Blue Crane Inn continued to change — in part because of the rise of the automobile and decline of the street car. By 1923, it’d morphed to add a bakery. One year later, with a new owner Jean Baldwin, Blue Crane Inn added a full-fledged restaurant.
As P&G’s notes, Blue Crane Inn — as The Casino was before it — relied heavily on the trolley system. Once trolley service on the Highland-New Paltz line ended in 1925, “New Paltz and the Blue Crane Inn lost their ‘captive’ audience.”
Struggling to find a new use
Blue Crane Inn — still with Jean Baldwin as owner — limped on against the market disruption created by cars. But she eventually rented part of her building out to R.R. Akins for it to be a drug store.
In 1934, Baldwin sold out to Harold Hedges, but the building wasn’t done changing hands in this transitional period. Joseph Weber bought Blue Crane Inn in 1937, opening it all day for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
After the Akins Drug store and Blue Crane Inn, the building also housed a real estate office, The Maria Shop and a place called Dick’s Bar and Grill.
Dick’s Bar and Grill is the first time the building was used in a way consistent with how it functions now.
P&G themselves: Patrick Cafferty and George Jayne
Pat Cafferty, originally from Scranton, PA and his business partner George Jayne of Gardiner, eventually started what we now know as P&G’s Restaurant. Both men knew each other because they were Lake Mohonk employees.
Cafferty and Jayne, bought out Dick’s in 1947. Originally, as an ad from the period notes, they had a different name in mind. They wanted to call it “Cafferty & Jayne Restaurant.” But they soon dropped that idea. By 1948, they called it the less formal “Pat & George’s Restaurant.” Locals shortened it P&G’s soon after that.
According to a 1961 New Paltz Independent story, Cafferty and Jayne ran the bar, but they were tenants up until 1951. That’s when George Jayne bought the building from Helen Eagan Valentine.
Stormy and Beck
When it was still run by Jayne, one draw during the 1950s and ’60s was having Storm Nickerson as the bartender. Stormy, an ex-professional baseball player with the Dodger’s organization, had a great heart and is fondly remembered by a lot of old-time New Paltzians and alumni.
Stormy had a connection to the New Paltz college baseball team too, since he helped pitch batting practice, according to P&G’s. The restaurant catered to a mix of customers back in the ’50s and ’60s — fraternity guys, bikers and hippies.
In 1969, when George Jayne was looking to sell the bar, he talked to the local paper. It’s striking how similar what Jayne said to what Mike Beck said during a recent interview.
“It’s always been a college hangout,” the 1969 article quotes Jayne as saying. “Not only is it frequented by college students, but also by former students who are passing through the area.”
Hippies were obviously on that reporter’s mind back in ’69 too, since they asked Jayne directly about them. George Jayne, for his part, liked hippies as customers.
