Riverfront Park

The Hudson River has long been the lifeblood of the Valley, providing food, water, and transportation as a tidal estuary whose predictable tides and winds supported travel by canoe, sail, and sloop for centuries before Robert Fulton's 1807 steamboat transformed water travel. Hyde Park began as a small farming community started by Jacobus Stoutenburgh in the early 1700s and grew quickly; by 1800, Richard DeCantillon's waterfront landing was shipping grain and supplies to New York City and receiving rum, sugar, and molasses from the West Indies, while the mouth of Crum Elbow Creek became a shipbuilding and repair site and the creek powered grist mills, saw mills, a plaster mill, a flax mill, and a nail mill. Commerce expanded through the 1800s, especially after the Erie Canal opened in 1825, as sloops and later steamers docked here nearly every day on a Hudson River that served as a busy Main Street for a growing nation. In the late 1800s, Hyde Park's waterfront also became a major center of sturgeon fishing, with eggs sold as caviar and the meat so common it was called "Albany Beef," but over-fishing and other factors caused a sharp decline by the mid-1900s; fishing for sturgeon has been banned since 1996, and the species may take as long as 50 years to recover because it lives long and matures slowly. The first Hyde Park railroad station was built in 1851 as the Hudson River Railroad pushed north from Poughkeepsie toward Albany, and the present station was built in 1914 after the tracks were expanded from two to four and the original station was demolished; passenger service ended in 1958.

Hyde Park, New York · United States