Rhinecliff Phoenix
by Cynthia Owen Philip

I can't tell you how pleased I am the Rhinecliff Hotel will reopen this summer as The Rhinecliff. The hotel became one of my favorite haunts from the time I bought my house in the hamlet almost 30 years ago. Arriving on Saturdays on the noon train, I would stop in for a delicious BLT and a beer, which were delivered to me in the upstairs dining room overlooking the river because the talk at the bar below was not deemed suitable for my little pink ears. I also attended Pete Seeger's concerts, and, when it was briefly a popular thing for hamlet dwellers to do, I shot pool there.

Gradually, however, it became evident to me that the building was beginning to shift and sag. In fact, the building's gradual deterioration was recorded in the shape of the doors. They were filled out with flaring tops and bottoms to accommodate the slanting ceilings and floors. An increasingly musty dampness began to seep up from the cellar and invade the rooms off the bar. It was a great relief when James Chapman bought the place in the millennium year with the intention of restoring it to its long ago soundness and grace.

As we all know now, that is not exactly what happened. Early on, the structure itself proved too wobbly to fix. For instance, when workmen removed the west porch, most of the wall slithered along with it. Bad went to worse. The only sane solution was to rebuild, conforming as closely as possible to the original hotel. Some hamlet residents grumbled that it should have been replicated exactly. That was not feasible, or even possible. I found out later why.

The site of the hotel is as poor as can be imagined. Before the railroad came in 1852, the location was a swamp, not surprising because it is the lowest point in the hamlet, where runoff from rain and the few households naturally flowed. Jacob Shatzell, a New Yorker who had bought the farm on which it was located in 1806, had had to build a pen around that boggy place to keep his cows from miring in it. When he died in 1849, well-funded New York merchant Charles H. Russell bought the farm for a development he would call Rhinecliff. (Previously the area had been called Kipsbergen — Kips's mountain — in honor of the original Dutch settlers.) A member of the Hudson River Railroad's board of directors, he easily persuaded the railroad to locate its depot down by Shatzell's derelict dock. Next he bought the ferry monopoly and moved its east bank terminus from Long Dock, where it had been for 150 years, to the waterfront west of the station. Now a transportation hub, all the new depot area lacked was a hotel. The obvious location was across Shatzell Avenue. But most of that lot was the swamp. Cleverly, Russell had the railroad fill it in with stone dynamited from the cliffs when the tracks were laid. The northern section of the hotel rested on top of this rubble, which in turn sat on top of a 14-foot deep vein of slippery clay, and over another 150 years, slowly rotted.

To meet today's strict building codes, the new hotel had to be reconstructed from the ground up. However, Chapman has reused every piece of the old building that could be resurrected. Sound flooring has been scraped and re-laid, floor joists have been used as beams, bed frames and behind the washbowls in the bathrooms. The stair rails and banisters and the great bar will be reinstalled. The fireplace surround is made from foundation stone and the patio as well at the path leading into the restaurant are salvaged chimney brick. Un-corroded pressed ceiling tin will be used decoratively. All this extra work added considerably to the expense of the building, as anyone who has tried it knows only too well. But Chapman did it.

When I visited the hotel just before sitting down to write this article, the site was a beehive of activity. An extraordinarily long painting crane was stretched across the Shatzell Avenue side of the building; a skilled young woman was finishing off a balcony railing. She told me the rig could extend to 86 feet and that, although the cab at the end was a little bouncy, making painting a balancing act, she couldn't think how she could do her job without it. Beneath it were three heating and plumbers trucks stuffed with every conceivable tool and material of the trade. Almost, but not quite, blocking Grinnell Street was an immense ten-wheel truck, piled high with 5/8 inch, 4 by 12 foot fire-check sheetrock. The truck's own crane was lifting bundles of 24 up to a third floor window where a worker extracted them by hand one by one. It was an utterly mesmerizing performance.

Inside, the hotel was abuzz with electric drills, screwdrivers, saws and the click-clacking of work-boot heels, a strong sign the hotel was nearing completion. When open to the public in mid-summer, it will offer a reasonably priced restaurant and bar with its kitchen and store rooms on the ground floor. Like China Rose across the street, it is expected to become a destination spot for area residents. The second floor is a large room for special parties — weddings, graduations, birthdays and conferences, and the like. The third and the fourth floors are devoted to the sleeping part of the inn. There are five bedrooms on the lower and four on the upper floor. They vary in size, but all are large and handsome and have private balconies with stunning views of the river, the Kingston Lighthouse, fabulous sunsets and, in the distance, the multi-hued Catskill Mountain range.

I'm counting the days until the Rhinecliff Hotel reopens as The Rhinecliff. Part of me wishes it would be rechristened the Rhinecliff Phoenix, rising magically from its own ashes, so to speak. But, come to think of it, The Rhinecliff, so close to the former name, rings true. May it continue to grace the hamlet's waterfront for the next 150 years.