5 Best Sights in Hudson Valley, New York

Every August you can watch giant puppets and imaginative spectacles unfold before the Esopus Creek in Tina Chorvas Waterfront Park. You'll be dazzled once the sun goes down and local puppeteers transform the park into an otherworldly extravaganza.

Upward of 50,000 people make a pilgrimage to Saugerties the last weekend of September for a celebration of the "stinking rose," otherwise known as garlic. Although you find much of the usual fair fare here—crafts booths, fried-dough stands, live musical performances—one vast section of the festival is devoted to farmers, arts-and-crafts people, and food vendors all providing tributes to garlic.

The stone house, parts of which date from the 1720s, serves as the home of the Saugerties Historical Society and a museum. Inside you can see original architectural details, including wide-plank floors and fireplace mantels. The front lawn is the site of summertime concerts, periodic colonial reenactments, and other special events.

The late Harvey Fite put 37 years into the making of this 6-acre outdoor sculpture, created in the rock bed of an abandoned bluestone quarry. The architectural creation is an assemblage of curving bluestone walkways, swirling terraces, and finely fitted ramps around pools, trees, and fountains. The Quarryman's Museum contains 19th-century tools.

You may feel the urge to pick up a paintbrush as you take in the Catskill Mountain views from the front porch of the yellow-brick Federal house of the Thomas Cole National Historic Site. Well, at least you can understand what inspired Thomas Cole (1801–48), the painter credited with starting the Hudson River School of Art. Cole came to know the 1815 house, called Cedar Grove, when he set up a studio in an outbuilding he rented on the property; he settled down here after marrying a niece of the owner. James Fenimore Cooper and Asher B. Durand are among the 19th-century luminaries who visited Cedar Grove, 13 miles north of Saugerties.