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Jewel Called Adelphi

Glimpses of the past fill Broadway hotel

By Glenye Cain

The first time Sheila Parkert saw the Adelphi Hotel, it was an abandoned building about to be torn down. That was a long way from what it was a century earlier, and it was a long way from where Parkert and her late husband, Gregg Riefker, thought they could take it. Built in 1877, the hotel had been considered a Saratoga Springs jewel from the moment it opened, an occasion that owner William McCaffery celebrated by hiring the 77th Regiment Band of Saratoga to play from the second-floor piazza, which ran the length of the hotel’s façade. But a century later, when Parkert and her husband – a pair of Nebraskans in their 20’s – took their first good look at the property, the Adelphi was enough of a blight that it had been slated for demolition.“At the time, it was painted red,” Parkert said. “It had been closed up from the time we had lived here. The people who had it had completely pulled up stakes, and vandals had taken everything out of it.”

The Nebraskans were unlikely saviors for the Adelphi. They had fallen in love with Saratoga in the early 1970’s when they passed through on a road trip, and they had moved there several years later. By 1979, they had run a small downtown grocery, managed Sperry’s restaurant and bar, and, in Sheila’s case, gone to law school. They weren’t developers, hoteliers, or professional renovators. But they loved the town, they loved history and
interior design, and they didn’t want to see the Adelphi demolished. That, plus $100,000, was enough to buy the place.

The Adelphi, built in 1877, was designed as an Italian villa with a distinctive second-floor piazza fronting the hotel. It was scheduled to be demolished before Sheila Parkert, the current owner, bought the hotel withher husband in 1979 and restored it room by room.

“We were really kids,” Parkert said. “Urban renewal was a big thing here, and this town was up for grabs in the 70’s. My god, they were tearing down everything. If you could stop the wrecking ball, you could buy something for $10,000. All the mansions on Union Avenue, you could buy anything you wanted. It was a big ol’ land grab.“It had gotten to be big news that they were going to tear this place down. We’d gone to France a lot, and we had seen what people had done with old hotels. We were just young enough and dumb enough to think, ‘This could work.’ " Parkert, then 27, and Siefker raised the $100,000 and bought the hotel in 1979. They would put another $350,000 or so in renovating the building and its interior, room by room as they could afford to do it. When it reopened in 1980, now painted dark brown with cream-colored trim, the Adelphi was still a work in progress. But it was already on its way back to prominence as one of Saratoga’s most distinctive inns.

That was precisely what Parkert and Siefker had in mind when, to help raise funds for the purchase and renovation of the property, they circulated a prospectus. They laid ourt their plan “to return it to the lively days it once knew as a hotel” and “to inspire in all of the city the realization that the glory of the Spa they once knew is not dead, only sleeping.”

The interiors are an eclectic blend of style and contain interesting relics of the past. The hotel is reputed to be haunted, but Parkert said, "I've never seen a ghost, and I've been here in the winters and alone."

The Adelphi was not the largest or most prestigious of Saratoga’s luxury hotels when it opened on July 5, 1877. But there were plenty of gilded-age celebrities to go around in Saratoga, and the Adelphi got its share. Set like a small diamond between the larger and more famous United States and Grand Union hotels, the Adelphi was built on the site of the less tony Old Aelphia, which had been best know for having the only saloon on Broadway that sold liquor by the glass, a bar called The Blue Hen’s Chicken. In the mid-1870s, railroad conductor-cum-hotelier William McCaffery inherited the Old Adelphia from his wife’s family and determined to move it up in the world by tearing it down and starting fresh.The result was the Adelphi, a four-story building designed in the style of Adelphi Hotel an Italian villa with what was known as a “Lombardian” flourish, with arched windows and some architectural referenced to the medieval era. But its most notable and popular feature was its second-floor piazza, which put a more private twist on the grand ground-floor porches that fronted other hotels. Being above street level afforded the Adelphi’s grandees a comfortable place to talk business, and among the figures that could be found doing just that in the late 1870’s were such men as Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt and John Morrissey, a state senator, casino owner, and former prize fighter. Both Vanderbilt and Morrissey were fixtures at the Spa, and Morrissey had been instrumental in bringing a four-day experimental race meet to town in 1863, in the well-founded hopes that the end of the Civil War would make racing a permanent summertime activity at Saratoga again. Vanderbilt, of course, was also a famous horseman, but in Saratoga he is also known as having unwittingly had a hand in the development of the potato chip. The story goes that, while dining at Saratoga’s Moon Lake Lodge one night, Vanderbilt sent a potato back to the kitchen, complaining that it was sliced too thickly, prompting chef George Crum to cut it ridiculously thin, fry it into a hard chip, salt it, and return the remaining crisp to the Commodore. The rebuke unexpectedly became a hit.Morrissey was a regular at the new Adelphi, but not for long. He died at the hotel the year after it opened and lay in state in the second-floor parlor that opened onto the piazza where he had once conducted profitable conversations with men like Vanderbilt.The hotel, not surprisingly, is reputed to be haunted, not by Morrissey but by a woman in a blue velvet Victorian dress.“But I’ve never seen a ghost,” Parkert said, “and I’ve been here in the winters and alone, I’ve never seen any supernatural things, but it wouldn’t surprise me.”Other Adelphi visitors who took advantage of the private piazza included the gangster Meyer Lansky, who was said to have met with his cohorts there from the 1930’s into the 1950”s.The abandoned Adelphi was a huge project for Parkert and Siefker. But they started small. First, they opened only the bar, not the rooms, and the fare was limited to sandwiches. Gradually, the place began to take off. Customers they had known at Sperry’s made the trip to order drinks at the Adelphi, and the revival got a big lift from the New York City Ballet, which makes its summer home in Saratoga.“There were a lot of dancers,” said Parkert, herself a ballet dancer. “At that time, George Balanchine was still around. He never stayed here, but he would come here to the bar.”“Among the other famed choreographers and dancers to sip or stay at the Adelphi are the New York City Ballet’s ballet master in chief, Peter Martins, and the legendary ballerina Suzanne Farrell.

A chance encounter produced the lobby's most famous feature -- hand-stenciled walls and ceiling.

“I was very into the ballet and went every night, and they always came to the bar ,” Parket said. “For me, this was why we came to Saratoga. To be in the middle of it was unbelievable.”“The money we made in the summer was mostly off the bar,” Parkert said. “We took that money and started working on rooms. We only did about two or three rooms a year, and this took almost 20 years.”Today, the Adelphi’s 39 rooms are lavishly furnished. A good number are in Parkert’s favored Regency style, but each room is unique. Upon opening a door, you may find yourself in a Colonial suite, an Adirondack cabin, or a gilded-age boudoir. Whatever the style, some of the rooms still feature an interesting relic from the hotel’s past: mezuzahs, designed to hold small rolls of parchment inscribe with texts from Deuteronomy, fixed inside the door frames as a sign of Jewish faith. These date back to the 1920’s, when the hotel was owned by Eugene Zuckerman, who catered to Jewish clients with kosher and Hungarian food and hospitality at a time when anti-Semitism was common at other hotels.Taken together, the Adelphi’s rooms are a collection of styles and eras. In the early days of its restoration, there wasn’t a particular plan, Parkert said.“At that time, we could take our van around and fill it up with old stuff no one wanted and spend, like, a hundred dollars,” Parkert recalled. “So what informed the decoration was what we found on a given day and what would fit in the van.”The lobby, with its 1800’s-style plush furniture, large potted plants, and marble-topped tables, also benefited from a chance encounter that gave it its most famous feature: hand-stenciled walls and ceiling. The lobby’s current configuration dates back to the 1920’s, when the owners at the time put in such conveniences as an elevator – the kind that requires an operator and has a metalwork grille for a door – that is still in regular use. “First we just painted it,” Parkert said of the lobby. “But one day in the early 90’s, this crazy guy, Larry Boyce, rode up here on his bicycle. He looked like a biker guy. He came in and he said, ‘I’m a stencilist from San Francisco, and I need money. Here’s a portfolio of my work, and I’m gong to paint your lobby. I’ll only charge you a couple of thousand dollars.’ So we looked at his work, and he had done mansions and state capitols and cathedrals – it was amazing. He was just an itinerant, crazy guy who rode around on his bicycle, cross country, and paid for it wherever he was by doing a project. He stenciled the whole lobby and then came back and did the ceiling the ballroom. And then he died of AIDS. This was one of his last projects.”As more rooms opened and the Adelphi began to establish itself as an inn again, the ballet clientele increased. So did racing fans, history buffs, and other visitors looking for a quintessentially Saratoga experience. The hotel is open from May to October, and Parkert still enjoys redecorating rooms and adding new features that stay true to the Adelphi’s beloved old style. A recent addition was a small swimming pool behind the hotel. Sunk in stone and made private by lush plants and a romantic arbor, it looks as if it, too, were established in the 1800’s. That’s the way Parkert likes it, and, as she and Siefker gambled years ago, there are plenty of hotel guests who like it that way, too. Thanks to all of them, the Adelphi went from a near loss to a mainstay on Broadway.“Another few months, and they would have torn it down,” Parkert said. “We never thought that it wouldn’t make it. We always knew that it would.”

Article taken from Saratoga Scene

The Adelphi Hotel
365 Broadway, Saratoga Springs, NY 12866
(518)587-4688 Fax: 518-587-0851