And . . . the State ought to be thinking about expanding existing transit that we have. Imagine what we could have done with $7 Billion?

In other news, the Chair Factory site just north of Emeline Park in the Village of Haverstraw is to become a major staging area for Tappan Zee Bridge construction activities. Iron workers will fabricate massive bridge sections at the site and then float these components by barge to the Tappan Zee. Some State officials expect the Village to be flooded with iron workers and others working on the bridge project. The staging area will effectively tie up future development on the Chair Factor site (originally intended to become Phase III of Ginsburg Development’s waterfront revitalization project) until at least 2019. The original Tappan Zee Bridge components were fabricated in dry dock at the former clay pit that now is home to a deep water harbor, Haverstraw Marina. Both bridges, new and old, was and will be born in Haverstraw.

Which town looks more like Brooklyn? Top Row (Haverstraw) or Bottom Row (Irvington)? Photo creds: Ken Karlewics and Cat Alley

Hot off the presses, this New York Times article “Creating Hipsturbia in the Suburbs of New York” touches a whole slew of nerves and advances shallow ideas regarding demographic shifts in the Hudson Valley. The article confidently declares that Westchester Hudson River villages of Hastings, Dobbs Ferry, Tarrytown, Irvington and the like are becoming enclaves of that same Bohemian lifestyle that brought downtrodden Brooklyn back to life. No mention of Beacon, New York here. The article is the latest in a raft of publications and posts since 2010 that avow the too-cool aspects of the Hudson Valley. This edition is particularly sad because it fully ignores these towns’ history, while somehow comparing the “transformation” of these places to Brooklyn’s revival. The villages mentioned in the article are some of the whitest, wealthiest, and most educated zip codes in North America . . . and they were that way well before the word “hipster” existed. This is nothing like Brookyn’s transformation – in fact, it is astroturf.

“Welcome to hipsturbia,” indeed. Ms. Alison Bernstein, a realtor highlighted in the article, discusses a “mass exodus” of hipsters from Brooklyn to towns like the Hudson River towns, Montclair, New Jersey and Larchmont in eastern Westchester. Again, these towns have none of the characteristics that originally made Brooklyn attractive to the Creative Class. The only similarity is that they are “sprawl free” and “not very big-box retail-y, not strip-mall-y,” says Bernstein. Yet, these towns contain very little demographic diversity. Are these wealthy Brooklynites selling out, or in other words, committing hipster suicide by succumbing to a Cheeverian nightmare? In a word, yes – but it doesn’t have to be this way. Just look westward beneath the peak of High Tor.

Before going any further, the migrants detailed in this article are white, wealthy and highly educated. They may just belong in these towns as they fit exactly within the demographic that always lived here. They wear a sheen of creativity and alternative counterculture (and tattoos) that makes them in one way or another different than the Martha Stewart clones pushing expensive Bugaboo baby carriages. To somehow relate their movement from Brooklyn to ultra-wealthy Hudson River towns is ignorant, especially considering that one of the main redeeming qualities of urban pioneers is that they are economically transformative. These migrants are transforming nothing, just changing the decor. It’s not a bad thing that wealthy Brooklynites are moving into wealthy Westchester downtowns. At least they’ll bring some eclecticism. It’s hard to imagine a Rye, New York with too many art galleries or an overabundance of artisinal cheese shops.

The New York Times must go back to focusing on those river towns that are physically and socially analogous with Williamsburg or Bushwick – places like Peekskill, Yonkers, Newburgh and Haverstraw. Unfortunately, it seems that realtors like Alison Bernstein that “specialize in relocating New Yorkers to the suburbs” are pandering to the embedded “whites only” mindset that is not unlike the prevailing trends during the urban exodus of the 1950s. This article has the fingerprints of Koch Industries all over it; I’m kidding and I’m not.

I have some advice for these astroturf hipsters: Visit Haverstraw or Newburgh before you get sucked into Irvington or Mamaroneck. You can’t be truly hip in a wealthy Westchester suburb.

_____________________________

Downtown2GAGA

Also, visit this google map, so that you can explore the proposed path route: http://g.co/maps/zvaus

Bella Rose Lasagna - Borrowed from the UN of Food

A feisty food blogger from the United Nations of Food (one small man’s attempt to eat food from every country without leaving NYC ) took a weekend excursion with his fiance to Haverstraw where he was admittedly “shocked” by the wide selection of uber-awesome, unpretentious, Hudson Valley, non-yuppie, blue collar Latin/Italian, etc. food. Several times he exclaims in as many ways as he can: “And guess what?  I had it all wrong.  Haverstraw, formerly known as the brickmaking capital of the world, is a mostly working-class town, featuring a gravel mine and a gigantic oil-fired power plant.  No silly, pretentious food here.  Not even in the prettiest cafe in town.” That pretty cafe he mentions? Well, that’s the Bella Rose Cafe on New Main Street. And where did they sleep while staying in the Village? In the best bed and breakfast in the County, the Bricktown Inn on Hudson Avenue.

“For our first Haverstraw food shock, we stopped by a seven-table tacqueria called Tacos Marianita, thinking that we’d enjoy another mediocre east-coast burrito.  Nope.  This was roughly my 200th attempt at eating Mexican food in NYC and DC, and I finally found a spectacular plate of huevos rancheros, a jaw-droppingly tasty green salsa, shockingly fresh horchata, and the best chicken mole I’ve eaten east of the Rockies.  In a Rockland County restaurant with exactly zero yelp reviews.  Huh?” He’s talking about Tacos Marianita at 10 West Street, just off the Bank Corner (Broadway, Main, New Main). Could it be? The best tacos east of the Rocky Mountains is at the center of the Village of Haverstraw?! Looks like a new Yelp review just popped up. . . This post isn’t even long enough to touch on the fusion awesomeness that is Antoine McGuire’s and Union Restaurant.

“And completely by accident, we found my new favorite New York Italian restaurant. . .” the blogger boasts. This is coming from a guy that’s eaten in thousands of restaurants in New York City. While Rocklanders all but ignore this blue collar pearl on the Hudson, New Yorkers take heed. Downtown Haverstraw is the mecca for authenticity in the Hudson Valley. You just don’t know it yet.

A trip across the widest part of the Hudson River from Haverstraw, New York to the Ossining, New York MetroNorth train station. At the train station in Ossining, you can catch a train into Grand Central Terminal in midtown Manhattan or points north. The whole trip to Grand Central, including the ferry ride, takes about 1 hour.

It is possible to work in Rockland County and use the ferry to get there from Westchester, NYC, or points north. Check the ferry schedule, which conveniently lists reverse directions and when the ferry departs or arrives at Ossining or Haverstraw. More and more commuters are using the ferry to “reverse commute.” The ferry can also be used to get to White Plains, believe it or not. Once you arrive in Ossining, wait for the 11, 13, or 14 Bee Line Bus directly to White Plains: map here.

The cliffs were named by Verazzano’s crew as ‘Palisades,’ or “fence of stakes,” which was indicative of the forts built by local Native Americans. I would argue that the Native Americans, at the time, did not construct palisade walls, as this was originally a Roman tradition that was passed on to the Celts, Normans, and other Northern Europeans. Verazzano was merely describing the walls of forts he had seen on the remains of battle fields in Europe. Imagine a frontier outpost built of hacked logs, vertically buried in the ground, with the tops whittled to spikes – the spiked logs make a wall that is seemingly impenetrable. The Palisades really do resemble a palisade wall.

The United States Geological Survey (USGS) reveals much information on the Palisades Escarpment at its website: http://3dparks.wr.usgs.gov/nyc/parks/loc39.htm . The website says:

The Palisades were designated a “National Natural Landmark” being “the best example of a thick diabase sill in the United States.” The sill extends southward beyond the cliffs in Jersey City beneath the Inner Harbor, and reappear on Staten Island (see Figure 24 on the Staten Island page). The Palisades are the eroded cross-section of a large intrusive diabase sill that intruded between layers of sandstone and shale of the Late Triassic Stockton and Lockatong Formations. (In the Staten Island area, the strata equivalent to the Lockatong Formation is called the Brunswick Formation.) The sill approaches 1,000 feet thick and was probably fed from an unknown stock buried beneath the basin to the west. Radiometric age determinations of the diabase suggest that the sill formed in multiple stages between about 192 to 186 million years ago (late Early Jurassic). Exposures of the basal chill zone, a zone of contact metamorphism of the underlying sedimentary layers, occur scattered amongst the massive talus slopes at the base of the cliff. The upper side of the sill also has a chill zone with the upper part of the sill displaying many xenoliths (pieces of the overlying host rock in which the sill intruded). Within the lower portion of the sill there is a zone of rock enriched in olivine, a high temperature ultramafic mineral that formed first and settled to the bottom of the intrusion before the rest of the magma cooled. This zone is about 10 to 15 feet thick, and crops out along and above the road in the Ross Dock area near the south entrance to the park (see Figure 89).

The escarpment of the Palisades reveals the strike of the eastern margin of the Newark Basin. The path of the Hudson River follows the trace of the underlying unconformity at the base of the Stockton Formation (see Figure 88 on the Newark Basin page). This unconformity represents the gentle ancient landscape surface that existed in the region before rifting occurred. As continental glaciers scoured the lower Hudson River Valley, the softer sedimentary cover above this unconformity was preferentially stripped away. In addition, during low-standing sea level, the Hudson River also preferentially followed this boundary.

In a documentary I watched recently (“How the Earth Was Made”), the Palisades Escarpment is described in an exciting light. At the dawn of the age of Pangea (when all the continents were “one” amidst a massive ancient sea), plate tectonics began to rip apart the continent. At this time (over 200 million years ago), it is thought, what is now New York City was literally at the center of the world. The plates began to move in their respective eastern or western directions and magma began to pour out of the earth at this massive rift (now the continental divide at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean). The molten rock covered an area the size of Australia and was, at times, nearly a half mile thick. Imagine a massive ocean of liquid rock, churning and flaring off super heated gases. The magma also found its way into ancient, horizontal sandstone and shale fissures. The underground flowing magma “river” created what is known as a sill, buried beneath layers of sandstone and shale. The Palisades Interstate Park Commission dedicates a website to this phenomenon, and describes the process of sill formation (the website describes the process as taking place within a “day,” but this is actually stretched of hundreds of millions of years):

It literally bakes the rocks with which it comes into contact, metamorphosing some of them into the red, crumbly stone one still finds beneath the ancient sill (good examples of this metamorphic rock, “baked” shale, can be found behind the Kearney House).

. . . the sill cools and hardens beneath the ground, the molten rock crystallizing into the hard Palisades stone called diabase.Still well before “dawn,” further convulsions caused by the breakup of Pangea result in the entire region being shifted down between 17 and 20 degrees to the west, lifting the eastern edge of the hardened sill (that raised edge will become the Palisades Cliffs).

Throughout the course of the rest of the “day,” as the pieces of Pangea slowly move into the positions of the continents as we think of them, the forces of erosion—wind and rain, streams and gravity—will relentlessly whittle away at the softer stone above and around the buried sill. Little by little, parts of the buried sill, especially along its easternmost, raised edge, begin to emerge above the surface. (Just as a point of reference, it is believed that at around 4:30 in the “afternoon,” i.e., about 65 million years ago, a meteor or comet slams into what is today the Yucatan Peninsula; the global winter created by this event will spell the doom of the dinosaurs, the ascendancy of mammals.) An ancestral stream flowing roughly along the path of today’s Hudson also does its part to chisel away the softer stone to reveal more of the edge of the sill. By “dinnertime,” the continents are more or less in their present positions. (Around “11 pm,” meanwhile, the earliest ancestors of human beings show up in Africa…)

Throughout the “evening,” the creatures living here in the future New York–New Jersey metropolitan area enjoy a subtropical climate. Then, a “minute” or two before the end of our “day,” a series of Ice Ages overtake the earth. The causes of these dramatic global shifts in climate are not yet well understood, even if the results are. As temperatures drop in the north, snow fails to melt in places it previously had. Winter after winter, new snow piles upon the old, until that pile grows to hundreds of feet tall. Its own weight compresses the snow at the bottom of the pile, until it begins to behave like something other than snow. It begins to behave like a liquid.

It begins to flow.

Moving in the path of least resistance—generally, south in this hemisphere—the massive pile of frozen snow and ice begins, in essence, to smoosh itself across the ground before it. A glacier has been born. Slowly—its progress typically measured in feet, even inches, per year—this frozen mass of water grinds over the surface of the earth, scraping away anything loose in its path. Vegetation, even mighty forests, loose stone, soil—all of it gets inexorably pushed in front of the plough of the glacier. Called moraine, this line of debris will be left behind when the glacier finally begins to melt back (or, retreats), a deep pile of rubble, called terminal moraine, which marks the southernmost reach of the glacier’s leading edge. In the case of the last (or, perhaps better put, most recent) glacier, the Wisconsin Ice Sheet, its terminal moraine is found as far south as Newark, New Jersey; much of the high ground in Long Island is likewise made up of terminal moraine from the Wisconsin Ice Sheet. Within the terminal moraine, no doubt, are vast quantities of the sandstones and shales that once encased the Palisades. Also, there are pieces of the sill itself in the terminal moraine, the “talus” that had fallen from the cliffs before the glacier came. The cliffs, in other words, are when the glacier retreats as sheer from top to bottom as they ever will be; new talus will begin to accumulate at their base.

Now it is a few “seconds” before “midnight.”

As the glacier continues to retreat (along its retreat route it will scatter boulders that failed to dislodge at its terminus; these are called erratics), the first human beings arrive on the scene, hunters and gatherers of the forests and wetlands that emerge as the ice slowly returns north.

(Again for point of reference: a Florentine navigator named Verrazano will make the first written record of the Hudson in 1524, almost four centuries ago—and just inside of a quarter of a second before the final “midnight” of our peculiar “day”…)

Most scientists who study climate believe that we are most likely in what is termed an “interglacial period”—between two Ice Ages. (The next Ice Age, however, remains most likely millennia in the future; and, of course, there is the ongoing debate about the effects that human activity may have on climate.) Yet even without a glacier bearing down upon us, ice continues to be a powerful shaper of the Palisades.

When the diabase cooled, it naturally formed into vertically arranged columns, the tall pillars of rock that gave the cliffs their name (they reminded someone of a palisade-type stockade fence). The cliff face and its columns are rife with cracks. Into these cracks each year rainwater collects. In the winter, that water freezes. Water, unlike any other substance on earth, expands when it freezes. (The same property causes ice cubes in a freezer tray to rise above the rim.) That expansion can exert a force on the order of 2,000 pounds per square inch. This force in turn enlarges fissures in the rock face and can result in rockslides, though often they occur months after the spring thaw.

It all reminds us in a way of the childhood game of Paper, Scissors, Rock—except, in this version, Water, especially in its frozen form, usually wins…

It is said that there are “sisters” to the Palisades Escarpment that can be found in west Africa, the Atlantic coast of the United Kingdom, and parts of the Brazil coast. Our geology is literally scattered across the shores of the Atlantic, as these pieces were once united during the time of the dinosaurs.