The view from the Olana property, with photo-simulation of cement plant and vapor plume added (Hudson Valley Preservation Coalition and the Olana Partnership)

Seeing the Big Picture

Historic landscapes provide a necessary antidote to the dissonance of modern life.

By RICHARD TODD

Olana, home of the 19th-century artist Frederic Edwin Church, sits atop a ridge outside Hudson, N.Y., presiding over the landscape that he celebrated in many of his paintings. The house wonderfully and somewhat outrageously exemplifies the Orientalism of the age, an impressionistic mingling of various Eastern and Middle Eastern influences to create a "Persian" house never seen in Persia but glorious in its own right. The house survives astoundingly intact—Church's heirs owned it for many years and revered it and changed virtually nothing. It would be arresting and memorable architecture wherever it stood, but what ultimately distinguishes Olana lies outside its grounds—the view, a long sweeping prospect of the Hudson River valley, westward to the Catskill Mountains beyond, and eastward to the Berkshires.

A view, as we all know, is a problematic thing. You can buy a view—people do it all the time—but it's unlikely that you can own it, and the longer and finer the view, the better the chance that someone will come along to spoil it. Over the decades, of course, Olana's view has been compromised in various ways. Now a threat looms that has friends of Olana ready, as one of them puts it, to "draw a line in the sand."

The St. Lawrence Cement Co., which currently runs a small plant across the river, proposes to build an enormous new facility three miles north of Olana, and very close to the town center of Hudson. The dominant feature of the plant would be a smokestack towering more than 600 feet above the valley. The plant, needless to say, has many opponents, and they have found dramatic ways of describing it. They like to point out that its smokestack would be the tallest structure between Manhattan and Albany, that it would on some days produce a vapor plume stretching more than six miles across the sky.

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