Last Saturday, roughly 171,000 people rode Metro-North, according to the railroad. Not all of them were going to look at trees. But enough were that the MTA announced on Friday that it was adding still more of its “Leaf Peeper” trains, citing “unprecedented weekend ridership this fall,” in a press release that reads, if you squint, like a dispatch from a city in quiet flight.
The new service starts today, Oct. 17, and runs every weekend through Nov. 8: six more round trips between Grand Central and Beacon, stopping at Harlem-125th Street, Croton-Harmon, Peekskill, Garrison and Cold Spring. That brings the count, by the MTA’s tally, to 20 Leaf Peeper trains added to the weekend schedule between Tarrytown and Poughkeepsie. The railroad’s original seasonal schedule, which began Oct. 3, had already added three morning trains up the Hudson Line and three afternoon trains back, per the MTA.
So the exodus is official. The question for the discerning New Yorker is not whether to go. It is how to go without spending the afternoon wedged against a stranger’s trekking poles.
The view from the platform
Last weekend was, by most accounts, a rout. Hoodline, summarizing reporting from Hudson Valley Post and lohud, described trains so full that some riders couldn’t board, a standing-room crush on Metro-North, and a trail up Mount Beacon more crowded than one local writer had ever seen it. One Instagram user, Hoodline reported, missed his train back to the city because it was too full and waited about another hour for the next one. At Kaaterskill Falls in the Catskills, the state-managed waterfall that Thomas Cole painted in 1826 and that now has a parking problem worthy of East Hampton, visitors described traffic and circling for spaces.
None of this is a surprise to anyone who has tried to get a table in Cold Spring on a Saturday in October. It is a surprise, perhaps, to the 171,000.
The leaves, for the record
The color, at least, is cooperating. The state’s I LOVE NY foliage report, built on more than 100 volunteer observers, projected near-peak to peak conditions across much of the mid-to-upper Hudson Valley for the week of Oct. 14 through 20, with New Paltz, Poughkeepsie, Newburgh and Cornwall among the places expected to see the most dramatic change, per Hoodline’s summary. Much of the Catskills was at or near peak. In practical terms: this weekend and next are the moment, and everyone knows it.
Where the smart money sleeps
The day trip is for the young and the masochistic. Those of us who prefer our foliage with a bathrobe have a few new options, and at least one is already earning notices.
New Paltz Way, a 28-room hotel that Ulster County’s tourism office says was built on the site of a former box factory alongside the Wallkill Valley Rail Trail, drew a warm Condé Nast Traveler review on Oct. 12, which called it “the first boutique hotel in a charming Hudson Valley university town set at the foot of the stunning Mohonk Preserve.” The particulars are catnip for a certain kind of Brooklynite: a record player and a small vinyl library in every room, original art by Scott Ackerman, a “rock library” of stones gathered from the surrounding ridges, and a self-serve spa with sauna, steam room, frost cabin and hot pool, per the review. It is part of Way Hospitality, whose other hotels are in Woodstock and Kingston. Its key selling point is that you can walk out the back door onto the 22-mile rail trail without ever touching a car or a parking lot. In October, that counts as luxury.
Further west, Foster Supply Hospitality, the group behind the DeBruce, Hemlock Neversink, the Arnold House and Kenoza Hall, is bringing the Belleayre Lodge in Pine Hill back to life as an 11-suite mountain property, alongside the restored Pine Hill Arms restaurant. Travel + Leisure reports a November opening; Ulster County’s tourism office had listed October. Either way, it lands in time for ski season at Belleayre, and it is the group’s first move into Ulster County, per the lodge’s own site. Foster Supply is also planning a hotel in downtown Newburgh, which its website says is coming in 2027; Travel + Leisure, citing The New York Times, reports it could be the first big development of its kind in the Hudson River city in more than 130 years. Newburgh, which has spent decades as the Hudson Valley’s perennial “next,” may finally be getting a hotel worthy of its riverfront.
A modest proposal for the weekend
Herewith the City Politic method, offered free of charge:
Take the earliest Leaf Peeper train you can stand, or better yet, go on a Friday. Skip Beacon, where everyone else is going, in favor of Garrison or Cold Spring, both now served by the added trains. If you must see Kaaterskill Falls, go on a weekday or accept your fate. If you are driving, drive to New Paltz, park once, and stay put: the trail, the bookshops and the cider are all within walking distance, as Condé Nast Traveler notes. And if you are the sort of person who measures a weekend by the thread count, book the Catskills now for the first snow, when the leaf people have gone home and the mountains go quiet again.
There is something touching, frankly, about 171,000 New Yorkers boarding trains on a Saturday morning to go look at maple trees. It is the oldest ritual in the city’s playbook, older than the Hamptons and cheaper than Aspen, and it proves what we have always suspected: that every hardened Manhattanite is a Hudson River School painter at heart. Cole got there first. He didn’t have to stand.
The City Politic has reached out to the MTA, Empire State Development’s I LOVE NY program, the state Department of Environmental Conservation, New Paltz Way and Foster Supply Hospitality for comment and will update this story with any response.
Image: Thomas Cole, Kaaterskill Falls (1826). Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
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