The Grand Hotels

It's quiet and green out here now, but a hundred and fifty years ago this was one of the hottest vacation spots in America — a place of grand hotels, ballrooms, and railroad crowds, the Gap the whole reason they came.

The turning point was the railroad. When the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western line reached the Gap in the eighteen-fifties, it put this dramatic mountain scenery within an easy train ride of New York and Philadelphia — and the cities poured out. Enormous wooden resort hotels went up to catch them: the Kittatinny House grew to hold hundreds of guests; the Water Gap House opened in the eighteen-seventies, all verandas and mountain views. Ladies and gentlemen came for the summer to breathe the mountain air, promenade, take in the sublime scenery of the Gap, and be seen. For decades, the Delaware Water Gap was to the East roughly what a grand national-park lodge is out West.

And then it faded, the way these things do — the automobile let people drive past to somewhere new, tastes changed, and one by one the great hotels caught fire and burned, the Kittatinny House in the nineteen-thirties, others before it. They're gone now, every one, and the forest has taken the ground back. But drive this valley knowing it was once dressed up in its Sunday best, full of music and summer crowds — a lost, gilded age, hiding under all these trees.