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BEAR MOUNTAIN INN CONSTRUCTION CONTINUES - 11 April, 2004
By NANCY CACIOPPO
THE JOURNAL NEWS
The Palisades Interstate Park Commission estimates that the $10 million restoration project it launched early last year at the Bear Mountain Inn will be completed by Easter 2006.
Former Nyack Mayor Terry Hekker, whose father, John S. Martin, was general manager of the inn from 1941 to 1966, said she would like to see her father's efforts recognized.
"I couldn't be happier the inn is being restored," she said. "Its golden age was when my father was running it. In the '40s and early '50s, the Bear Mountain Inn was the only large venue in Rockland County for any kind of meaningful, major event."
The inn's guest book once read like a Who's Who of world notables.
Among them were presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower; then-Vice President Richard M. Nixon; former first ladies Mamie Eisenhower and Lady Bird Johnson; Madame Chiang Kai-shek, wife of the Nationalist Chinese president; Gov. W. Averill Harriman; Laurence Rockefeller; U.S. Postmaster General James Farley; New York City Parks Commissioner Robert Moses; and restaurateur Toots Shor. Sports teams, including the Brooklyn Dodgers, the New York Giants and the New York Knicks, stayed at the Bear Mountain Inn while training at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
John Hekker's success had a rocky start. Terry Hekker recalled that her father took the job as general manager in September 1941. Three months later, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor thrust the United States into World War II and put a severe crimp in the inn's business. With the war came the rationing of gasoline, food and alcohol. Even if someone could get to the inn, she said, there were no grand meals to be had once they got there.
Those setbacks did not deter Hekker's father. He found some resourceful ways to support his wife and six children, who lived in a small house behind the inn.
When the federal government hired 17,000 workers to transform 2,000 acres of Orangeburg farm fields into Shanks Village, a major embarkation point for military troops headed for Europe, John Hekker stepped in to feed them, Terry Hekker said. With war-imposed travel restrictions, he also arranged for New York-area sports teams to train at West Point and stay at the Bear Mountain Inn rather than go to southern training camps.
"And if we had a busy Sunday, everyone from my mother to the accountant sold hot dogs, dad mopped up the floor and everybody pitched in to paint the ladies room," she said.
According to the park's 1960 history, the Bear Mountain Inn was a tourist draw from its first years. After philanthropist Mary W. Harriman donated 10,000 acres and $1 million to the state in 1909 to establish Bear Mountain-Harriman State Park in the Palisades Interstate Park system, Gov. Charles Hughes canceled plans to build a prison on the site.
In his centennial history of the park, "Palisades: 100,000 Acres in 100 Years," former commission director Robert Binnewies told how George W. Perkins, 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.
Annual attendance at Bear Mountain and Harriman state parks averaged 450,000 by 1915, the year the inn was completed. By 1916, total visitors exceeded 600,000 — with 250,000 arriving by boat — and 2,150 cars were counted in the inn's parking lot. Park officials credited the inn's construction with the spike in park attendance.
The inn, which is on the National Register of Historic Places, was last given a cosmetic restoration in the 1970s. Commission director Carol Ash said the 1930s, too, was a good time for the inn. That is why its latest face-lift by New York City restoration architect Hugh Hardy will restore it to a 1930s ambience.
"Although it was only a two- or three-season facility at that point, it was such a wonderful statement of ability for people to spend a day in the country in a healthy atmosphere and have good dining while they were at it," Ash said. "That's what we hope to re-create."
Included will be new geothermal heating and cooling systems and energy-efficient appliances, fixtures and double-lock windows. Park officials have said the utility upgrade will save between 50 percent and 65 percent of the inn's heating and cooling costs.
Ash outlined the work schedule. This year, the partially opened inn will continue to serve the public with lunches, dinners and catered events while construction continues.
Starting the second week in January 2005, the inn will close completely to allow final construction to take place. All events will move to nearby Overlook Lodge, the Bear Mountain Merry-Go-Round and a permanent food concession stand at the former bus circle northeast of the inn.
The $10 million project is being paid for with a $2 million state grant, foundation grants, fund-raisers and private donations.
"It's taken longer to raise the money than we expected," Ash said. "But I feel confident we'll get this done in the time frame we have."
Send e-mail to Nancy Cacioppo
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