1,000 Places to See in the U.S.A. & Canada Before You Die (28 page)

The place got its start in the late 17th century, when six Quaker families established a
community near the King’s Highway. By the 1730s it had become known as Prince Town, named in honor of Prince William III of Orange and Nassau, and in 1756 was selected as the new home of the College of New Jersey, North America’s fourth institute of higher learning. As if that’s not enough, the town was also site of a major battle of the Revolution; hosted the Continental Congress for five months in 1783 (during which time Britain finally recognized U.S. independence); was home to two U.S. presidents (Grover Cleveland and Woodrow Wilson); and was headquarters for Albert Einstein from 1932 to his death in 1955.

The campus itself is gorgeous, a veritable garden of learning. At the main Nassau Street entrance, the 1905 wrought-iron FitzRandolph gate was designed by the great New York architectural firm McKim, Mead & White. The college’s first building, Nassau Hall, was constructed in 1756 as the largest academic building in the colonies, and today serves as the office of the university president. Other historic structures on campus include the gothic University Chapel, completed in 1928 and still one of the largest university chapels in the world; Alexander Hall, a venue that’s hosted speeches by William Jennings Bryan, Einstein, and Eleanor Roosevelt; and the mid-19th-century Prospect House, which served as Woodrow Wilson’s home during his time as the university’s 13th president

Near Prospect House, the Princeton University Art Museum, founded in 1882, holds a collection of more than 60,000 works ranging from Claude Monet and Willem de Kooning to extensive holdings of pre-Columbian and Asian art. Off campus, Nassau Street is the main strip, lined with boutiques, bookstores, and beautiful architecture.

Princeton University was originally intended to train Presbyterian ministers.

Just to the north, Palmer Square offers high-end shops and restaurants and is home to the Nassau Inn, which has hosted everyone from George Washington to William Shatner in its 250-year history, first in its original Nassau Street home, then beginning in 1937 in its 203-room Colonial-style abode. Its Yankee Doodle Tap Room is named for the 13-foot Norman Rockwell mural hanging behind the bar.

W
HERE:
50 miles southwest of New York City.
Visitor info:
Tel 609-924-1776;
www.visitprinceton.org
.
A
RT
M
USEUM
: Tel 609-258-3788;
www.princetonartmuseum.org
.
N
ASSAU
I
NN:
Tel 800-862-7728 or 609-921-7500;
www.nassauinn.com
.
Cost:
from $225.
B
EST TIME
: Sun for the Historical Society’s guided walking tours (
www.princetonhistory.org
).

Counting Sheep Along the Delaware

Stockton, New Jersey

Perched on a hill above the Delaware River, surrounded by its own 10 acres of apple and maple trees and another 300 of forest and farmland, the Woolverton is the very paragon of romantic historic inns. Built in 1792 by
mill owner and Revolutionary War veteran John Prall Jr. (and owned by the Woolverton family from 1850), the former manor house was converted to an inn in 1981 and carefully renovated to an historical ideal. Today, its 18th-century atmosphere is so complete that you half expect to see gentlemen in waistcoats and three-cornered hats strolling the gardens or ladies in petticoats swishing about its 13 rooms.

In the main 1792 building you can choose from eight individually decorated rooms and suites, some with whirlpool tubs and fireplaces. Around the grounds, the 1860s carriage house and barn contain five cottage accommodations for an even more luxurious experience, from the classic styling of the Garden and Audubon cottages to the high-beamed, lodgelike feel of the Hunterdon. Each has a private entrance, whirlpool tub for two, fireplace, king-size feather beds, and views of the sheep pasture, woodlands, or hillside.

On the Woolverton Inn’s preserved farmland, you can feed the pasturing sheep.

Days begin with extravagant breakfasts, with specialties like apple cranberry turkey sausage, lemon ricotta pancakes, and thick maple-glazed bacon. From here you can repair to the long, gracious front porch with its rocking chairs and wicker love seats, or roam the grounds greeting the resident black-faced sheep. There are riverside biking trails nearby, and the lovely antique-rich towns of Lambertville and New Hope, Pennsylvania, are only five minutes away, with scenic Bucks County, Pennsylvania, just beyond (see p. 215).

W
HERE
: 70 miles southwest of New York City; 6 Woolverton Rd. Tel 888-264-6648 or 609-397-0802;
www.woolvertoninn.com
.
C
OST:
from $130 (off-peak), from $150 (peak).
B
EST TIMES
: Sept–Nov for fall colors and great weather.

At One with Nature, Courtesy of America’s Foremost Outdoorsman

Waretown, New Jersey

In 1957, a small boy named Tom Brown met a young Indian boy who took him home to meet his 83-year-old grandfather, the Apache medicine man Stalking Wolf. It was a moment that changed Brown’s life. For the next
ten years he stayed at Stalking Wolf’s side, absorbing his vast knowledge of nature, survival, tracking, and Native American philosophy. When Brown was ready, he left New Jersey and followed his teacher’s path, wandering from wilderness to wilderness around the Americas, learning from the land and surviving without the aid of modern tools. When he returned to civilization in the mid-1970s, he put his tracking skills to work finding missing persons and fugitives; wrote the first of 17 books (and counting); and opened a school to pass on Stalking Wolf’s
wisdom to new generations. To date, several thousand students have accepted the challenge.

Though Brown himself has trained U.S. special forces and law enforcement officers, this isn’t one of those hard-core, gun-obsessed survivalist schools. In fact, it’s exactly the opposite. At its core, Brown’s school emphasizes living in a state of complete awareness, balanced and in harmony with nature. In all, the school offers more than 30 courses, from “The Standard” to intensive courses in nature observation, tracking, survival, scouting, natural healing, and philosophy. Days are long, typically beginning before 7:30 and going on until 10 or 11
P.M
. Advanced classes are extremely hands-on, while the standard class balances long, detailed lectures with time practicing the skills you’re learning: building shelters using natural materials, finding water, harvesting wild edible plants, making fire with a bow-drill, tracking and trapping, and tanning hides. No animals are harmed during any of the courses—because it’s not necessary and would be disrespectful to the animals. That kind of spiritual connectedness is what Brown and his school foster, taking refugees from modern society and teaching them to see the world in an entirely different way.

W
HERE
: 85 miles south of New York City. Tel 609-242-0350;
www.trackerschool.com
.
C
OST:
weeklong classes from $800.
W
HEN
: May–Dec at one of two camps near Waretown. (Jan–May at facilities near Fort Myers, FL, or Boulder Creek, CA.)

Top-Drawer Dining in the Garden State

Whitehouse, New Jersey

Though big cities like New York and San Francisco typically get the most foodie press, one of the nation’s best restaurants flourishes quietly in the hamlet of Whitehouse, New Jersey, inhabiting a meticulously well-kept
1796 farmhouse and former stagecoach stop. It’s the Ryland Inn, a critical favorite that’s been garnering rave reviews since chef Craig Shelton took over in 1991. In 2000, Shelton was named Best Chef of the Mid-Atlantic by the James Beard Foundation, while food publications regularly reward it with stars and high praise.

Sitting on 50 acres of hills and pasture, the restaurant offers three dinner tasting menus featuring Shelton’s innovative take on French-American cuisine, served in five beautifully appointed dining rooms. Just outside the kitchen, a 3-acre organic garden produces 150 herbs, 95 kinds of lettuce, 120 other vegetables, and two dozen fruits, which are picked immediately before use in preparing your meal. The garden provides both ingredients and direction for the menus, which adhere to the seasons—spring and summer menus are lively and full of color, with a profusion of herbs; fall and winter menus favor a deeper, more meaty palate.

Service is superb, going beyond knowledge and attentiveness to display an outright reverence for the cuisine, which might include dishes such as Atlantic bluefin with micro-cucumbers, crispy Maine crabmeat, uni, and wasabi; California squab and foie gras with Australian marrons, shaved green papaya, sassafras, vanilla, and Thai basil; and chanterelles ravioli with garden fava beans, lemon savory, and pinot noir. Expertly paired wines can accompany each course. The
Ryland’s Bistro, located in its Buchan Room, offers a less formal menu and piano entertainment Sunday through Friday.

W
HERE
: 45 miles west of New York City; Route 22 West. Tel 908-534-4011;
www.rylandinn.com
.
C
OST
: dinner tasting menus from $90 per person.
B
EST TIME
: summer for the restaurant’s organic gardening classes.

Extravagant Isolation, Forever Wild

New York

The largest park in the continental U.S.—larger than Yosemite or the entire state of Massachusetts—the 6-million-acre Adirondack State Park is legally protected to remain “forever wild,” a debt owed to the tireless
efforts of 19th-century lawyer-turned-surveyor Verplanck Colvin.

The park isn’t completely wild, but rather a patchwork of public and private lands covering 12,000 square miles in northeastern New York state. The mountains it’s named after are among the world’s oldest peaks, made of billion-year-old Precambrian rocks. An 1830s geologist, Ebenezer Emmons, gave them the moniker after a tribe of Indians who hunted here. (A more common legend has it the Mohawk scornfully dubbed the Montagnais, an Algonquian tribe that lived nearby,
adirondack,
or “bark-eaters.”)

A whiff of aristocratic cachet remains from when 19th-century masters of the universe with names like Whitney, Vanderbilt, and Rockefeller chose this roadless wilderness to build their “Great Camps,” with armies of servants in tow. Surrounded by primeval forests, mountains, and more than 2,500 lakes and ponds, the lakefront compounds blended luxury and rustic charm, using minimally worked logs, twisted branches, and decorative twigwork in what has become known as the Adirondack style.

Less than two dozen of these great camps have survived. And precious few operate as hotels, the most magnificent being The Point, a nine-building compound built in 1932 by William Avery Rockefeller on 8-mile-long Upper Saranac Lake. With its lavish guest rooms, the atmosphere of a house party prevails, with candlelit meals and an exceptional wine list. Forced into extravagant isolation happy campers spend idyllic days canoeing, fishing, or exploring the hiking trails that extend into the parkland.

A bit more budget-friendly, Lake Placid Lodge on the western shore of the lake is operated by the owners of the Point. Destroyed by fire in 2005, the 1882 camp is being reconstructed to resemble the original as closely as possible. The 1920s-era lakeside cabins are perfect for two, with stone fireplaces and antler furniture alongside modern comforts like feather beds and huge soaking tubs.