Glens Falls, New York, is an unprepossessing berg. It’s tatty - auto body repair, crappy pizza parlors, down-at-the-heels shops, rust, decay and grim, crowded streets. The Iroquois nailed it thousands of years ago, calling the area Chepontuc, “difficult to get around”, which it remains. In 1766, it was Wing’s Falls for Abraham Wing, leader of the Quakers who established a settlement, but, in 1788, Wing lost a card game to Colonel Johannes Glen of Schenectady and - BOOM! - Glens Falls it became. The place even got a mention in David Foster Wallace’s 1966 novel Infinite Jest as bordering a nuclear wasteland known as "The Great Concavity”. It’s that nasty. Glens Falls has one redeeming social value, however, a spectacular one.
The Hyde Collection is a world-class art museum that sticks out like kindness on a Republican amid all the urban sprawl.
It includes works by Sandro Botticelli, El Greco, Rembrandt, Peter Paul Rubens, Edgar Degas, Georges Seurat, Pablo Picasso and Pierre-Auguste Renoir and American artists Thomas Eakins, Childe Hassam, Winslow Homer and James McNeill Whistler. Their Modern and contemporary collection features works by Robert Motherwell, Ben Nicholson and Robert Rauschenberg, among others.
I know, right?
It was founded by the extravagantly rich Pruyn family, which owned a giant paper mill right behind their home. The smelly mill operates there still and dominates the vista behind the three posh homes that comprise the Hyde.
The Pruyn mill took advantage of two abundant resources nearby - the endless supply of logs from the Adirondacks to the north and waterways to get said logs to their plant.
The family, expanded with the addition of Louis Fisk Hyde, a Harvard educated lawyer who married Charlotte Pruyn, used their wealth to build a serious collection of art for “the betterment of the community”.
To walk into this museum is to be transported. My only comparable experience was at Newark, NJ, years ago. Your eyes became wide when you entered the elegant Newark Museum of Art which seemed so profoundly out of place in that place.
Next time you find yourself in Upstate New York, 1) let me know so we can hoist a beverage or three and 2) get a wiggle on to The Hyde Collection.
Do, please, though ignore everything that surrounds it and do not look out of the windows. Just don’t.
even the ugliest have a spot of beauty. The museum sounds perfect
Absolutely BONZER column! I read with great relish your every perfect word choice in this gobsmacking description. You are worth every penny.