My friend was and continues to be heavily involved in the boy scout movement. As we were leaving Sterling Forest he recalled that he used to go to a boy scout camp in the vicinity and that there was another furnace close by. He mentioned that it was not as impressive as the one at Sterling Forest, but that it might be worth a look. So off we went to find it.

On the way we passed this lovely old, abandoned building. It’s the Red Apple Rest.

The Red Apple Rest was a cafeteria-style restaurant on New York State Route 17, in the Southfields section of Tuxedo, New York. It was a noted way station for people traveling to the hotels of the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York.

Before the New York State Thruway was built, the travel time from New York City to the Catskill Mountains was often four or five hours, especially during weekends. The Red Apple Rest, located almost halfway, became a major roadside stopping place. The restaurant was opened in May 1931 by Reuben Freed.

The Red Apple Rest had a great deal of business during the 1940s and 1950s. It was open 365 days a year, 24 hours a day, and was patronized by so-called “Borscht Belt” comedians and professional athletes as well as families traveling to campgrounds and resorts. Although the Thruway (which was built beginning 1953) bypassed the restaurant, and vacationing in the Catskill Mountains became less popular after the 1960s, the restaurant remained very busy until the 1970s. In 1965 the Red Apple Rest served one million customers.

In his book on Jewish comedians in America, The Haunted Smile, author Lawrence J. Epstein said that comedians would stop at the Red Apple Rest late at night and “would go over the acts, describe the audience, and gather gossip about the other comedians and about routines ripe for buying or ‘borrowing.'”

After 53 years under the Freed family management, the Red Apple Rest was sold in 1984 to a Greek businessman who ran it for another 21 years. At that point it was mostly catering to locals due to the fact that the Catskills had dwindled away as a destination. It closed in September 2006—purportedly for various reasons.

The restaurant was featured in several movies such as Woody Allen’s Deconstructing Harry, A Walk on the Moon, Tenderness and Oliver’s Story, and the November 28, 2013 installment of Bill Griffith’s comic strip Zippy.(Wikipedia)

Update: I’ve just (4 April 2023) come across what looks like an interesting book on this restaurant. It’s called Stop at the Red Apple: The Restaurant on Route 17 and it’s by Elaine Freed Lindenblatt, the daughter of the founder of the restaurant: Reuben Freed.

Taken with a Fuji X-E3 and Fuji XC 16-50mm f3.5-5.6 OSS II

This magnificent set of ruins was once the Hoist House, which housed the cable mechanism that hauled the ore cars from the Lake Mine. The cars then dumped the ore at the tipple directly below the hoist house where conveyors moved the ore to the crusher and then to the dryer located across from the mine opening. From there the ore went to the concentrating mill.

Taken with a Fuji X-E3 and Fuji XC 16-50mm f3.5-5.6 OSS II

Before going to the Concentrating Mill the ore was first crushed and then dried. The building on the right is the crusher. The brick building on the left is the dryer.

Taken with a Fuji X-E3 and Fuji XC 16-50mm f3.5-5.6 OSS II

Although I’m not entirely sure I believe that this building is the Concentrating Mill. This was used to magnetically separate the ore, which was then placed in storage bins and taken away via the Sterling Mountain Railroad.

Taken with a Fuji X-E3 and Fuji XC 16-50mm f3.5-5.6 OSS II

We walked back to the visitors center and got in the car to leave. I’d had a great time, but was feeling a little disappointed because I knew that there were some other ruined buildings, and I was a little sad that I wasn’t going to see them. Still you can’t have everything.

As we were driving away we reached a fork in the road. We were turning left, but as I looked down the right fork I was surprised to see in the distance what might have been a cluster of buildings. We couldn’t drive up the road, but I asked my friend if he would stop. He was a bit skeptical thinking that what I’d seen was just some buildings used by the Sterling Lake Adminstration. But he pulled over an off I went. As I got closer I found that there was indeed a group of building, and they were associated with old Lake Mine.

Two shafts lead into the Lake Mine. Workers began the Lake Mine by digging open pits in the hills above the shaft but soon tunneled under Sterling Lake. Today, the abandoned mine is 1,100 vertical feet below the lake’s surface at the shaft’s end. The mine’s main shaft is 2/3 of a mile long and runs downward at an angle between 12 and 25 degrees. In some places it is over 1,000 feet wide. Although filled with water, it was considered a dry mine when it was active. Three pumps, one at the bottom of the mine, a larger one near the center of the shaft, and one at the surface, removed what little water seeped into the mine. At considerable risk to their lives, workers removed more that 2.5 billion pounds of high-grade iron ore from the Lake Mine between 1843 and 1923. (information board).

I’m not entirely sure what the building in the foreground is, but I think it might be the concentrating mill. The two buildings in the background are the crusher and the dryer.

This well-preserved cluster of buildings from 1920 shows a visual diagram of the steps to turn crude ore into the feed for the furnace.

Taken with a Fuji X-E3 and Fuji XC 16-50mm f3.5-5.6 OSS II