Along the Palisades Riverfront

Along the Palisades Riverfront. . , The background photograph shows Alpine Landing – here – known earlier as Closter Landing or the Closter Dock – around 1897. From before the Revolutionary War, a steep road through a break in the cliffs of the Palisades allowed Bergen County farmers to bring goods to the docks here to ship to New York City’s markets. In time boatmen, dock workers, quarrymen, laborers, fishermen – and their families – came to live here and at similar landings along the Palisades. A steam-powered mill for grinding oats and coffee beans (the big complex at the right of the photograph) was built here in the 1860s., Mrs. Rachel Kearney, left, raised at least nine children at the landing. After being widowed a second time in 1831, she kept a tavern at her house (this house is at the center of the background photograph and is the only one still standing today). She was ninety when she died in 1870., The photograph of eel fishermen, right, was taken around 1910 at Cape Fly Away, just north of Alpine Landing. Even after the Palisades Interstate Park Commission acquired the land in the early twentieth century, many Palisades residents – like these fishermen – continued to live and work along the riverfront, until the last moved away around 1930.