Unlike the hotel, the town of Rhinecliff has changed little over the last 100 years. This may be because there’s so little room for development: The hamlet is one mile square and built almost vertically up the Hudson bluff. The main catalyst for change came in 1957 when the ferry was replaced with the Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge, and although the amount of traffic back and forth over the Hudson was increased, Rhinecliff has remained charming and unspoiled. It’s one of the oldest intact hamlets along the Hudson and is listed in the National Register of Historic Places as a contributor to the Hudson River National Landmark District.
At the core of the hamlet is a grassy traffic island with a war memorial, and that’s where all the action is, so to speak. It’s pretty quiet in Rhinecliff. If you stand by the war memorial and turn around in a circle, you’ll see all of Rhinecliff’s commercial and civic buildings, which is to say the post office, the library just up the hill, and that’s about it. The rest of town comprises residential properties spilling up- and down-hill, mostly wooden frame houses on small, landscaped lots, many dating from the first half of the 19th century. And always the river glimmering below.
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