The Hudson River
The tidal river that made New York the gateway of a continent
The Hudson River runs about 315 miles (507 km) down the eastern edge of New York State, from a small pond called Lake Tear of the Clouds high on Mount Marcy in the Adirondacks to the great harbor at New York City, where it empties into the Atlantic between Manhattan and New Jersey. For much of its course it carves a broad, steep-sided valley — so deep and so influenced by the sea that the lower river is not really a river at all but a tidal estuary, with ocean tides felt all the way up to Troy, more than 150 miles inland.
That tidal reach is the key to the Hudson's importance. Together with the Mohawk River, which joins it near Albany, the Hudson forms the only near-sea-level break through the Appalachian barrier — the Hudson-Mohawk corridor. The Erie Canal exploited that gap in 1825 to link the Atlantic with the Great Lakes and the entire interior, and the route built New York City into the commercial capital of the nation. Oceangoing ships could reach Albany, and from there cargo flowed west to the whole continent.
The Hudson also shaped American culture. Its dramatic scenery — the Palisades cliffs, the Highlands, the wide bays — inspired the Hudson River School, the first native school of American landscape painting, in the 1800s. After a century as an industrial artery left it badly polluted, the river became an early battleground of the modern environmental movement, and decades of cleanup have brought much of it back to life.