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By LUCINDA FLEESON; Knight-Ridder Newspapers
Sunday, September 18, 1994 Page: 1E
Several windows and doors at the Buck Hill Inn in Buck Hill Falls have been
smashed in by vandals, and the openings have been crudely covered with
plywood. The once magnificent gardens and terraces are overgrown with weeds.
Inside are eerie tableaux from happier times, when the Buck Hill Inn was
one of the premier resorts in the Poconos. Firewood is still stacked beside
the fireplace in the Green Leaf Library and has been since October 1990, when
the inn’s owners unceremoniously evicted guests and closed the doors. They had
already filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
Pools of muted light from a few, still-lit table lamps barely illuminate
conversational groups of faded armchairs in the cavernous Exchange Lobby. A
big stainless-steel bowl is set on a coffee table, to catch water drips.
No one shoveled the heavy snows off the roofs last winter, and when they
melted, leaks flooded the buildings, causing walls to rot, ceilings to
crumble, and floors to buckle.
“We’re running a race against time,” says William Kirkhuff, who is heading
a group of hoteliers interested in reopening Buck Hill as a Crowne Plaza
Resort. “Our concern is to get a new roof and at least protect the interior by
this winter, or there isn’t going to be much left to save.”
The original Buck Hill Inn was designed by Philadelphia architects Morgan
Bunting & Arthur Shrigley, who also designed its 1923 expansion into an
eight-story stone structure that is virtually one of a kind. Its loss “is an
architectural tragedy,” says Wayne Vanderhoof, a historic-renovation architect
in East Stroudsburg. “It’s probably one of the few examples of regional
architecture we have in this part of Pennsylvania.”
Not only does the inn’s native materials relate to its rocky surroundings,
but its stone facade became a model for the nearly 300 stately
stone-and-shingle homes that surround the resort and others in the region.
But not many people seem interested in investing in the rebirth of an aging
Poconos mountain resort. Once there were dozens of these sprawling grand
structures, and dozens more hotels, boarding houses and cottage inns.
Now there are about 10 of what are called “full-service destination
resorts,” where guests are served three meals a day and are offered golf,
tennis, riding and other sports activities.
Many other smaller inns and hotels built of wood have burned; others have
been demolished, taking away part of the architectural legacy of one of
America’s first resort areas.
Changing vacation patterns now threaten the few that remain.
“It used to be that people either came up for the whole summer, a month or
two, or two weeks. Now the most you can hope for is two or three days. And
people don’t return; they try different locations,” says Sam Arnett, manager
of the Mountain Laurel in White Haven. The traditional family resort vacation
has been replaced with jaunts to Europe or the Caribbean.
“Many of the smaller quaint Mom-and-Pop-run establishments that are still
around are in a very precarious situation,” said David Leung, a preservation
architect in Scranton. “For all intents and purposes, they won’t exist in
another 10 years.”
Many vacationers who used to go to resorts in the ’70s or ’80s have now
bought second homes in the area, or rent houses for a week or two. And now the
people who bought second homes are beginning to move into them as their
permanent residences and are commuting to New York and Philadelphia.
“Probably the biggest problem we’re having is that too many people are
coming here, liking it, and moving in,” says Robert Uguccioni, executive
director of the Pocono Mountain Vacation Bureau.
The Pocono Mountains and their foothills in the Delaware Water Gap became
one of the most popular inland resort areas in the 1880s and remained so until
World War I.
Philadelphia Quakers founded two of the first big resorts, Buck Hill in
1901 and Pocono Manor in 1902, and brought a quiet, unostentatious style to
the region. Guests were admonished to avoid evening dress at Buck Hill. Liquor
and dancing were not allowed.
The Buckwood Inn, now Shawnee Resort, opened in 1911 as one of the first
golfing resorts, and its white-concrete Moorish structure with Spanish tile
roofs still remains a classic Spanish Colonial Revival building. Both Shawnee
and Pocono Manor, with its shingle exterior and stone turrets, show signs of
age, despite multimillion-dollar renovations in recent years. Both now depend
heavily on golf, bus tours and convention business for survival.
The other large resorts in the area — Pocono Palace, Fernwood Resort,
Mount Airy Lodge, Split Rock Resort and Tamiment — have been renovated and
modernized so that their original structures have been all but obliterated.
“That is even sadder than Buck Hill,” says Leung. “They lost their original
character, and the sad thing is they could have done it better.”
Unlike the grand Adirondack camps built by the robber barons in Upstate New
York or the Victorian gingerbread town of Saratoga Springs, N.Y., Poconos
architecture for the smaller inns was frequently modest and simple, with
unadorned frame structures, front porches, and carpenter-Gothic details that
were structurally identical to those of large homes of the same period. Some
survive today as private residences.
A thick file titled “Resort Fires” at the Monroe County Historical Society
in Stroudsburg chronicles how many of the grand hotels and inns were lost,
including the 275-room Kittatinny House on the banks of the Delaware River in
1930. More than a dozen inns have burned in the last two decades, including
the 117-year-old Mountain House, the only inn on the Appalachian Trail, which
was destroyed in a fire termed suspicious in June 1987.
In the 1970s, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers demolished eight or so inns
in what is now the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area to make way for
the proposed Tuck’s Dam on the Delaware River and create a 36-mile lake.
Community opposition forced abandonment of the project, but not before
hundreds of structures had been destroyed. “We lost a lot of historic
buildings in the park. The corps moved very quickly,” says Thomas E. Solon,
the park’s historical architect.
Only two former inns on the Pennsylvania side of the recreation area
survive: the now-empty 1810 Jacob Shoemaker House, which the park proposes to
convert into housing for seasonal employees, and the Schoonover Mountain
House, which was saved because of its immaculately preserved condition as a
prototypical 19th-century country boarding house. The structure was built in
1869 and expanded in the 1870s as a two-story white-frame house with a veranda
on two sides.
The park service has leased the property to the Bushkill Outreach program
as a center for distributing food and clothes to the poor — an adaptive use
that has so far ensured its preservation. Few inns have been so lucky.
Preserving these historic structures and meeting insurance and building
codes can be a nightmare, says Solon.
But perhaps more important, the market for the simple life without modern
conveniences is drying up. “How many people want to stay in a place with a
bathroom down the hall?” asks Solon.
Apparently few people want the mountain air anymore.
The first thing that Joan Cooper, proprietor of the Swiftwater Inn, tells
prospective guests is that “we do not have air conditioning or television. I
tell them that before I even take them upstairs to see a room, and it saves me
a trip. People have become so brainwashed by air conditioning that they can’t
live without it.”
Only 20 of the 50 guest rooms in the 216-year-old inn are still open, and
they are tiny and old-fashioned. Bathrooms have claw-foot tubs.
With its hodgepodge of additions and two-story porches, the Swiftwater Inn
resembles a lopsided wedding cake. “Maintenance is never-ending,” says Cooper.
“In the last two years, we’ve put on six roofs.”
Due east from Swiftwater Inn, Henryville House has been closed for a decade
is rapidly becoming more and more delapidated. The inn is a landmark — it’s
America’s oldest trout-fishing hotel, where presidents and celebrities fished
the famed Brodheads stream. Theodore Roosevelt, Benjamin Harrison, Grover
Cleveland, Calvin Coolidge, Annie Oakley and Buffalo Bill were guests.
The gable-front clapboard cottage has front porches that in the 19th
century served as an architectural sign of its role as a hostelry. The inn is
thought to have been a model for the plain and simple Pocono resorts that
proliferated through the region.
But the future for Henryville House, even though it is on the National
Register of Historic Places, is uncertain. In 1991, it was bought at auction
by Pasquale and Henrietta Capozzolo, who have no plans for renovation. Each
year, there is more wood rot, leaking roofs and water damage.
Ironically, while many of the region’s historic inns are falling into
disuse and disrepair, the most successful hotels and motels are those that
advertise themselves as “country inns” and bed and breakfasts. They’re selling
nostalgia and history but often offer little of either.
“We used to call them old resorts; now we call them country inns, and
everybody likes them — it’s all how you wrap this thing,” says Uguccionni of
the vacation bureau.
Sometimes the B&Bs are nothing more than motel-type accommodations with
breakfast. And although some of the country inns are in charming historic
structures, the definition of “country” has been stretched as never before.
Robert Dunlop, owner of the Crescent Lodge in Paradise Valley, says that
this summer has been the best season ever. Originally a 19th-century tourist
home, the lodge gutted the interior of its small rooms, added bathrooms, and
built 18 small individual cottages in the rear of the property. Many of the
rooms feature fireplaces, Jacuzzis, canopy beds and kitchenettes.
In 1967, the front porches were torn off, a large dining room was added in
back, and a two-story, vaulted glass, shingle-and-field stone entrance was
added.
And what is a country inn anyway? Dunlop defines it this way: “A country
inn is a hotel on a reduced scale — yet we have to make it look small and
cozy but do the volume to cover the overhead.”
Skytop, which was built in 1926, is the last remaining old-time grand
resort still meticulously maintained with elegance and service. The sprawling
inn of field stone, with Dutch-colonial roofs, is atop a hill on 5,500 acres
overlooking manicured lawns and flower gardens.
There are tennis courts, 18 holes of golf, stocked trout streams, and
nature hikes to waterfalls.
A critical element of Skytop’s enduring success is its “real determination
to hold onto old-time values,” says Ed Mayotte, general manager of the
166-room resort. “Some of those values may be frumpy — we ask people to wear
jackets in the dining room and ask people to adhere to a certain decorum.”
Finger bowls are served after dinner, and guests are asked to be quiet in
their rooms after 11 p.m. Every Saturday night there is a dance in the Pine
Lobby, after which guests march four-abreast around the lobby, out onto the
terraces and through the grounds.
Designed in reaction to the Quaker resorts, Skytop had a dance floor and
card rooms and served liquor in a basement bar, although not until the early
1970s was it possible to order a cocktail in the dining room. Only in 1987 did
the resort install television in guest rooms.
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