On a wet Wednesday morning, volunteer gardeners lowered the 72-step ladder to the Bannerman Island pier, the six-acre outpost on the Hudson River that has woken up as the COVID-19 crisis recedes.
Highland’s Linda Scott among a dozen volunteers who had cared for the perennial gardens along the trails that ascend the hill to the partially restored Bannerman residence, with stunning perspectives of the Hudson, Breakneck Ridge to the east and Storm King Mountain to the west.
The island is not located on the east bank of the Hudson River at Fishkill, on the border of Dutchess and Putnam counties.
“I’ve come here for 10 years,” said Scott. We climb a little more into the gardens every year. “
The improvements to the gardens, with the help of a pump that carries brackish water from the Hudson River up the hill to moisten the soil, are a step forward in Bannerman Castle Trust’s ongoing efforts to make the island a popular destination in the Hudson Valley. can the adventure from May to October.
Bannerman’s 2021 season begins a year after the island opened in a limited way in the summer of 2020, when COVID halted many travel plans.
This summer, the island will host weekends via boat from Beacon and kayak with Storm King Adventures from a pier in Cornwall-on-Hudson on the west bank of the river. You can kayak there on your own, but you need to make a reservation to moor at the pier on weekends and the historic site.
Special occasions this summer include 3 films: “Bill and Ted Face Music” on August 20; “Vertigo” by Alfred Hitchcock on August 27; and the 1939 vintage, “King Kong,” on September 10.
On Aug. 18, Butterfly Day, the annual dinner of the farm’s new chefs, with a five-course meal served in two seats on Saturdays. On September 4, Labor Day weekend, a radio play based on the movie “Sunset Boulevard” on the weekend of July 31 and live music every 3 Sunday afternoons.
Beacon’s Neil Caplan, a former song telegram performer who once donned a gorilla mask to sing “Happy Birthday” to actor Al Pacino, fell in love with the deserted island in the early 1990s. Pataki, who lived along the Hudson River about 10 miles south of the island in garrison.
While Pataki long ago disappeared from the governor’s apartments in Albany, his call remains on a sign as you climb the steps leading to the castle.
“We started with a quaint ruin that we were looking for for a tourist destination,” said Caplan, a genuine real estate agent and owner of swann inn in Beacon. “It was sleeping beauty’s castle. “
Caplan, who spent more than 3 decades leading the effort, has benefited from The State of New York, the proximity of the U. S. Military Academy. U. S. At West Point, foundations and individual donors. West Point cadets who read civil engineering have built a bridge over the island and waterless baths in recent years as a component of synthesis projects for their courses.
The site, also known as Pollepel Island, the summer apartment of ammunition broker Frank Bannerman VI in the early twentieth century, also needed a booth to buy the materials he sold in his store at 501 Broadway in Manhattan, making a first edition of the current Army and Navy stores. , albeit with live ammunition.
In 1920, a massive explosion in the construction of an ammunition garage on the island shook the Hudson Valley and the explosion was felt miles away.
Bannerman strongly encouraged through the baronial taste of European castles to build the landscape of his dreams on the Hudson River. From 1901 to 1918, Bannerman built 4 arsenals, housing for his workers and a hilltop apartment for his circle of relatives on the island.
Bannerman’s circle of relatives closed the island in 1958. In 1967, the island became a component of the state park system. Then a chimney swept Bannerman away in 1969, weakening the structures of several buildings and leaving her in ruins.
When Caplan first approached the state to open the island to the public, it was turned away, and park officials stated they would remain on the wild island forever. But Caplan persisted, gargle with local governments on both sides of the Hudson River and thousands of local people. Ers.
Among them were Jane Bannerman, Frank Bannerman’s daughter-in-law. He joined the board of directors of Bannerman Island Trust, offering a link to the afterlife as conservatives looked to the future.
Caplan remembers the on the island, to celebrate Jane Bannerman’s 100th birthday in 2010. Many friends have sung the American songbook to him. Caplan sang “The Impossible Dream”, from the musical “Man of La Mancha”.
He said it seemed appropriate to celebrate Bannerman and what, in the first place, seemed to be Caplan’s chimerical vision.
“It all seemed like a kind of dream,” he said.
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