“I’ve been looking at this building since I bought the liquor store thirteen years ago,” Feehan said of his own reasons for purchasing the historic hotel. “To be in a position, finally, to be able to do something really great with it is very exciting. I love the fact that so many people have come to me with ideas about this. I welcome it.”
“What I’d love to see is a really nice small hotel with a pub and a restaurant.” Feehan continued. “I’m talking with an architect, and what I’ve asked for is a design that will blend into Phoenicia, but also stand out because it’s beautiful. Something along the lines of a Victorian style building with a wraparound porch.”
Turning this vision into reality, though, will be no easy project. Feehan’s purchase price from former owner Richard Stokes was $395,000, and demolition costs for the condemned structure will add about $50,000 to the upfront expenses. Helping with the financing was the fact that both the Catskill Watershed Corporation and the SHARP committee essentially rolled over their existing loans to the previous owner, about $60,000 from CWC and $55,000 from SHARP.
Feehan had to provide the balance personally, using equity from a number of residential and several commercial buildings he owns in Shandaken, Olive, and Woodstock. He estimates that the total cost of the project would likely he envisions would fall, in the end, somewhere in the $4 million to $6 million range.
CWC’s maintaining of an interest in the property via its loan decision could indicate a willingness on the regional agency’s part to participate further in his coming development process.
Before the hotel burned, CWC was considering a plan to purchase the property and rehabilitate it with hopes of then selling a turn key operation to someone in the private sector, something similar to what the agency is now doing in the Village of Stamford with another historic hotel property.
Now that Feehan has taken the property, that particular approach by CWC would no longer be viable, but Feehan has been in discussions with CWC officials about ways it could participate.
The hotel building, first opened in 1854, had a long and colorful past, according to local historians and authors Lonnie and Ruth Gale. From about 1900 to 1920 its front porch was a nationally known center of fly-fishing, when the Esopus widely known as the premier trout stream in the Northeast.
In the late 1920s, Babe Ruth often drank and held forth there, and sometimes spent the night when he couldn’t make it back to his regular boarding house at the mouth of Woodland Valley.
Notorious bootlegger and gangster Dutch Schultz was another regular during Prohibition years; his allegedly buried treasure remains undiscovered somewhere in the area to this day.
The hotel’s reputation as an elegant though somewhat rough and tumble establishment continued through the 1940s, say the Gales, when “somebody would go through the plate glass window just about every weekend.” In the late 40s and early 50s its storefronts were added to house Rudy’ restaurant and Ilene’s dress shop.
The building’s last 30 or so years had been a period of continual decline, culminating in its condemnation several years ago for unsolved structural problems and the revocation of its liquor license.
On July 29, 2007, it was destroyed by fire, later determined to be “of suspicious origin.” Earlier this winter, modest repairs compelled by the town were made to prevent a portion of the building from collapse.
What’s next for the property’s redevelopment is uncertain at the moment, except that Feehan is planning to have the burned-out structure demolished sometime this spring. In the short term, he’s planning to develop a hotel design and explore construction funding options.
“The truth is,” he says, “the whole site is only two thirds of an acre, and there’s no place for anything larger than a very small septic field. So the viability of any hotel project is completely dependent on the availability of municipal wastewater treatment. If Phoenicia gets that, then I think it can also get a beautiful hotel on this site, a real centerpiece of the hamlet. If we can’t figure out how to do that, I’ll have to go back and look at other options.”
Those options, according to Feehan, do not include partnering with other local developers, though he is hopeful that perhaps public sector participation in any final project might play a significant role. And no, he laughs, he has “no plans” to build any self-storage units on the hamlet’s historic commercial center, even though he does have experience with the construction of such operations.
Last February 2, voters in what would be the Phoenicia Sewer District defeated a referendum which would have permitted the construction of a $17 million New York City funded septic treatment system.
Funding for such a system remains available until early this summer, should a negotiated resolution and voter approval permit.
As it now stands, any such resolution appears very far off. On Monday, February 25, town Supervisor Peter DiSclafani said there is no way he would even ask the people of Phoenicia to reconsider the deal that was turned down last year, even though the DEP has made it clear that offer would not change.
It did not appear that DiSclafani was doing anything to negotiate a better deal and he was adamant that he saw no point to assemble some type of sewer committee to take on the negotiating chores.
But Feehan, 39 and the owner of the Phoenicia Liquor Store, who started his business career working with Town Tinker Tube Rentals, remains hopeful such a solution may be possible. He grew up in Phoenicia after his parents moved here in 1973, and except for his years at college, has lived here ever since.
“Truth is almost everybody in town has been thinking about this building or this site and its future,” he said of his new purchase. “There’s a lot of great ideas out there.”

Furthermore, it’s not expected to be released for public perusal until next Wednesday, March 5, at the earliest. Even though a form of the document, which serves as something of a blueprint for longer environmental statements subject to intense review, was available two weeks ago, as originally proposed by the state.
“According to protocol, it goes to the applicant to look at first,” said DEC Region 3 spokeswoman Wendy Rosenbach on February 25. “They have an option to review it. They can also suggest changes.”
Rosenback added that whether suggested changes are made is the state’s prerogative, something she couldn’t address at present.
“All I know is that it’s a very long document and it’s very comprehensive,” she added. “It’s a big production.
Added DEC Region 3 Director Willie Janeway, in a February 26 e-mail, “Availability of the expanded Belleayre Crossroads Scope should be announced, as per regular process, in ENB.”
He was referring to the weekly Environmental Notices Bulletin the DEC publishes on its website each Wednesday. Rosenbach added that she didn’t see any release before March 5, and noted that the process had been complicated by the need for the Scope to address the long-hinted at but never formally proposed ski center expansion, as well as the Unit Management Plan the DEC would need to achieve such changes.
On the eve of an earlier anticipated Scoping Release date, pro development forces joined forces Monday, February 18 to try and spin their view of the region’s need for such investment in a press conference at Ulster County Chamber of Commerce offices in Kingston.
Simultaneously, a coalition of groups and local landowners opposing the project, first proposed nearly a decade ago by Shandaken-based developer Dean Gitter, sent out their own spin documents noting how their beef wasn’t with skiers or the state-owned ski center at Belleayre, but the private resort planned to buttress what they note was originally planned in the 1940s as a populist recreational facility.
Two news items seemed to have triggered the press conference called by Joe Kelly of the Coalition for Belleayre, which announced its intentions to change its name back to the Coalition to Save Belleayre, and Partners for Progress, a Margaretville-based coalition of local business owners and other supporters of what they call “the governor’s compromise.”
One was a January 10, 2008 letter from The Greene County Coalition for Economic Equality to the state DEC as a comment on Scoping, per the state’s request. The detailed letter, handed out at the Chamber meeting, noted how two of the new coalition’s members, Hunter and Windham mountain ski areas, as well as the entirety of Greene County, would be adversely impacted by any major expansion at Belleayre Mountain, which they said was already hurting them via the state’s unfair business practices.
Hunter Mountain President Russ Coloton, who attended the Monday session in Kingston without comment, later handed over a full 20-page White Paper stating their position that Belleayre has been able to undercut other area’s prices because the public, via state coffers, covers so many otherwise heavy industry-related expenses.
The other point of opposition that Kelly and others said the press conference was called to counter involved the Greene County Legislature’s passage of a resolution backing their ski areas’ objections to the expansion, as well as a more serious state Senate bill calling for the establishment of a statewide “Blue Ribbon Commission on fair competition in the outdoor recreation industry,” which Coloton later said had been unanimously approved by the Board of Directors of Ski Areas of New York, the industry’s main advocacy group.
The latter bill, put forth by State Senator Jim Seward on January 28, asks Spitzer to okay the naming of an 11-member commission by his office and the state legislature to look into Hunter and Windham’s charges, as well as similar complaints elsewhere in the state, with a report due by year’s end.
Kelly opened his session for five members of the press with talk about how his coalition was originally formed in the early 1980s to battle a previous state move to close Belleayre.
“We’re here today because Belleayre is under attack and it’s time to fight back,” Kelly said, as members of Partners for Progress, several Delaware County chambers of commerce and governmental agencies, and representatives of a number of key local unions stood around and nodded in agreement as the talk veered between the ski center’s expansion and the private resort plans.
Also on hand were David Donaldson, Chairman of the Ulster County Legislature, who noted his support of the ski area but withheld comment on the private resource; legislator Susan Zimet, who withheld all comment excepting a few words of interest; and Ulster County Development Corporation and Industrial Development Agency head Lance Matteson, who would eventually speak about the importance of bringing investment dollars to the county.
Former Ulster County Chamber chairman Joan Lawrence Bauer, currently a member of the Delaware County IDA and director of the not-for-profit M-ARK Project, a housing and local development agency, as well as a former Gitter employee, aided Kelly with his presentation and handed out materials, including a “Rumor Control” set of pages apparently created by the resort developers countering various assertions it has been saying its opponents are touting.
Gitter’s Vice President of Public Relations, Paul Rakov, nodded approvingly as presentations were made but did not say anything publicly himself.
“We think the state is doing a fantastic job of being in the ski industry,” Kelly said, after lamenting the attacks of Ulster’s “northern neighbors.” He talked about how the New York constitution, “mandated the state to be in this industry” and that any problem private ski areas were having had nothing to do with state business.
Sam Fratto of the Hudson Valley Building Trades union talked about how “We give too much credence to the opponents of projects” and noted the promises of full employment that Gitter has made to his and other area unions.
Others spoke of possible ghost towns should the resort and ski center expansion not go through. Several people denigrated environmentalists for holding back the local economy, and Lawrence Bauer again spoke of the state constitution as though any failure to meet its maximized ski center size were an affront to some unnamed founding fathers.
Planned business rallies for the resort, including one at Cold Spring Lodge in Olivera on March 5, and a new billboard campaign of giant signs labeled “Say Yes To Compromise” were mentioned.
Asked whether Belleayre was under actual threat of closure, and whether the purpose of the press conference was more about support for Gitter’s private project, Kelly and others talked about “the cost of paralysis,” “a culture of decay,” having to “grow or go,” and “a thousand little pinpricks of pressure” similar to what led to the state’s 1984 attempt to close the ski area.
“I think what you’re seeing here is our frustration coming out,” Kelly said.
Could the entire problem actually reflect an industry-wide fear, much reported in the national and international press, that climate change pressures are increasing competitive worries amongst ski centers?
“When and if that comes technology will have to deal with it,” Kelly said as others rolled their eyes. “If it gets too hot I’ll pull out my Speedo and go to the pool at the resort.”
What, Kelly was asked, would be the problem if Seward’s bill passed and a Blue Ribbon Committee was put into place to study public/private competition in the recreation industries?
“Delay, delay, delay,” Kelly replied. “We can’t afford any delays.”
Would there be further such press conferences throughout the coming process, including the impending release of the Scoping Document whose comments this event was indirectly focused on?
“The Coalition will have a constant opinion as this continues to move forward,” he replied. “We have been pushed into a corner here.”
Meanwhile, Save The Mountain, the coalition of groups opposing the current expansion and resort plans outlined in Spitzer’s AIP, sent out a press release the day after the Chamber press conference touting their support of the state owned ski center and noting, in a headline, “Don’t be fooled by attempts to confuse! There are 2 Belleayres”
“Some statements made by others are intended to blur the lines between our PUBLIC Belleayre Mountain and its Ski Center, part of the Catskill Park, vs the proposed PRIVATE Belleayre Resort, a real estate development,” their release reads. “On the contrary, we say put Belleayre Mountain and Ski Center first. We’re concerned that building the huge PRIVATE high-end, for-profit Belleayre Resort, as proposed, may impede expansion, overwhelm the great PUBLIC Belleayre Mountain Ski Center, and even raise lift and rental prices… We are also concerned about using our tax dollars and yours to build and maintain private ski lifts, trails and snowmaking for the enjoyment and private profit of a few.”