The Cliffs Remember

Fort Lee Historic Park sits on top of the Palisades, directly above the George Washington Bridge. The juxtaposition is startling. You stand at the reconstructed gun battery, looking out at a view that is simultaneously 1776 and now — the Hudson River is the same river the British crossed, but the skyline beyond it is Manhattan's.

Most of our visitors come for the view. They see the bridge, the river, the city. Then they notice the earthworks, the interpretive signs, the reconstructed battery. And the question comes: there was a fort here?

There was. And understanding why changes how you see the landscape. The Palisades are a natural fortress — three hundred feet of vertical basalt cliff. The Americans built Fort Lee here because the terrain seemed to make it impregnable. What they did not account for was that the cliffs could be climbed, that the British had local guides who knew the paths, and that a fort on top of a cliff is useless if the position across the river is lost.

The park preserves about eight acres of the original fort site. We have reconstructed a section of the gun battery and several of the earthwork positions. The terrain itself is the primary artifact — the same cliffs, the same views, the same paths that the British climbed on November 20, 1776.

What I find most moving is the retreat route. You can follow the road that Greene's men took down from the Palisades to the Hackensack River. It is steep and narrow. Imagine two thousand men scrambling down this road in the dark with the British behind them, leaving behind everything they could not carry. That is the beginning of the march that nearly ended the Revolution — and the beginning of the march that led to Trenton.

The cliffs have not changed. The river has not changed. Stand where Greene stood and you can feel what he must have felt: the vertigo of watching everything fall apart, and the clarity that comes from having no choice but to keep moving.