The Park
The Pillars
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The Eagle’s Nest
The location of the fabled “Eagle’s Nest” at the “loop” where Cornwall Avenue curves into Grand View Avenue in Cliffside Park, Cornwall-on-Hudson, new york. visible in the middle distance above the trees is the cornwall yacht club. Storm King Mountain rises to the right, while bull Hill – ACROSS THE HUDSON – dominates the center of the photo. breakneck ridge is behind the trees At left.
In the time in which the CLIFFSIDE CHRONICLES are set (1969-75), there were many more trees blocking this view, and the vegetation was thick and wild, offering plenty of concealment from the street. One had to squeeze between bushes to get to the edge of the cliff to look down on the remains of what was once the bustling riverport known as Cornwall Landing in the days when ships plied the Hudson, aka “The American Rhine,” in great numbers.
Cornwall Landing is the real name of the very real place that I’ve borrowed as the name of the fictionalized (read: not completely fictional) town at the center of THE CHRONICLES. “The Landing,” as it’s called in the books, combines the Town of Cornwall and Village of Cornwall-on-Hudson in which I spent my adolescence into one incredibly spooky place.
While “Cornwall Landing” appears as a label on present-day maps, there is no longer any town there, by any administrative definition anyway. People no longer live or do business there (save for selling recreational drugs), and no one did by the time my family moved to Cornwall-on-Hudson in 1969. Some of the houses in which they lived and the stores in which had fallen into a state of abandonment and decrepitude, and the Landing at the time rivaled any ghost town in the Old West.
The upstate Winters and the capricious winds and weather of the Hudson Highlands had their way with them for over a decade, and before long a power company seeking to build a power plant nearby razed every ruin, including a train station and a large factory building, effectively putting an end to a very real but dangerous playground to spend Summer days for scores of local kids. In a time in which electronic devices were limited to transistor radios and portable TVs, exploring by bicycle was a shared experience. The allure of abandoned and off-limits places awaiting arsonists or wrecking balls was strong; every kid I knew interpreted No Trespassing signs as invitation to trespass at will. “Tetanus, Schmetanus!” As if stepping on a rusty nail was the worst that could happen. And taunts of “Chicken!” could make the most sensible 12- and 13-year-old do incredibly stupid things. It was the age of skinned knees, splinters, and double-dares that challenged every notion we had of invincibility. Thankfully, nothing worse happened for real (as opposed to some of the stuff that goes down in THE CHRONICLES).
The small open patch of grass in the photo wasn’t there in the 1970s. As I said, that triangular plot was largely covered with trees and bushes. Some of the bushes were so big that there were natural kid-sized nooks and crannies inside them that were prime spots in games of Hide & Go Seek that involved the entire neighborhood. By “entire neighborhood,” I mean both that every kid under age 13 or so joined in, and that the “playing field” consisted of all of Cliffside Park. There was a time when no Cliffsider didn’t own a squirt gun or a flashlight, and marathon games of tag and Wiffle Ball dominated, especially on weekends and during those seemingly endless summers.
A serpentine path wound in and around several large thickets that were off the left-hand edge of the photo. No one – certainly not the owner (who I believe was Fred Rose; more on him below) – ever cleared the denser underbrush or cut the trees back to open up the above view in the early 1970s. One could not have this view without venturing through the brush and, once through the foliage, standing on the precipice of the very cliff that gave the neighborhood its name.
The present view – of the famous Wey-Gat between Storm King Mountain and Breakneck Ridge, marking the Northern Gate of the Hudson Highlands – accounts these days for greatly increased foot, bicycle, and vehicular traffic in Cliffside Park. In the prime time of the Cliffsiders, that end of the street (two streets – Grand View and Cornwall avenues – meet there, actually, constituting a “demilitarized zone” between the two, since social stratification was even prevalent on street level) was like our little secret place. It made “The Park” seem more like the small enclave within the village – itself an enclave relative to the “upper town” – that it really was to the children growing up there, affording them their own place within the place, where no adults “feared to tread.” There were no joggers, power-walkers, cellphone photographers, or leaf peepers attracted by the vista the location presents these days.
Fronting the spot for years was a large rock engraved with the name “Rose” that was eventually removed. Rose was the name of the family that owned the actual land in the photo at the time, and the stone served as a property marker. (The Roses appear in THE ISLAND as the Robbins family). Fred Rose was a chemist and West Point professor who raised pheasants in the literal “last house on the left” on lower Cornwall Avenue, just before “The Loop.”
I’ve been told that the rock was removed in the early 2000s because a new generation of smaller children were frightened by it, thinking it was a grave. As Cliffsiders of my time would say: “What a bunch of little wimps.” I find that terribly ironic, since that’s precisely what older Cliffsiders in THE ISLAND tell younger ones to keep them from venturing too close to the cliff edge. For their own good, as well as to keep them away from their secret meeting spot.
Regarding the removal of the “Rose Rock,” call it the difference between two generations – one perhaps too independent and one perhaps too coddled – but if we had ever imagined it was a real grave, we would’ve thought it was the coolest thing ever. Just whose decaying corpse had been buried there? No one over the age of four would’ve ever told their parents that it scared them. We would’ve played Ouija Board right on top of it in the dark hoping to raise the occupant’s spirit! Thus, in the CHRONICLES, the rock is the basis of a tall tale that the fictional Cliffsiders actually do tell in pup tents by candlelight during backyard campouts. It’s “The Goblin’s Rock” in the books (featuring a footprint of one of a river demon’s cloven hooves as it was chased through the Landing 300 years before).
The real Eagle’s Nest was not this spot per se, but actually a rocky ledge several feet below the clifftop that was accessible by climbing down using exposed roots as hand- and footholds. Aptly named, since without those climbing aids, only an eagle could get to it (as Patrick Wymark tells the commando team about the castle in the 1968 thriller – and Cliffside Kid favorite – WHERE EAGLES DARE). Well, not really. Kids can be oh-so-dramatic. You just had to be careful and sure-footed to climb down to reach the ledge.
Seemingly dug slightly back into the cliff face, several low outcrops on the ledge served as natural stone benches. The entire ledge was somewhat protected from the elements by an overhang. The Nest wasn’t technically a cave, but felt like one at times because of that overhang and because it was set back a few feet. It also saw time as the de facto “kissing fort” in the neighborhood as kids got older, second to the loft of the Cummings garage, replete with the pads from chaise lounges. That garage was always left open. Not too many garages or even houses were locked in “The Park” in those days. But all that changed with the advent of “Stranger Danger” in the 1980s.
Several ropes were anchored to trees growing out of the cliff face on either side of the Nest, forming “ratlines” that allowed the Cliffsiders to get to the bottom in an expedited manner. The ratlines ended behind the ruins of the old Cornwall Landing post office at the foot of Dock Hill Road. If there was any decrepit place close by that looked like a house in line for a haunting, the old PO surely qualified. Truth be told, however, it never reached the heights of creepiness that the abandoned hotels below the mountain did. Those places were more remote, and their locations in the woods made them spookier than the ghost structures on the riverfront.
The Cornwall Landing Post Office CIRCA 1972, nine years after being abandoned. the mead & taft woodworking factory, also abandoned at the time, is visible in the right background.
All that remains of the post office today is a portion of its stone foundation at the base of the cliff at the foot of Dock Hill Road, on the left, just before one reaches the CSX railroad crossing. If you climb up and around the top of the foundation and can make it a few yards up the steep cliffside, you can still find several trees with rusting brackets (actually old door handles salvaged from the village dump) that held the Cliffsider’s ropes in place. Donohue Park now occupies the land where the Mead & Taft factory once stood.
The FOUNDATIONS OF THE Cornwall Landing Post Office in 2019. cliffsiders making the descent from the eagle’s nest high above emerged from the trees above and behind the building, which stood on this spot until 1973, ten years after being abandoned.
However, no mysterious place radiated more spookiness and cultivated more cat-killing curiosity than the abandoned castle on Bannerman’s Island, which always beckoned to every Cliffside kid from the first time they laid eyes on it from Grand View Avenue. For my part, I thought I was seeing things when I first saw it in late June 1969. An island in a river was one thing, but an island in a river with a castle on it?
And therein was planted the seeds of THE ISLAND, in the form of a short story (“Where Mohicans Fear to Sleep,” which can be downloaded from this page), about what other things may be lurking in such a place, written in longhand with a Bic Banana on looseleaf when I was 15, but never completed. Until now.
The Poet’s Gazebo
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The Hitching Post
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The Wall
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