One big reason that West Saugerties became a cohesive community was the summer traffic, predominantly from New York City, to the bungalows of its scenic mountains—cottages that eventually became year-round homes. Summer migration to the Catskills began with the construction of the Catskill Mountain House, which boasted a breathtaking view, at Pine Orchard (near Haines Falls) in 1823. Rival hotels like Woodstock’s Overlook Mountain House sprang up at places where the vistas of the Catskills and Hudson Valley were just as majestic. Saugerties made a bid as a destination with the rebuilding of the Overlook Mountain House in 1878 (it had burned in 1875) by the Kiersted brothers of Saugerties, who made their fortune in land speculation and tanning. Though officially in Woodstock, the hotel, according to Evers in “The Catskills: From Wilderness to Woodstock,” “was largely a Saugerties show, and it became the symbol of a Saugerties bid for dominance of the Catskills’ summer-visitor business.”
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, more and more middle- and lower-class families, or even young people traveling with friends (instead of adult escorts), came to the Catskills to spend brief vacations “climbing the mountains, picking berries, and drinking fresh milk,” as Evers puts it. Policemen and their families from New York City and environs were drawn to West Saugerties by the NYPD’s Police Recreation Center, known simply as the “police camp,” up Platte Clove Rd. in what is now Elka Park, but was then still considered part of the hamlet. Built in 1921, the police camp—consisting of a large main building, a dining hall, and several other structures, including a movie theater, casino, bar, and ballroom—burned down the following year but sprang back immediately to provide vacations in the country for the next 60 years. (It closed in 1983, sat vacant for eight years, and is now owned by the Bruderhof Christian community.)
Albert (Bob) Miller, 74, remembers working six days a week at Joe Kissley’s gas station in Tannersville after he got out of military service in the 1950s. “The police camp was in full bloom then,” he says. “The wives were up all summer and the cops, their husbands, would come up on weekends. Labor Day weekend, I’d get $245 in tips because they all tipped at the end of the summer.”
The Carn and Rodgers families had owned much of the hamlet’s original farming and residential properties, and Jake Rodgers (known as the unofficial “mayor of West Saugerties”) sold 85 acres to Charlie Bach, Bub’s father, in 1944. A Carn daughter married Rodgers, “who owned everything,” Bub says. “We bought our first acre of land off Jake in 1927. He put in all those summer bungalows. There were an awful lot of them.” They sprang up around the main road of the hamlet which, Bub recalls, went past Blue Mountain Reformed Church on Blue Mountain Church Rd. and beyond the Blue Mountain reservoir to what is now the Grant D. Morse Elementary School on Harry Wells Rd.
The increase in summer migration was occasioned by the rise of train travel. Visitors to West Saugerties arrived at the station in the village, where the tracks cross Ulster Avenue. “They all came by train,” Bub Bach says. “I came up by train when I was in the service. It took four hours from New York City.” No record is available of when that station closed, but Smith points out that freight service to the Saugerties station ended in 1959 and “passenger service had closed previously.” (It was, however, still in use after June 1952, when the Mt. Marion station closed and its passengers taken up by the Saugerties station, Smith says.)
“Right after the [Second World] war, cars started coming in,” Bub Bach says. “The war took a lot of people out of West Saugerties, I can tell you that. The train left for the war, and some didn’t come back. The end of the train station [in the 1950s] was also the end of people coming up to the bungalows. Today they go up to the Adirondacks.”
The ethos of the place, Bach and others say, made West Saugerties stand out. “People were kind to a young woman with four children,” recalls Marie Post, 88, former town councilwoman and animal control manager for the town (who lives in the original Bach homestead on Manorville Rd.). “They looked out for one another. People felt safe.”
Adds Bub Bach, “It’s a real nice place to live.”
Miller says the distinctive quality of the hamlet derives from “the nice people here—and the view.” And certainly the view has been as much a contributing factor as any other to the place that is West Saugerties.
