A view of Greenwood Lake from Defeo Marina. Greenwood Lake is Orange County’s largest lake at nine miles long and up to 57 feet deep. Hills rise on its banks, providing seclusion that’s attracted visitors for a century. Credit: David McIntyre
Greenwood Lake, Orange County’s largest lake at nine miles long and between 17 and 57 feet deep, actually straddles state lines: Half is in Hewitt, NJ, while the other half is claimed by the eponymous village in New York. Next year, the village of Greenwood Lake celebrates a century since its official municipal founding in 1924—and 100 years of the lake’s use for industry, transportation, and a playground for locals and visitors alike. Despite the area’s growth from an indigenous home to a hotspot for bars, restaurants, and primary and second homes, the central focus remains the picturesque lake that asks nothing more than simply to be enjoyed.
“It’s been quite an evolution,” says Peter Lyons Hall, digital content manager for the village and a wellspring of history. The lake originally known as Long Pond was the homeland of Lenni Lenape, who signed a treaty in 1702 that became known as the Cheesecock Patent—trading their land to colonists from Britain, who nudged the Lenape further into the wilderness as they built their homes and businesses around the lake. The Industrial Age in the late 1700s ushered in an ironworks at Long Pond, refining ore mined at nearby Sterling Forest.
Chugging around the Lake
The clear waters of the lake froze solid in the winter, providing another welcome resource: ice for New York City, harvested and sold by the Mountain Ice Company. The city needed iron and ice quickly, and the Erie line provided rail service through the Montclair and Greenwood Railroad (later the NY and Greenwood Lake Railroad) from Hoboken, NJ, to a station along the east side of the lake, on the site of the current Cove Castle restaurant.
City residents soon discovered the beauty of the area that was a half-day’s travel away, and the train line began carrying passengers by the mid-1800s. Public roads did not exist in Greenwood Lake until 1889; the lengthy and difficult overland trip from the depot to the hotels that sprang up around the lake was eliminated by steamboats that crisscrossed the lake itself. Nowadays, you can stroll down to the town-owned Thomas Morahan Waterfront Park to enjoy a lake view, catch some live music, and even swim at the small, sandy beach. But back in the day, visitors would disembark from a steamboat onto the dock of the once-bustling Windermere Hotel at that spot. Steamers—the largest was the 400-passenger Montclair—had regular routes, picking up train passengers and docking at waterfront resorts. The late 1800s saw at least a dozen or more big hotels and inns along the lake, which was the muse of several artists of that time—including landscape artist Jasper Cropsey, whose pre-Civil War Greenwood Lake, New York depicts the vista.
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