[2] The Palisades are among the most dramatic geologic features in the vicinity of New York City, forming a canyon of the Hudson north of the George Washington Bridge, as well as providing a vista of the Manhattan skyline.

The basalt cliffs are the margin of a diabase sill, formed about 200 million years ago,[3] at the close of the Triassic period, by the intrusion of molten magma upward into sandstone.

[6][7][8][9] The Palisades appear on the first European map of the New World, made by Gerardus Mercator in 1541 based on the description given him by Giovanni da Verrazzano,[10] who suggested they look like a "fence of stakes".

[16] An English visitor, Fanny Trollope, in her 1832 book Domestic Manners of the Americans, wrote of a park established at the Palisades by a Hoboken ferryboat entrepreneur at that time: It is hardly possible to imagine one of greater attraction; a broad belt of light underwood and flowering shrubs, studded at intervals with lofty forest trees, runs for two miles along a cliff which overhangs the matchless Hudson; sometimes it feathers the rocks down to its very margin, and at others leaves a pebbly shore, just rude enough to break the gentle waves, and make a music which mimics softly the loud chorus of the ocean.

[17]After the Civil War, signs advertising patent medicines and other products covered the rock face in letters 20 feet (6.1 m) high.

The following year,[10] work by the New Jersey Federation of Women's Clubs led to the creation of the Palisades Interstate Park Commission, headed by George W. Perkins, which was authorized to acquire land between Fort Lee and Piermont, New York.

Conservationists, inspired by the work of the Palisades Interstate Park Commission, lobbied successfully for the creation of the Highlands of the Hudson Forest Preserve.

George Walbridge Perkins, who served as president of the Palisades Interstate Park Commission from its creation in 1900 until his death in 1920, with whom she had been working, raised another $1.5 million from a dozen wealthy contributors including John D. Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan.

On June 23, 2015, officials of the South Korean conglomerate LG Group announced that their planned new North American headquarters building in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, which was originally designed to be 143 feet (44 m) tall, and would have broken the tree line on top of the Palisades, would be reduced to 69 feet (21 m) in height, thus preserving the contour of the ridge.