Attractions and Places To See around Firthcliffe - Top 20

If you're in New York and want to go hiking, this is the ideal place. Easily accessible by train, scenically beautiful, and interwoven with many trails of varying difficulty.

Mount Beacon Park, part of the Hudson Highlands State Park Preserve, is beautiful, with fantastic hiking trails and spectacular panoramic views. The park's trails, which range from moderate to challenging, lead to the summit of South Beacon Mountain, with a restored 60-foot fire tower, offering breathtaking vistas that stretch from the Manhattan skyline to the Catskill Mountains, especially on a clear day. The park is also home to the remnants of the historic Mount Beacon Incline Railway, once the world's steepest, and the foundations of an old casino and hotel, adding a unique historical dimension to the natural beauty of this area.

Only the outer walls of the cable car building have been preserved, the roof is completely missing. On the other hand, it is easy to get to the remains of the machines, which are quite well preserved. Two large electric motors where you can still see the wire windings, huge gears with a few teeth missing. I find it remarkable that the foundations are concreted, but the bases for the machinery were built from bricks on top of them. These bricks are likely to have had a rather poor quality, because they are almost completely weathered, which means that the complex has settled a lot.

It is a ruin of a stately property that burned down in the 1950s. In addition to the main house, the complex consists of many smaller objects such as garages, glass houses, staff living quarters ... If you use your imagination, you can easily imagine life here and also operate the rather high technical effort around such a complex away from the cities to be able to.

It's a nice hike to this summit, but the visibility isn't great. The summit is overgrown with trees. But there are plenty of small branches in the area on the way to real "view points" with a very nice view of the Hundson Valley and the West Point military academy.

The incline railway, built in 1902, was a funicular that carried passengers to the hotel and casino atop Mount Beacon. When it opened, this was the steepest funicular in the world. The Great Depression eventually led to the closing of the mountaintop resort, and the increased use of cars made the incline railway obsolete. It closed in 1978, and fires later destroyed much of the buildings and track, leaving behind eerie ruins for exploration.

The name of the stream is "Dry Brook", and it has a lovely waterfall of about 400 ft. The best way to get to it is to take the trailhead at the end of Pocket Road instead of the actual Mt. Beacon parking lot.

Initially built in the early 1900s for diamond merchant Sigmund Stern, it was then sold to Edward Cornish in 1917 (so it's also called the Cornish Estate). When Cornish and his wife died just a few weeks apart in 1938 (Edward died at his desk in NYC--rest up, everyone!), their nephew Joel inherited the estate. Joel did not live at the estate, and a fire destroyed almost everything in 1956. But you can still see the creepy ruins of several buildings, including the main hall, greenhouse, and swimming pool.