Great Hill

The Great Hill is an open hilltop meadow with picnic tables, a three-quarter mile soft surface oval path (good for a jog), and green grass under stately American elms.

Olmsted and Vaux designed the Great Hill as a carriage concourse where passengers could enjoy commanding views of the Hudson River and the Palisades, but with the passing of time and the growing of trees, the view slowly disappeared. In the 1940s and 1950s, the Great Hill was turned into a recreation area with bocce, tennis and volleyball courts, and horseshoe pits, but by the 1980s, it was an abandoned and dilapidated ruin. The restoration of the landscape in 1993 as a place for community leisure finally gave the Great Hill the contemporary identity it needed.

Now, the Great Hill is the site of family and church picnics, frisbee games, running or race walking on the oval track, musical concerts, film screenings, and the popular series of free multicultural performances and art workshops for families called A Clearing in the Forest.