Heres an article from the NY Times of 1999 on the Red Apple Rest: August 30, 1999 NY Times: SUMMER PLACES Long Past Heyday, Fabled Catskills Cafeteria Struggles By JOSEPH BERGER SOUTHFIELDS, N.Y. -- The first taste of what those summers not so long ago were like is the faded billboard. Red Apple Rest -- 4 miles, it announces, with a picture of a crimson apple. Cafeteria. Buses Welcome. Four miles north, along a now sleepy stretch of Route 17, is the place itself. It is still a sprawling barn of a building, looking like a cross between Nathans hot dog stand on Coney Island and the Dubrows cafeteria that once fed Manhattans garment district. But it is hard for those who remember its heyday to believe this was once the storied way station for summer pilgrims -- mostly Jewish pilgrims -- journeying to and from the Eden of the Catskills. Now it is but a shadow of the bustling hive it once was. The large wooden apple perched on its roof is more brown than red. The windows still have signs, now weathered, announcing pizza slices for 85 cents, but the windows themselves are long shut. Inside, the cafeteria is intact, with a tall mound of trays, stainless steel counter, steaming pans of vegetables, and signs pointing to sections for cold sandwiches and hot foods. The mens bathroom still has 10 urinals, a sign of the niche this restaurant filled for the throngs trapped in a traffic jam. But the crowds of jostling vacationers are a thing of the past. Instead, the collection of forlorn brown tables is dappled with people like Sam and Evelyn Kawam, octogenarian New Jerseyans who have the time for the now quaint ritual of a drive in the country and who drop in three times a week, and Mary Petrosky, a 77-year-old local woman who has been stopping by since she was a teen-ager. While the owner, Peter Kourakos, tenderly hovers about, the customers sit in the almost hushed dining room taking small, unhurried bites of the pot roast or other daily specials. Sometimes they reminisce about summers past when it was impossible to get a seat. It was mobbed, recalled Kawam, 81, a retired mailroom supervisor from Totowa, N.J., the astonishment still audible in his voice. You should have seen the cars out there, said Ms. Petrosky. On a Sunday night the traffic was bumper to bumper. Everybody came to the Red Apple, from T-shirted borough working stiffs to Borscht Belt comics like Milton Berle, to W. Averell Harriman, the railroad heir and onetime New York Governor who would send his chauffeur for takeout. In the 1950s, the Red Apple served 350,000 hot dogs and four tons of potatoes to a million customers a year. If you didnt know about it you must have been deaf, dumb and blind, said Art DLugoff, who always dropped in while hitchhiking to jobs as a hotel busboy and went on to become the impresario of another legendary watering hole, the Village Gate in Greenwich Village. That was the place to stop over. On a Friday night at the sweltering height of summer, cars would lumber up in an unbroken stream, their radiators already gurgling steam from two hours of stop-and-go driving along the two-lane morass of Route 17 -- mocked by exasperated World War II veterans as the Burma Road. Out would spill dozens of Irvs, Sams and Murrays, drained from a week of muscular work and lonely for their wives and children up in the bungalows in places like Swan Lake and Monticello. Aware the weekend was rapidly disappearing, they would wolf down hot dogs and soda and race off for another two hours of driving. Elsewhere in the 300-car parking lot would be fleets of buses loaded with children off to sleepaway camps and dozens of private cabs, their roofs stacked with rope-lashed valises from New York straphangers who were splitting the fare. Give me your two Grossingers, Ill give you my two Neveles, one hack might say to the other, trading passengers like playing cards so the drivers could shorten their own journeys to join their summering families. What made the Red Apple so essential a summertime port of call was not so much its food as its location. Before the New York State Thruway opened in 1956, the ride up to the mountains along the old Route 17 could take four or five hours and the Red Apple Rest were almost exactly halfway. While there were three or four other pit stops, the Red Apple, watched over by its founder, Reuben Freed, became the place to go. It grew from a convenience into a tradition, said Tania Grossinger, a member of the Grossinger clan that ruled the hotel in Liberty, N.Y., now closed. It did not hurt patronage that Freed strategically spaced a dozen billboards -- only one survives -- telling travelers how much farther to the Red Apple, insuring a Pavlovian whetting of appetites. But the Thruway, and its new branching artery, a revamped stretch of Route 17 popularly called the Quickway, not only bypassed the Red Apple but also cut the ride from New York to the Catskills in half, eliminating the need for a rest stop. Then there was a malicious paradox. While people could now get to the Catskills more rapidly, fewer people wanted to go. Cheap jets to Europe, air-conditioning and a generation that spurned overeating and raucous humor all sent the Catskills into a tailspin. With the Red Apples fate intertwined with that of the mountains, the restaurant slowly faded into an ordinary roadside diner on an unexceptional river of blacktop. The eaterys owner of the past 14 years, Kourakos, has preserved legendary dishes like the vegetable soup -- as good as it used to be, he insists -- though he has abandoned others like knishes. But he knows he can no longer dine off nostalgia. The business that once employed more than 170 cooks, waiters and busboys has returned to its mom-and-pop roots. Kourakos, 52, a mustached Greek immigrant with the weary disposition of someone who runs a 15-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week business, keeps it going with help from his wife, Vicky, his 20-year-old daughter, Maria, and a staff of three. Though weekends can still get busy -- motorcyclists have made his place a rallying point -- the rest of the week brings in loyal stragglers like the Kawams and Ms. Petrosky and the odd trucker. A striking number of customers, Kourakos said, last dropped in 10 or 20 years before and pause only for a whiff of childhood. They say, I was here when I was a kid and I stopped here with my parents, he said. A lot of them are surprised were still here. Some of the old customers have used their memories in films like Woody Allens Deconstructing Harry and A Walk on the Moon, directed by Tony Goldwyn and written by Pamela Gray. When he bought the nine-acre property in 1985 Kourakos realized the Catskills popularity had crested. But he thought he could keep the Red Apple going on buses that still made the Catskills run. As name-brand hotels like Grossingers and Browns continued to close, however, prospects for a revival dimmed. The lure of gambling in Atlantic City and the Thruways fast-food service areas dampened commerce even more. Still, Kourakos hopes for a godsend, like government approval of gambling at Monticello Raceway or the emergence of a Disney World-like Catskills attraction. At the same time, he talks about renovating the Red Apple into a standard-issue restaurant that would capitalize on the increasing suburbanization of Rockland and Orange Counties. The main thing is were here and well be here for a long time, he said stoically. The Red Apple was started by another immigrant. Reuben Freed was a refugee from Russian pogroms who swept garment district floors, then started a womens coat business that went bankrupt during the Depression. In 1931, he drove to the country with a friend and ended up buying what was then a combination gas station and refreshment stand. He called it the Red Apple, after his chef, a rust-haired man named Red Appel. With the return of soldiers after World War II and the boom in automobile ownership, the Red Apple flourished, staying open 24 hours every day, even Yom Kippur. We didnt own a key to the door, said Evelyn Marshak, one of Freeds four children. At the height of the operation people were eating standing up. If you saw a seat in the phone booth that was prime property. Outside, there were three hot dog stations and windows that sold hamburgers, knishes and milkshakes. Forty cents would buy a hot dog, French fries and soda. I remember sitting in the bus and Id say to my uncle, Are we almost there? Are we almost there? and Id mean the Red Apple, recalled Marilyn Banner, who first journeyed to the bungalows in the 1940s. Freed, a slightly built man with a genial smile who insisted on working in a suit and tie hovered. He would clear off the table before you finished eating! Driving an hour to pick up fresh bread and rolls. Although his home was just across Route 17, most days he would not return until 11. Everything my father earned in life came from the restaurant, Mrs. Marshak said. But there was always an ambivalence by his children because it took him away from his children. If I wanted to eat with my father I came here. Freed was still clearing off tables in 1980 just days before he died at 88. His son, Herbert, took over, partly glad, the son once said, that he was now running a restaurant instead of a nut house. But he abdicated in 1985. Those who remember the Red Apples salad days find it somewhat painful to see its pallor today. Max Banner, 78, Marilyn Banners brother-in-law, happened by chance to pass it the other day after a 40-year hiatus. Its like seeing someone who was the picture of health and you see him sick, he said. Thats what the Red Apple looked like to me.
Posted on: Fri, 26 Dec 2014 00:42:06 +0000
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