And then there is the sense of Americana, so pervasive in this part of the country at this time of year. When you go to a place like Bar Harbor, Maine, just outside Acadia, or Saratoga Springs, New York, or Newport or Cape Cod, you feel like you’re visiting one of the sacred sites where Americans learned, in the late 19th century, what it meant to go on summer vacation in this country. So many of the natural wonders that rose to prominence during that era, like Niagara Falls and Howe Caverns, are today swaddled in a blanket of kitsch that I find more charming than anything.
There are also human-created wonders, masterworks of American ingenuity and obsession. Two of my favorite weekend summertime destinations, both within a couple of hours of New York City, are oases raised from the ruins of abandoned quarries: Manitoga, near the Algonquin Trail in Garrison, New York, is a tranquil modernist home and Japanese-inspired woodland garden curated over many years by the industrial designer Russel Wright; Opus 40, about five miles from the house where Big Pink was recorded in Saugerties, New York, is a graceful bluestone environmental sculpture painstakingly assembled over nearly four decades by Harvey Fite, a professor at nearby Bard College, that rivals the great earthworks of the West.
For more “official” art, here are two different twinned art pilgrimages that both make for excellent summer weekends. In New York, a little ways downstream from Opus 40, on opposite sides of the Hudson River lie Storm King, a collection of magisterial modern sculptures by the likes of Alexander Calder and Richard Serra, Louise Nevelson and Maya Lin, tucked among the swells and furrows of a beautiful swath of the Hudson Valley, and Dia Beacon, a converted Nabisco box-printing plant that houses an extraordinary assortment of postwar minimalists and conceptualists (Andy Warhol, Agnes Martin, Donald Judd, more Serra). Further north in Western Massachusetts, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (better known as Mass MOCA), also in a converted printing facility, showcases a dizzyingly eclectic array of modern and contemporary art, sculpture, installation, and performance work; a 15-minute drive away, near Williams College, the Clark Art Institute holds one of the finest collections of 19th-century European work (Monet, Degas, Renoir, Rodin) in America in its stately original marble exhibition hall and a sleek Tadao Ando-designed addition, with a recently established contemporary sculpture garden sharing space with cows in the pastures outside. In the neighborhood are more cultural attractions like Tanglewood, the beloved summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra; numerous picturesque trailheads; great antiquing; and marvelous restaurants like the Prairie Whale in Great Barrington. The design-forward nouveau roadside inn Tourists is an ideal home base for doing it all. It’s one of the most paradisiacal parts of the country to post up in for a long summer weekend.
