Suffern’s historical Hotel Lafayette will soon be demolished to make room for a new upscale apartment complex that may help kick-off a whole other chapter for the village.
A piece of the Village of Suffern’s past will soon be history. Suffern (and Town of Ramapo and Rockland County) Historian Craig Long gives a nice summary of the history of the Hotel Lafayette, shot by LoHud’s Tania Savayan.
Peter Kramer, LoHud’s resident theater writer and man-about-town, contributes an interesting historical perspective on the Hotel Lafayette, which will soon be demolished to make way for urban renewal.
(Suffern Village Historian Craig Long discusses the Hotel Lafayette)
Soon Suffern will embark on its grand smart transit downtown apartment living experiment. The hotel sits smack in the epicenter of the Orange Avenue Associates project that will build some 91 luxury rental apartments in a specially created Transit Development District (TDD) on a 1.48 acre site.
The site is currently undergoing clean-up and pre-construction, well, preparation.
The Hotel Lafayette property is currently in abysmal condition and rather beyond saving in terms of a return on investment. The property has been used as a sort of low income housing cash register for many years, i.e., kind of a flophouse.
Long recalls fire calls at the property back in the 1980s with Suffern Fire Inspector Frank Conklin, where residents had hot plates catching fire. Long sounds nearly wistful while describing Suffern’s changing skyline – saying finally, “it’s progress.”
Historical Hotel Lafayette in Suffern to be demolished https://t.co/UBjwmzzlFZ pic.twitter.com/Jm3sU6bxtW
— lohud.com (@lohud) March 21, 2016
Kramer delves into the building’s glory days, providing a brief coloful history of ownership.
There’s a nice quote from lifelong Suffern resident and former longtime Suffern Clerk Virginia Menschner, who at 94 remembers Suffern’s yesteryears. Menschner said she “won’t be too nostalgic for the Hotel Lafayette”, which has been rundown now for nearly as long as its bright heyday.
“I’m still sad they built the Thruway,” said Menschner. “We used to swim in the lake there. We used to have a beautiful beach there, believe it or not.”
Photos and video courtesy of Tania Savayan/The Journal News.
