Palisades: 1920s and Yesterday

Jeremy

(This will include photos as soon as I figure out how to add them.)

These are old photos of the Palisades, from the Cornell College archives. Mostly they are from the 1920s, although some are of earlier provenance, and some are a decade later, and some may be of even later decades. Many things have changed since those years, but the river remains. Looking at the photos, I begin to wonder if anything else has survived.

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The water is close to shore, closer than I’ve seen at the Palisades. Most of the area has some sort of beach. Also, I don’t recall ever seeing that sort of building anywhere near the water. Well, it’s been 90 years – I can’t imagine it would have been preserved.

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This photo looks like it could have been taken yesterday, although the trees are a bit thinner, and there’s less underbrush.

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Yesterday. There is a sign posted just above the road: TREE FARM. I didn’t ask who farms, or why.

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There are trees by the riverbank, with only a small sandy beach. Has the beach only been there since then, then?

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Yesterday. The riverbank is extensively silted along entirety of Palisades, with very wide beaches. Bushes grow there, and low grasses, but the bushes seem impermanent and the grasses seem like they won’t amount to much.

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In the background, there is a building on the shore. Hard to see, but it’s there. I wonder how the cameraman took this photo.

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Yesterday. The largest building close to shore was a public bathroom built of stone. Perhaps it’s the one in the photo? But the one in the photo is just a bit too large for that. Where have all the old shoreline buildings gone?

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Yesterday. Limestone wears away easily, and next to the stairs that lead up from the dam, there is a hollow overhang in the rock. One or two people could sleep there and not worry about rain. Or, actually, they might, since the limestone seems full of holes. Imagine, if you can, the inside of a sponge – that’s what the hollow reminded me of. But really, there’s nothing quite like water-eroded limestone.

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This photo is from when Cornell still held Pal Day. Everyone would skip class and go to the Palisades, teachers included – this was in response to the first year it occurred, which was done with no approval. Flunk day, they called it that first year, in 1920. There was, once, a commuter rail line between Cedar Rapids and Mount Vernon, and it passed within a mile of the Palisades – so getting there was easy. So people went.

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Possibly same tug-of-war. The trees are curiously absent from the riverbank, as if they’ve only grown since then. Also curiously absent is a steep hill rising behind them, which may mean that this photo was taken in a different area than the main part of the park. There are some smaller sections up river and downriver.

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This is the dam, newly-made. Is that a tree planted on it? Or is that where the dam meets the shore? Either way, it’s certainly not hydroelectric. In fact, I wonder why they built the thing in the first place. It may have been a make-work project, given that this is CCC handiwork. Maybe it was meant to control flooding, somehow?

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Yesterday, I saw the dam, or what’s left of it. It’s mostly a pile of rocks and worn concrete, with whole trees on top. What hasn’t broken already is crumbling, and the corrugated sheets of metal stand mostly exposed. Rivers are not kind to manmade things. Rivers are not kind to that which refuses to yield.

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The far shore is a set of limestone cliffs, interspersed with places where the soil slopes down to the river. I wonder – is the house in this photo still there?

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Last November, my geology class went to the Palisades to observe the cliff on the far shore. we noticed a house atop the cliff, and the fact that the cliff is limestone, and we wondered how long it would take for the cliff to wear away and drop the house into the river. Probably a while. Still, having a house that close to a river is a bad idea.

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Perhaps a few years ago, the Hartford Courant had a front-page article about a man’s house on a bank of the Connecticut r=River. This was a spot where the water sped up and wore away at the shore, such that his house was doomed to fall into the river within a few years.

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Now the riverbank has a wide beach. Maybe it was always there, just not in as many places as it is now. Now the river is fairly well silted.

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Old inn. It has a large roofed porch; it is a large mishmash of a building. It was built in the very early part of the 20^th century. Does it still exist? Perhaps it’s closer to the entrance, and I never noticed. How well is it maintained, if it does exist?

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Yesterday. At a picnicking area above the stairs to the dam, there is a water fountain. It’s missing a certain circular plate just above the handle, so when I turned the handle, the fountain spat out water at my hand and none of it reached the faucet.

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Painting, early 20^th century. Moonlight on Cedar River, where the water meets the cliff. It’s all purple and red and blue, instead of the blueish-silver that is actual moonlight. But it’s pretty enough. Note the absence of a beach. Why do I keep going on about that?

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This one is, I believe, of a sorority house above the riverbank. I never saw it. Does it still exist?

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I think that’s some kind of landing that the canoes are tethered to.

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There aren’t nearly as many bushes on this beach as I saw yesterday. Perhaps, then, these beaches are natural. It is in the nature of a river to carry silt and sand and deposit it wherever, especially in a flood. The dam hasn’t done much besides catch a lot of rocks and trees, and someday it will all be swept away.

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This one is probably from Pal Day. I think I found this spot yesterday, although the lawn is smaller now that there’s a paved road.

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Shore has no semblance of a beach. Where is this lovely spot along the Cedar River? I confess, I haven’t seen all of the park.

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The man in the stern seems happy enough.

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Yesterday. A sign is posted at various points: WARNING. CEDAR RIVER HAS DANGEROUS CURRENTS.

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Probably Pal Day; they are doing a weenie roast. I prefer s’mores, if only because you can roast the marshmallows more quickly with a judicious application of burning. Does anyone do weenie roasts now?

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There are small fires here and there beneath the trees, which makes me think that they’re doing a weenie roast – possibly the same one. I don’t know, though. Where is this? The place where it might have taken place is all overgrown with bushes now, but there are other spots…just not many along the river itself.

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I have probably passed by these buildings many times without giving them much thought. Or are they still there? The definite change is that the road in this photo is unpaved. Nearly all the roads in the Palisades are paved, now. It proved convenient yesterday.

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Pal Day again?

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This a wider shot of the same area, possibly the same day. What strikes me is the lack of underbrush. Perhaps this place was well-trammeled, or closely cropped.

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Yesterday. The area is full of underbrush now. Assuming, of course, that it’s the same area. But the park is only so large. Where else could they have been? There’s a walking trail at the north end of the paved road, but it’s all bumpy and rooty and twisty – they can’t have gone that way, right? So where did they go? Where did everything go?

Pal Day ended in 1971. I’m not sure why. Maybe the logistics of getting the entire campus to the park became too much. But Whatever the reason, it seems like there’s not as much going on at the park as the photos show. Granted, the photos showed an all-campus excursion. But the canoes, the tug-of-war, the picnic areas – none of it remains.

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Today. The only phrase that holds true for everything is: “This, too, shall pass.” Enjoy it while it lasts.