The Hudson-Fulton Celebration: New York’s River Festival of 1909 and the Making of a Metropolis is the subject of Wednesday night’s lecture at the Nyack Library on July 8th at 7p.
Kathleen Eagen Johnson, a curator at Historic Hudson Valley, will present an illustrated lecture on her new book complementing the current library exhibit on the 1909 Hudson Fulton Celebration in Nyack.
Here is a brief synopsis of Johnson’s book:
For two weeks in the fall of 1909, New York threw itself the biggest party it had ever seen’€”attracting millions to a sprawling festival 150 miles long, from Manhattan up the Hudson River to Albany. This extraordinary event, the Hudson-Fulton Celebration, was officially mounted to commemorate the 300th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s discovery of the river bearing his name and the centennial of Robert Fulton’s first successful run of his steamship on that same waterway in 1807. But in an era of grand world’s fairs, the Celebration was really created to showcase New York’s coming of age as a world metropolis. On city sidewalks and in cities and towns along the Hudson, millions enjoyed a nonstop circus of fireworks, concerts, museum exhibitions, children’s festivals, and parades, each designed to link past glories to present challenges and future progress’€”and to show the world that its biggest city functioned beautifully.
Note: While construction continues on restoration of the front entrance, please use the children’s entrance on the side. This work should be completed by the middle of July.
