Old Croton Aqueduct Trail
“Seen from the air, the Old Croton Aqueduct gives the impression that a giant mole had tunneled its way south from the Croton River to New York City, throwing up the slight bulge that is the telltale sign of the animal's passage through a lawn”.
So yesterday I pulled out the hybrid and used it as a mountain bike in traversing the 26 miles (of the original 41) in 2 days. Tuesday I approached from the South in Yonkers ….toTarrytown, and Wednesday from the North…..The Croton Dam to Ossining. The path of the Old Croton Aqueduct is a National Historic Landmark.
At times it was easy to envision hundreds of Irish immigrants hacking away with picks and shovels and laying the brick that would form the tunnels bringing water to New York City for the first time. In 1840 the lower Hudson Valley was fairly settled. Hostility toward the aqueduct took many forms. Surveying parties were denied access to some properties under threat of suits for trespass. Surveyors were subjected to abusive language or even assaulted. Stakes hammered into the ground to mark site boundaries mysteriously disappeared. Landowners attempted to extract every bit of compensation they could by any means. Opportunistic speculators bought up farmland along the route of the aqueduct, divided it into village lots, and tried to convince aqueduct appraisers of their inflated values.
Worse still were the hundreds upon hundreds of Irish Immigrants trampling property and setting up “shanties” all along the route. Even Washington Irving, who was no exception to the xenophobia of the day, and whose house (Sunnyside) was between the Hudson and the Aqueduct, contributed to one of the lighter moments of that period……
“In an 1840 letter to the editor of Knickerbocker Magazine in New York City, he described how a camp of Irish laborers near Sleepy Hollow had been beset by the headless apparitions associated with the place and aroused by “strangers of an unknown tongue.” These ghostly specters intimidated the workers, and kept them from walking past the haunted Dutch church to nearby whiskey mills, so that “the paddys will not any longer venture out of their shantys at night.”
Washington Irving used his 1820 book “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” to spread rumors of a headless horseman, keeping “the Paddys” confined to their shanty’s at night. Needless to say I “howled” when I read that.
“Pick-and-shovel work was new to America, and few Americans wanted to do it. As a result, successive waves of Irish were welcomed to the cities, where their labor met the need for better streets, sewers and new housing, all the while suffering terrible hardships doing the roughest, most dangerous work without complaint. The Irish hod carrier and bricklayer became the butt of many a vaudeville joke. With time, however, prejudices eventually faded, as the brawn and mechanical skills of the Irish made their adopted country an industrial giant and the envy of the world”.
My Great Great Grandfather, Peter Tague, was one of them. Coming to this country during the Great Potato Famine he settled in Port Ewen across the Rondout from Kingston, NY. He worked the barges on the Delaware and Hudson Canal bringing Anthracite coal from Pennsylvania to the Hudson to be shipped South to NYC or North to the Erie Canal for distribution to the interior. Anthracite coal was the “gold standard” …burned efficiently with less smoke and soot. While living in Port Ewen, and as was common in those days, Peter took in boarders and adopted. When Peter’s wife died he followed his sons to NYC, living in Red Hook, Brooklyn, where he became captain of a tug boat in a19th century version of “On the Waterfront”. He had lived a hard life when he died at age 75, livingthrough three quarters of the 19th century……..quite a feat.
 Croton Trail Ventilation Shaft |
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 Phillipsburg Manor |
 Hudson River Palisades |
 State Historic Park |
 Scene off the Croton Trail |
Off the Old Croton Aqueduct Trail, in Irvington, is the amazing Amour-Steiner house, often called the Octagon House.
The Armour-Stiner (Octagon) House is one of the most visually unique homes in the world. It is the only known residence constructed in the eight-sided, domed colonnaded shape of a classic Roman Temple.The Octagon House was originally built in the 1860s following the publication of The Octagon House, a Home for All by Orson Squire Fowler, a phrenologist, sexologist and amateur architect. Fowler advocated octagonal instead of four-sided houses on the supposition that the shape enclosed more space, created rooms which received twice as much sunlight and had greater accessibility to each other.In 1872, the house was purchased by Joseph Stiner, a prominent New York City tea merchant. His alterations created the present lyrical structure. The exterior embellishments are extraordinarily festive with floral detailing in the cast iron cresting and railings and elaborately carved wood scrollwork and capitals – all painted in shades of rose, blue, violet and red. The interiors are equally decorative with painted and stenciled ceilings, trim with gold, silver and bronze leaf and unique 8-sided motifs in the plasterwork, woodwork and etched glass.
Subsequent owners of the house have been imaginative people. In the 1930s it was occupied by Aleko E. Lilius, a Finnish writer and explorer who had lived with a female pirate who plundered ships off the coast of China. Carl Carmer, the celebrated author, poet and historian, resided in the house from 1946 to the time of his death in 1976. The house plays a role in a number of his published tales, including stories of a resident ghost.
Shortly after the death of Carl Carmer, the house was acquired by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Unstable and in need of restoration, it was the first house to be resold to a private citizen. Joseph Pell Lombardi, the owner, is a Preservation Architect who has conserved the house, interiors, grounds and outbuildings.
