suffered disrespect there, they appropriated Sharon Springs and its elaborate Greek Revival water temples as their own.
Sharon Springs was still a refuge for spa devotees through the 1940's and into the 1950's. Former Mayor Edward I. Koch of New York worked as a 22-year-old busboy there in 1946. But in the 1960's, Sharon Springs succumbed to those notorious mass executioners of so many upstate retreats: the turnpike motel and the cheap jet fare. During subsequent, somnolent decades, the village imploded into a resort mirage, a place of abandoned, moldering wood- frame mansions, sagging porches and collapsing roofs.
Though local reanimation efforts were sometimes tried, it was not until the late 1980's that Ms. Spofford's family opened Clausen Farms, an 11-room bed-and-breakfast on Route 20. A few years later, Doug Plummer and Garth Roberts moved up from New York City to establish the Rockville Cafe and Bakery on Main Street, which became not only the hangout for townies, farmers and new residents, but also an incubator for resurrection.
To their astonishment, the cafe partners found themselves buying the 26-room American Hotel, built in 1847, for $18,000 in 1996 just to keep it from disintegrating. Then they wound up spending more than $400,000 in savings and loans during the next five years to prop it up, clean it out and bring it back. In June, the American Hotel began renting nine of its rooms, after having opened its 65-seat restaurant in May. Naturally, the village breakfast spot has migrated from the Rockville, now closed, to the 25-seat pub at the hotel.
The busy hotel "makes a tremendous statement there on Main Street," Senator Seward said. "We spoke very bravely that all this was going to happen, and it's exciting to see that it is actually happening. I can see so much difference between last summer and this summer."
And to the delight of Mr. Plummer and Mr. Roberts, the new hotel has suddenly benefited from a staple of the old hotel: the walk-in. How better to describe Winnie and Ken Caswell, from New Castle, N.H.
"We've been driving through the area and were charmed by the hotel," Mrs. Caswell said as they entered the lobby. "We thought, why not spend the night?"
Down the hill on Main Street, Dawne Belloise and her partner, Dennis Giacomo, have spent five years restoring the town's most imposing ruined grande dame, the 160- year-old, 130-room, four-story Roseboro Hotel. They bought the structure for $20,000 in 1996, defying all rational explanation, as they put it; they have found themselves spending $250,000 on the restoration so far.
The Roseboro's 90-seat restaurant, with its oak floors and saffron curtains, opened on July 13, and patrons were offered a new-American menu under the dining room's woven bamboo-blade fans and $3,000 Roman- inspired chandeliers. In September, Ms. Belloise and Mr. Giacomo plan to open
New York Region
July 23, 2001

A Faded Resort Lumbers to Life

By Glenn Collins

SHARON SPRINGS, N.Y. — For the old-timers in this historic mineral-spring village, it was more than a little startling when the white elephant came back to life.
The rebirth, two months ago, of the stately white-clapboard American Hotel on Main Street has been the most visible symbol of the comeback of this legendary but depopulated Brigadoon of gingerbready, abandoned Victorian resort hotels. Rooms were being rented at the American for the first time in five decades.
"What a great breath of fresh air," said Sally Lauzon, a science teacher at Sharon Springs Central School, gesturing toward the hotel on a recent afternoon. She lives on Main Street up the hill from the American, and was taking her 3-week-old son, Alexander Carl, on a little jaunt. "When we moved in here 18 years ago, most of the houses on Main Street were uninhabitable."
The town "has literally come back from the dead," said State Senator James L. Seward, who represents Sharon Springs and vividly remembers the days when not a living soul stirred on Main Street.
Indeed, Sharon Springs, near Cooperstown, "was a poster child for rural decline, so the signs of its recovery are especially heartening," said Kent Barwick, president of the Municipal Art Society of New York, who has spent every summer near the village since boyhood.
When The New York Times visited the village last year, the wisp of revival had become a full-fledged restoration, but skeptics wondered whether the efforts could truly achieve critical mass. At the start, not a penny of government money spurred the renaissance. No Albany bureaucrat stuck a pin in a map and declared Sharon Springs the lucky winner. No wealthy patrons distributed largess.
What had happened here was thoroughly local, and mostly uncoordinated. "I suppose we were defying the laws of gravity," said Maureen Lodes, president of the Sharon Springs Chamber of Commerce. In 1997, when she and her business partner, Kathy Spofford, opened up Cobbler & Company, a quirky collectibles emporium on Main Street, "everyone thought we were lunatics," she said. "People asked, `Who will go there?' But now, it's all starting to snowball."
Maybe, but after a very long freeze. These days the village has a year-round population of 550, but it once drew 10,000 resort visitors during the summer. Originally a 19th-century playground of the Vanderbilts and Roosevelts, who were drawn to the benefits of the famous mineral-rich waters, it was later spurned by the fickle rich for Saratoga Springs. When pillars of the wealthy Jewish elite
Ruth Fremson/New York Times
five new Main Street storefronts on the Roseboro's 75-foot-long front-porch extension, which was until recently a sagging protuberance requiring extensive reconstruction.
Over the last couple of years, more and more tourists have been seeking out the town's shabby chic. Thanks to the resuscitation efforts, visiting shoppers can work their way down the hill now past the Sharon Springs Village Hall and Free Library to Cobbler & Company, a 13-room, two- story gift-shop menagerie where the walls and halls have already been signed by a thousand visitors from 40 states and 30 countries.
After perusing the American Hotel opposite Main Street, they might encounter Finishing Touch, an apparel and home-decor shop, and then Gino's Italian Restaurant and Pizzeria, where the mozzarella is fresh and the pizza dough is whirled by Cipriano Loviglio, a pieman from Bari, Italy.
Pausing further to observe the restoration of the Roseboro, shoppers might then browse the Sharon Springs Emporium, an eclectic consignment and antiques store, and wander into the Sharon Historical Society. Just down the street, the Imperial Baths, the 73-year-old white-sulfur mineral baths, are still open to the public every day except Saturday. Massage is an option.
Main Street is also punctuated by lively historic markers recalling the mineral-spring past, all of it referenced on the village's elaborate Internet site, www.sharonsprings.com, created by Ms. Belloise, a Web designer.
The growing hubbub contrasts with the realities of a decade ago, "when most of Main Street was condemned and the place seemed totally eerie," said Ms. Belloise, who moved here in 1990, charmed by the crumbling five-block main drag and its possibility for renewal.
"This transformation was not ordered from on high," Mr. Barwick said, "it was a grass-roots effort by young, optimistic people who weren't scared away by the terrible decline that had occurred there."
In the village, there is "real momentum now," Senator Seward said.
But can so much promising activity be equated with unstoppable progress? Town veterans fret that the Sharon Springs revival "is still tentative," said Ms. Lauzon, the science teacher. "In the end, I think we'll have to work together as a village to keep all this going."
But Mr. Barwick said Sharon Springs had not been affected by recent economic problems "because there was no room for a further downturn," he said. "Sharon Springs had nowhere to go but up."
© 2006 The American Hotel, Sharon Springs, NY