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Olana and Hudson
Saturday, September 29 2007
Since Gretchen's parents were in town for the weekend, it would be an activity-filled one. Today we'd be heading north to Hudson and stopping along the way to tour Olana, where Frederic Church (the famous Hudson River School painter) lived and died. We stopped briefly at Olana on the way to Hudson, but because the tours were all full until 3:30pm, we decided to visit Hudson first.
Hudson was having its autumnal Artswalk, which we didn't know much about but Gretchen had seen something about it somewhere. On Warren Street in Hudson, there didn't seem to be anything particularly festive going on. There were some galleries with art in their windows, but it wasn't as if anyone had put out any cheese and crackers or wine. The most interesting exhibits were actually in the antique shops, although some were so quirky that they seemed to transcend distinctions between antique store, gallery, and someone's private residence.
We had lunch at Baba Louie's, a cheerful restraunt built around a huge brick oven and specializing in gourmet sandwiches and pizza. Gretchen ordered a vegan pizza, usually a dubious proposition, but was delighted with what she was given. As for me, my pizza didn't just had cheese; it also had shrimp and anchovies.
On the way back towards our car, we stopped at tag sale being held in a parking lot. Well, it would have been a tag sale had the items had pricetags. Unusual for such a sale, it featured a DJ armed with an electronic keyboard filling the block with obnoxious industrial noises. The sale was being run by a handful of slackers who were sitting around drinking beer. Using her powers of negotiation, Gretchen managed to buy me a pair of large curved-glass windows (the doors from a vintage armour) for $25. At some point in his negotiations with Gretchen, one of the beer-drinking guys running the sale shrugged and admitted, "I gotta buy more beer!"
Thanks to a massive influx of New York City gays, Hudson's Warren Street is a thriving cultural center. But one street on either side, one sees Hudson the way it was at its heterosexual nadir: boarded-up windows, peeling paint, and vinyl siding. This was our last glimpse of Hudson as we drove out of town on our way back to Olana.
Olana is a large house done on a human scale. Its details and design mostly borrow from the Persian tradition (at least as it was understood by 19th Century Americans). The arches are all peaked and the columns are as spindly as chicken bones.
The view from Olana is spectacular. It sits atop a hill and looks out to the Hudson, the Catskills, as well as to a large nearby pond. It rather looks like the setting for a Hudson River School painting, although not today. Instead of the brooding storms and the bright searchlights of sunbeams, today we had clear, cloudless skies.
Olana must be something of an international destination, because we could hear other languages being spoken by the other visitors we passed (and sunbathed near) on the Olana grounds. When we toured the house, our small tour group included at least one Australian, and I surprised to see he wasn't wearing any bandages from whatever extreme thing he'd done three months before on this particular vacation.
Throughout Olana itself, and in keeping with the Persian style, many surfaces are covered with abstract stenciled designs and even Arabic characters (though many of these were written with nonsense characters or were arranged into nonsense words). Frederic Church's most famous paintings are all in big museums, so most of what is on display in Olana are his lesser-known works and the artwork he himself had collected (much of it hundreds of years older and painted by artists whose names have been lost to history). I can't say I'm much of a fan of the Hudson River School; I don't really know much about it, as there was little about it in the art history books I pored over in my youth.
An interesting shelf-type-thing in a Hudson antique store. Note to self: Gretchen would like me to maybe make her something like this.
Gretchen buys me panes of bent glass at a tag sale in Hudson. That's Gretchen's mother to the left.
The slackers running the Hudson tag sale.
Warren Street, Hudson, NY.
View from Olana, looking south down the Hudson River.
Olana. In the foreground is Gretchen.
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