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November/December 2006 | Volume 57, Issue 6
Travel
Text Complexity Grade Level
9
Resort Sneaking a Spa In
Mohonk Mountain House opened in 1870 in one of the most spectacular settings in the Eastern United States, a craggy private mountaintop with views of five states. By 1902 it had grown into one of those monumental country hotels that exist in only a handful of places.
courtesy of mohonk mountain house2006_6_17a
Resort Sneaking a Spa In
Mohonk Mountain House opened in 1870 in one of the most spectacular settings in the Eastern United States, a craggy private mountaintop with views of five states. By 1902 it had grown into one of those monumental country hotels that exist in only a handful of places. Then it spent most of a century staying true to its austere Quaker roots, for years not even serving alcohol, despite being just 90 minutes from New York City.
Some found the resort ideally old-fashioned; others found it suffocatingly old-fashioned. How could it remain true to the ever-fewer former while drawing in the desperately needed latter? Mohonk has come a long way. Just in the last couple of years room air-conditioning was introduced, and a bar was built. Now the Mountain House has capped its embrace of the best of today by building a big, sumptuous spa in a new 30,000-square-foot wing, with a 60-foot heated indoor pool, saunas, steam rooms, meditation and yoga classes, and a menu of dozens of massages.
The new building that holds it all is gorgeous, with gleaming pine floors and stained-ash wainscoting, made largely with local materials. It fits perfectly with the rambling buildings beside it, and it adds an element of modern resort life not dreamt of when they were built.— Frederick E. Allen
Amenity The Front Porch Comes to the Airport
In the ancient days of our own times, flying was actually glamorous. Passengers dressed up for a flight. But gradually through the years, members of the flying public had to accept the fact that they were no longer personages. Long before security concerns added extra rules, passengers were turned into nonentities by the airports and airlines. Service personnel learned to excel at condescension, a contradiction in terms that left a trip through an airport as something to be endured. And endure it I did, but barely, before a flight in late July. In fact, by the time I reached the gate I wanted to go home. But with requisite obedience, I settled into a seat in a fixed row of chairs like those at every airport, as sturdy as an I-beam and just as ergonomic. Then I noticed in the middle of the section, where the rows slacked off, a pair of rocking chairs .
Rocking chairs in an airport? A bastion of nineteenth-century domesticity as an antidote to twenty-first-century regimentation? It is certainly a step in the right direction. To see them,