The Unfinished History of Denning’s Point

This project explores the cultural landscape of Denning’s Point, a 64-acre site on the Hudson River about 25 miles from my house. I began the project after finding a brick in my Westchester garden marked with the initials “DPBW.” I discovered the brick was made at Denning’s Point Brick Works, one of the largest Hudson Valley brick makers at the turn of the 20th century. DPBW bricks were used in large civic projects, including the Empire State Building and Rockefeller Center. Now a state park, Denning’s Point itself has a much more complicated—and distinctly American—history marked by racial and class conflict, unbridled industrialism, and environmental degradation.

In the 350 years since prominent Dutch enslavers took possession from the Wappinger people of Denning's Point as part of the 85,000-acre Rombout Patent, the area has been the site of estates, reported sojourns by Revolutionary War figures (including George Washington and Alexander Hamilton), an archaeological dig in the 1880s that unearthed Native American remains, the massive brick factory (which instituted a whites-only hiring policy in 1920s), a railway project for which the forest was cut down, a public swimming beach, and a short-lived environmental center, which the sponsoring university withdrew from just last year.

Some chapters in this history are well-documented, others often elided. When you visit the Point now, you can read a brief history of the park, including its importance during the Revolution, its resident bald eagles, and the nearby landmarks. But nothing about slavery, or native burials, or racist employment practices. As I continue this project, I hope it can express a more holistic, inclusive, and complex understanding of this and similar sites as deeply contested and embedded in the power structures that have shaped them and that lie at the core of U.S. history.