America Vacation Spot : Judson Valley and the Catskills

Let’s move up the Hudson Valley now. The Hudson River has been compared with the Rhine in its scenic splendor, but it is dramatically American is in its historical associations. Shortly after seeing the splendid Palisades, and viewing the river from Palisades Interstate Park, the visitor comes to Bear Mountain, where there's a friendly inn with an enormous stone fireplace, and pleasant Adirondack-type stone lodges, all in a very attractive state park a little more than an hour's drive north of the city. About fifteen minutes further along is the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

If you head west from Bear Mountain, you'll soon be in the Catskill Mountains, site of a huge state park, but far more famous as a truly unique vacation area, perhaps the greatest concentration of small and large resort hotels and inns in the world. The Catskills, easily accessible from New York City, got their start as a resort center with inexpensive boarding houses. The most celebrated was Grossinger's, which has grown to a huge, 690-room resort rambling over 1,200 mountain acres with its own post office (Grossinger, N. Y.) and a landing field for small planes. Its greatest rival is the even larger (1000-room) Concord, at Monticello, but there are many other large hotels in the area offering facilities for practically every sport imaginable and a nighttime entertainment program that rivals those of New York and Las Vegas. Many of the top stars of the theater, nightclubs and television started their careers in the Catskills and still are booked into Catskill hotels throughout the year. Although the area started off as a summer resort, the leading Catskill hotels are now as busy during the winter. The terrain is good for skiing, and when the weather fails, snow machines don't.

If you follow the Hudson Valley north of West Point and cross the river, you'll find the Franklin D. Roosevelt home and grave, a National Historical Site, at Hyde Park. North of Albany is Saratoga Springs, one of the most elegant resorts of the nineteenth century, and still a very pleasant and interesting place to visit. There's the famous race track and a trotting course, a racing museum, a state historical park on the site of the Revolutionary War battle of Saratoga, a mineral spa, and a fine old hotel, the Gideon Putnam.

America Vacation Spot : Long Island

Turning our attention to Long Island, we might take time out to note that New York State is one of the most popular areas in the nation for boating vacations. The New York State Department of Commerce estimates that the state's pleasure-craft fleet numbers close to 650,000, nearly one-tenth of the national total—thanks to the abundant opportunities for water sports in and around New York City. The state's thousands of miles of waterways offer the boatman just about every kind of sailing he'll find anywhere, including open ocean, sheltered Long Island Sound, scenic rivers and hundreds of island-studded mountain lakes. (New York has about 8,000 lakes and ponds, and most of them are used for some form of boating.)

On Long Island, sailors and land-lovers alike enjoy the superb beaches stretching eastward along the south shore from the Hamptons to Montauk Point. At the western end of the island are New York's city and suburban beaches: Jones Beach, and Coney Island. The reason why there are no famous beaches in the central part of the Long Island coast is that it's separated from the Atlantic by Fire Island, a thirty-mile stretch of sandspit which is in itself one of the most magnificent stretches of beach in North America. Fire Island's reputation has been undeservedly blemished by one or two tiny settlements of peculiar people, but all the rest are family resort communities, and when the new Fire Island National Seashore has been developed it will become one of the great recreational areas of the nation.

America Vacation Spot : New York State

New York State’s vacation possibilities are almost overpowering—ranging all the way from the world's most exciting city and a huge ocean side recreational area in its southeastern corner, to one of the most famous sightseeing attractions on earth, Niagara Falls, at the northwestern corner of the state. In between are the greatest number and the greatest variety of things to do and see of any state in the Union. We'll take them in geographic order, out of New York, the gateway city, as most visitors do, but let's first take a quick look at what New York City offers its 20 million annual visitors. It will have to be a quick look, because any attempt at a complete listing of New York's attractions would fill a book the size of the city's five telephone directories, which together form the world's largest telephone directory. It's the most and the biggest of just about everything, even though Tokyo and London surpass it in size. There are more museums and more Chinese restaurants, more churches of different denominations and more newspapers in different foreign languages, more magnificent apartment houses and hotels and more beat-up slum buildings than anywhere else you can think of.

Things to see in and around town include the harbor, the new Verrazano Narrows Bridge and the Statue of Liberty; Wall Street, the Stock Exchange, Chinatown and the Bowery; the garment center, the United Nations, the Museum of Modern Art, Rockefeller Center; the art galleries along 57th Street, Central Park, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Natural History and the Hayden Planetarium and the Cloisters.

And among the hundreds of different things to do are seeing a Broadway show or hearing a concert at Lincoln Center, viewing a big league baseball or football game at Yankee Stadium or Shea Stadium, watching the horses race at Aqueduct, Belmont Park, Yonkers or Roosevelt, taking the Staten Island ferry ride, shopping at the big department stores or the smart shops on Fifth and Madison avenues, dining at any of a thousand superb French, Italian, German, Hungarian, Kosher, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Philippine, Indian, Middle Eastern, Mexican, Spanish, Latin American and American steak, chop or seafood restaurants.

America Vacation Spot : Connecticut

Although southwestern Connecticut is now largely a suburban residential area for New York City, most of the rest of the state has retained its New England character, offering travelers delightful little elm-shaded village streets punctuated by the white spires of Colonial churches edging peaceful village greens. The Litchfield Hills section, in the northwestern corner of the state, bordering Massachusetts and New York, is one of the best places to absorb the old New England atmosphere, and view some lovely scenery—especially in and around the Housatonic River valley —and it also offers some good skiing when the weather cooperates. There are some very pleasant watering places along the shore of Long Island Sound; and at Mystic Seaport, in the southeastern part of the state near the Rhode Island line, you can enjoy a fascinating restoration of the early sailing and whaling days.

America Vacation Spot : Rhode Island

Rhode Island, smallest in the Union, is no bigger than a good-sized Texas ranch, but it offers large vacation possibilities for people who love the seaside. Newport is America's oldest and still one of its most celebrated summer resorts. Colonists found recreation here long before the Revolution, and after the Civil War New York's new millionaires built enormous, multi-million-dollar summer "cottages"—some of which are still to be seen. One of them has been transformed into a resort hotel. Newport has been given new life (some older residents say it's too much new life) by the annual Jazz Festival over the Fourth of July weekend. Other top resorts are Watch Hill and Block Island, about ten miles offshore.

America Vacation Spot : Massachusetts

Southern New England lacks the great wilderness areas of its northern neighbors, and is much smaller, but crammed into it are a lot more places to see and things to do. Boston is its gateway and the heart and soul of New England and at various times it has also been known—not immodestly—as the hub of the universe and the Athens of America. In national importance, Boston isn't what it used to be before the great westward migrations, but it remains the best place in the country to get close to early American history. In and around town are such historic shrines as Faneuil Hall, often called "The Cradle of Liberty"; Boston Common, the Park Street Church and King's Chapel, the Granary Burying Ground, the Old South Meeting House, Paul Revere's House and the Old North Church, Bunker Hill and the Boston Navy Yard, where you can still see the U.S.S. Constitution—"Old Ironsides." All except the last two can be covered on a one-and-one-quarter-mile walk along the marked "Freedom Trail" through the heart of the old city. It will take you about two hours. Just across the Charles River is Cambridge, with its own share of history, plus Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and within a short ride are Lexington, Concord and Thoreau's beloved Walden Pond.

Head north out of Boston and you'll drive along the North Shore, a coastline rich in history and recreational facilities. It really begins at Swampscott, about a dozen miles out of Boston. Here is your introduction to all that is typical of the North Shore: expensive summer homes and large resort hotels; comparatively small yet charming beaches; gems of Colonial buildings discovered along narrow, rose-bordered lanes; a long and basically tragic tradition of seafaring men and the loss of so many of them to the angry Atlantic. Next comes Marblehead, where you'll be able to see the original painting of the "Spirit of '76" in the town hall, and which disputes with nearby Beverly the tithe of birthplace of the U.S. Navy; then Salem, where you can see the House of Seven Gables and where—despite anything you might have heard—they never burned a witch. (They hanged them!) Soon you'll reach Gloucester, the famous old fishing village at the beginning of Cape Cod. At the end of Cape Ann is Rockport, another fishing village, and a rival of Provincetown, on Cape Cod, as an art center. Here you'll recognize the fisherman's shack that has been painted and drawn so much it has become known as Motif Number One.

In the opposite direction from Boston is the South Shore leading to Cape Cod. Just before you get to the Cape you'll pass through Plymouth, where the Pilgrims landed, and then through some great cranberry country; then you'll reach Sandwich, famed for its early American glass; next Hyannis, summer home of the Kennedy family. The entire Cape is one great summer resort as you swing north to Provincetown, a booming tourist town, an art colony, a well-preserved Colonial New England sailing town and a present-day commercial fishing center. The two famed and picturesque vacation islands of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket are reached by ferries from Wood's Hole, on the southwestern tip of the Cape.

Northern Massachusetts shares some scenic mountain country with neighboring New Hampshire and Vermont. It's reachable by car from eastern Massachusetts by the Mohawk Trail which crosses the north-western part of the state from Greenfield to Williamstown, a beautiful little college town near the Vermont and New York lines. This is also the northern end of Massachusetts' Berkshire Hills, which parallel the western edge of the state from Connecticut to Vermont. The renowned Berkshire Music Festival is held during the summer at Tangle wood, near Lenox.