Just over a century ago, more than a thousand cubic yards of the Palisades Cliffs were blasted away every day for roads and foundations in a growing New York, until a preservation movement led by New York’s wealthiest families, joined by Governors Theodore Roosevelt and Foster Voorhees, helped create the Palisades Interstate Park Commission in 1900 as one of the first interstate institutions formed solely to conserve scenic features. Since then, the Commission has protected wildlife habitat and cultural and recreational resources, managing more than 110,000 acres in 21 public parks and 8 historic sites. Its work and the broader corridor include the 42-mile Palisades Interstate Parkway, developed as a limited-access “drive through a park” rather than an expressway and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1998; early land purchases and donations shaped by George W. Perkins, Sr., John D. Rockefeller, Sr., J. Pierpont Morgan, and later John D. Rockefeller, Jr.; the Stony Point Battlefield and Lighthouse, where Anthony Wayne’s force captured the British fort in a midnight assault on July 15-16, 1779, and where a lighthouse was built in 1826; New Jersey women’s successful campaign beginning in 1896 to save the cliffs from quarrying; parklands such as Rockland Lake, Hook Mountain, Nyack Beach, and High Tor preserved through later public and private efforts; and the Harriman Group Camps, begun in 1926 to make the outdoors accessible to underprivileged children and families.
