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Restoring Bear Mountain Inn - 14 April, 2003
INN'S BEAUTY WILL BE RESTORED FOR THE FUTURE
The Journal News
Editorial
There have always been two Bear Mountain Inns for Rocklanders, the ones the locals visit, and the one that 3 million or so others trek to annually.
For both groups of fans, the $10 million ongoing renovation of the nearly nine-decades-old, beautiful Adirondack-style building is most welcome.
This prime destination ion the Hudson valley, just miles from anywhere in Rockland and once home to the N.Y. Giants as a practice ground, will be restored to its heyday beauty, 1930s style. The work will be paid for with a $2 million state grant, foundation grants, fund-raisers and private donations.
The second and third floors are expected to reopen April 11, with the first floor, which has been a cafeteria-museum area, closed the rest of the year.
The work will return the Inn to an ambiance that Palisades Interstate Park Commission officials say will render the rustic building worthy of its place on the National Register of Historic Places.
After philanthropist Mary W. Harriman, mother of Gov. Averell Harriman, donated 10,000 acres and $1 million to the state in 1909 to establish Bear Mountain-Harriman State Park in what would become the Palisades Interstate Park system, Gov. Charles Hughes canceled plans to build a prison on the site.
In his history of the park, “Palisades: 100,000 Acres in 100 Years,” former Commission Director Robert O. Binnewies told how George W. Perkins Sr., the park’s founder and first president of the park commission, won the unanimous approval of his fellow commissioners to use $100,000 in privately donated funds – largely his own – to construct the Bear Mountain Inn.
The Inn has a rich history, with many notables visiting over the decades, including presidents and world leaders but also countless thousands of Rocklanders who would sit by the fire in the upstairs great room after ice-skating or a walk to the zoo and Trailside Museums.
This great Inn has long been a mecca for many: Rocklanders during the week and tourists on weekends. Dinner at the Inn; an overnight stay; a wedding reception; maybe a walk around Hessian lake; the bobsledding and ski jumps of decades part; trips to the Bear Mountain dock by the Dayliner boat.
A magical place, the Bear Mountain and its Inn. And Rockland feels parochial about it.
We are most pleased that its long overdue renovation is now taking pace, that the Inn will be restored to its proper beauty, eliminating some gosh-awful later architectural mistakes and that the renovation will include energy conservation.
Of particular significance is the fact that adjacent Hessian lake will be tapped for geothermal heating and cooling. What a great use of a natural resource and a cost savings that should prove a worthy example to other government.
Generations have enjoyed this area, and now it will sit in beauty for at least another century.
Good move.
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