Park Bench Chat

New York-Fall Foliage: from the City to the Hudson River Valley

Ah, autumn in New York! From our luxurious home base at The Pierre hotel overlooking Central Park, we will explore the city’s parks and green spaces, many created with help from The Trust for Public Land. We’ll begin our exploration with a private afternoon tour of Central Park with former New York parks commissioner-now The Trust for Public Land’s director of park development-Adrian Benepe. The next morning, we’ll head to one of the city’s coolest places to play, the new “green infrastructure” playground and community park at P.S. 164 in Brooklyn. We’ll stop at 6/15 Green, a community garden that is a showcase for urban sustainability, before lunching at The River Café, a Michelin Star restaurant at the new Brooklyn Bridge Park. In the afternoon, we’ll tour the High Line, a trendsetting linear park built on a historic freight rail above the streets of Manhattan’s West Side. The next day we’ll board a train heading North to the Valley. From our perch at the Mohonk Mountain House, a national historic landmark nestled along the dramatic Shawangunk mountain ridge, we hike on century-old carriageways along the stunning cliffs, exposed summits, and rocky plateaus of Minnewaska State Park Preserve.

Through a colorful corridor of fall foliage, we stroll along the Wallkill Valley Rail Trail to the scenic village of New Paltz, founded in 1677 by French Huguenots. Crossing over to the Hudson’s eastern shore, we embark on a guided walking tour of the Home of Franklin D. Roosevelt National Historic Site, “Springwood.” We savor a gourmet lunch at The Culinary Institute of America at Hyde Park, where students and staff bring the wealth and diversity of America’s culinary heritage to the table. Art historians and modernists will delight in the works of the Hudson River School and a stroll through the colossal structures housed at Storm King Art Center.