The View From Eagle Rock

This peaceful hilltop overlooks northern New Jersey, facing east toward the Hudson River and New York City (about a dozen miles away).

Even in 1932, according to Ripley's Believe It Or Not, you could have seen the homes of twelve million people from Eagle Rock.

The four hundred acres that is Eagle Rock Reservation is a little heralded marvel, sitting as it does in the middle of the most densely populated county in the most urbanized state in the nation. Red oak forests and red maple wetlands are among its natural bounties. As a child, I picked bags full of acorns there, later admiring each one at length, spreading them out with great satisfaction on the living room carpet in our home - one of the many at the bottom of the hill. (At right, the same view, this time from the roof of my mother's apartment building.)

Originally intended as part of Llewellyn Park, Eagle Rock Reservation in West Orange, New Jersey became part of the Essex County Park System, the nation's first, in 1895. Thomas Edison’s research lab was located in nearby East Orange, and Edison purchased a home in Llewellyn Park in 1886. Edison would conduct secret sonar research on the Reservation for the U.S. Navy during World War I, not the first time it contributed to the war effort,. In the American Revolution, General Washington's army had set up a chain of lookout posts on Eagle Rock.
Llewellyn Park, located on the eastern fringe of the Watchung Mountains, was founded in 1853 as the first planned community in the States, and can plausibly claim that the suburbs started here. A map of Llewellyn Park, circa 1857, shows the Eyrie, a home designed for Mr. Haskell by noted architect Alexander Jackson Davis (1803-1892). Later, during a violent storm, its tower toppled and Haskell narrowly escaped death. A. J. Davis is buried in nearby Bloomfield Cemetery. The house was demolished in 1924, but the gatehouse to Llewellyn Park was designed in its image. Mountain Avenue (also known as Undercliff Road, an accurate description) borders Eagle Rock Reservation on the east. Early visitors climbed the Hundred Steps from the end of the trolley line to the summit. There is also Snake Road, named for its circuitous route up the mountainside.

"George Inness, had the temperament, the talent and the gift for attracting attention (which he professed to despise, and possibly did) that caused critics to trip over their tongues in their searches for superlatives." – Russell Lynes in The Art Makers (1970)

Innes' paintings of the meadowlands (several of them in the collection of the local Montclair Art Museum) have introduced the larger world to Essex County. Although born in Newburgh, New York, Inness greatly enjoyed the quiet time he spent in his studio at Montclair. Dubbed after the fact as a tonalist painter, Inness was influenced by the ideas of the 18th century Swedish philosopher Swedenborg, as well as by the time he spent at Barbizon in France. Such a landscape is familiar in many places along the Atlantic coast, with its gentle progression from meadowland to marshland to sandy beach. One also meets it in the works of Martin Johnson Heade, John Frederick Kensett, and Arthur Wesley Dow.