Netniks, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
My wife and I recently took a four day road trip to the Hudson, New York area to see some gardens and a couple preserved homes. We stayed the first night in quaint Hudson, NY, which lost to Albany by one vote to become New York’s capital. At one time it was a bustling whaling center, if you can believe it. It’s true. We actually stayed in the Whaler Hotel and many shops and restaurants have the word “whaler” in their title. Nevertheless, today the town has lost most of its industry. There are a few decent restaurants and, for some reason, lots and lots of boutique furniture stores.
Our first stop of the day after arriving in the area was to tour Olana State Historic Site, home of the beautifully restored mansion of nineteenth century Hudson River painter Frederic Church. Church was very, very popular in the nineteenth century and became fabulously rich by selling his paintings for what in today’s money would be hundreds of thousands of dollars each. He also took his paintings on tours of the major population centers in the US. He would rent a gallery and charge twenty-five cents, a very substantial fee in those days, for thousands of art lovers to view his works. He and his wife traveled widely, and he painted striking landscapes of what he saw. So Americans got a glimpse of the natural wonders of the world in vivid color on huge canvasses.
Church died around the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth century. Eventually his direct descendents died out and his large property along the Hudson fell into ruins. At the height of his fame Church purchased a several hundred acre property along the Hudson River with a very high hill where he built a mansion. His vistas from his hilltop mansion appealed to the artist and he created “view sheds” on his property, paths between the trees that guided the eye up and down the Hudson. We visitors first learned of the term at the Visitors’ Center, where it was suggested that we watch a fifteen minute video. The views from the hilltop home are striking even today. There’s a reason for this. The modern owners of Olana have waged an unrelenting campaign to prevent any sign of industry for miles and miles of Olana in all directions. The video expects us all to be very proud of the efforts of the non-profit’s influence over such a very vast area in stopping industrial development in the bud.
There are two major accomplishments, if one may call them that. The first so-called success was stopping construction of a nuclear power plant at least ten miles south of Olana on the other side of the Hudson River. Construction of the plant was perfectly legal, but…it violated Olana’s all-important “view shed”. In other words, from the top of the hill upon which the mansion sat, one would be able to see the cooling towers on a clear day. Can’t have that! Olana successfully got the nuclear power plant moved much further south, out of Olana’s view shed. One may say that the plant was eventually built, so what’s the big deal? My point is that even if the plant was built somewhere else, undoubtedly the company had spent many millions of dollars planning its construction and getting all the permits, land acquisition, etc for the site that was eventually abandoned. This is a dead loss to the company and to its customers that can never be recovered. It’s as if you had spent time and money lining up an architect and contractors to build an addition on your home. All the permits were obtained at great time and probably great expense only to have your neighbors brow beat you into abandoning the project. Instead of a larger home for your family on its present location, you had to move.
A much later so-called accomplishment was stopping a cement company from upgrading and restarting a cement plant on the outskirts of Hudson, NY at least five miles away from Olana as the crow flies. The plant had been shuttered for a time, but the market for its high quality cement rebounded. The owners planned a substantial upgrade and expansion. But…the plant would have some tall structures that would “spoil” Olana’s “view shed”. Forget the needs of the nation that this plant would meet and the increase in employment that the rather depressed area sorely needed. The spoliation of the nineteenth century view would offend the people who now run Olana, by the way, with a very substantial monetary input each year from the burdened taxpayers of New York. Our very nice guide for our two-hour tour of the house and properties burst with pride of how Olana stopped this terrible thing from happening.
Now, remember, Olana actually owns only a few hundred acres around its prominent hill with the mansion atop. Yet it deigns to claim moral authority over all it can see; i.e., its “view shed”. Obviously the business owners who never were plus the employees who never were had no say in Olana’s conception of a better world, which just might include such plebian values as a decent paying job, a home of one’s own, and a future for one’s offspring.
© Patrick Barron 2026 Website
