#HudsonValley: Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Years At Vassar College

The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet graduated from this former women’s college in Poughkeepsie.

by Rich Watson 

Edna St. Vincent Millay was a poet from the early twentieth century. Her poem “Ballad of the Harp-Weaver” won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923, the first time the award went to a woman poet.

She achieved notoriety early in life, which led to an education at a distinguished school: Vassar College.

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#HudsonValley: Washington Irving’s Tarrytown and the House He Made His Home, Sunnyside

One of the best American writers of the 1800s lived in this converted farmhouse in Tarrytown.

by Rich Watson 

Washington Irving was an acclaimed writer from the nineteenth century, whose works are well remembered today.

The New York City native (it was Irving who gave New York the Anglo-Saxon nickname “Gotham,” meaning “goat’s town”) served in the War of 1812. He then spent seventeen years traveling in Europe, beginning in 1815. He returned to America in 1832.

Three years later, he purchased a house in a town upstate in which he had stayed briefly as a child: Tarrytown.

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Why Did the Bronx’s Freedomland Fail As An Amusement Park?

Freedomland was a theme park that aspired to greatness, but was undone almost as soon as it began.

by Rich Watson 

In the northeast corner of the Bronx, where Co-Op City resides, there once was an amusement park that for a brief time in the sixties, challenged Disneyland in popularity.

Freedomland USA sought to bring America’s past, however selective and biased, to life in a variety of rides, attractions and reenactments. At eighty-five acres, it was presented as the world’s biggest entertainment center.

So why didn’t it survive?

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