Nyack: The Fishing Place That Made American Art

The Lenape people called this bend in the Hudson River Nay-ack, the fishing place, and the first Dutch settler arrived in sixteen seventy-five, drawn by the same river. For two centuries Nyack built sloops and steamboats, quarried sandstone for Manhattan buildings, and stitched shoes. It became, quietly, a town of artists.

The painter Edward Hopper was born here in eighteen eighty-two in a clapboard house on North Broadway, and his spare, light-haunted canvases, Nighthawks, Early Sunday Morning, the lonely diners and empty streets, carry something of the Hudson Valley's particular stillness. Carson McCullers, author of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, is buried in Oak Hill Cemetery alongside Hopper. Helen Hayes, called the First Lady of the American Theatre, made her home here and died here in nineteen ninety-three.

Nyack became a village in the late nineteenth century and today carries that layered history along its hilly streets above the river.