became the 1.2-mile Walkway Over the Hudson. Waterfront parks followed in Kingston, Poughkeepsie, and Beacon.

  The water has its newcomers too. More than 100 foreign species now live in the river and along its banks. The zebra mussel arrived in 1989 and has spread through the freshwater region, reducing phytoplankton and river oxygen levels. Yet one trend runs against the world's usual pattern. The estuary holds about 7,000 acres of wetlands, and rising sea levels from climate change are expected to expand them rather than shrink them. Wetlands are expected to migrate upland as the river rises, giving more habitat to the region's fish and birds.

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