Red Apple Rest
Red Apple Rest was a famous highway stop along Route 17 in Tuxedo, New York. The cafeteria-style eatery opened in 1931 and for decades did a booming business. Several generations of vacationers regarded this place as the mental halfway point between New York City and the hotels of the Catskill Mountains. Open twenty-four hours a day, it was a favorite late night haunt of Borscht Belt comedians returning to the city from their gigs at the resorts. In its heyday, over a million people a year stopped at Red Apple Rest to grab a bite and visit the comfort stations. It was a travelers’ paradise.
All that changed when the popularity of the Catskill resorts began to fade. Even so, Red Apple Rest managed to hang on, despite fewer and fewer motorists frequenting the establishment. Then one day in 2006 a handwritten sign appeared on the door stating: “We went away for a graduation and vacation.” The place had gone dark and that was it. Those feeble last words hung there for many months until at last they were weather-worn into illegibility. At some point, the town’s building inspector showed up and covered over the now-effaced sheet of paper with a new sign bearing a singular, solemn word: “Condemned.”
When I was a kid growing up in the sixties, my family occasionally stopped at the busy but already doleful Red Apple Rest. The sprawling parking lot was invariably jammed with cars and buses of the summer swarms. My brothers and I didn’t much like the food dished up at Red Apple Rest. We joked that it tasted like World War II. By that point, we had already sampled the dubious pleasures available at a new-fangled type of fast food joint called Carrols, the a chain that later became Burger King. As the years passed, fewer and fewer patrons stopped in at Red Apple Rest. The edges of the asphalt parking lot started giving way to tall weeds and scrubby trees. Coyotes and bears began nosing around the dumpsters.
The last time I stopped by Red Apple Rest was Memorial Day weekend in 2005. I had been driving all day along the bucolic back roads of the Ramapo lake and hill country. Almost by accident, I came upon the dismal remains of the iconic eatery. It was late in the day and shadows were thickening. The parking lot was nearly empty, but the front door was propped open with an old wooden milk crate. Neon light flickered from within, like a promise going out. Hanging in the window was a pale placard that said “Open.”
Common sense told me to keep driving, but nostalgia demanded a comfort stop. So I pulled in. When I got out of the car, I could hear the whispery drone of traffic on the nearby Thruway. A worn-out sign on the side of the building advertised 85-cent slices of pizza. I walked up to the door and stepped inside. Nobody was around that I could see. The air was old and smelled like a charnel house for every bad diner meal ever dished up in America. Immediately on the right was an antiquated cafeteria turnstile. Next to that, a sign that read: “Enter Here.” A tired clock on the wall proclaimed the wrong time. An empty wooden coat rack stood inexplicably in the middle of the serving area. Far in the back was a dim doorway. Above it, another sign: “Bar.” Entry was blocked by a savagely illuminated case of Snapple drinks.
Not knowing what else to do, I took a few pictures. That’s when I became aware of—deep in the murky recesses of the dining room—a cheerless family gathered around a timeworn cafeteria table in timeworn chairs, each figure staring listlessly at an empty plate. Something told me that they were not customers. No, they were something else. Something vapory. I may have gasped. That’s when, in a single grim motion, they all looked up and stared at me in expressionless silence. I waved a timid hello. No one waved back. No one broke the silence. What is that old saying about ghosts, that they only appear if you are willing to meet them halfway? I must have crossed that line.
I turned around and hurried back outside to the parking lot, to what light remained.
©John P. O’Grady
Originally appeared in The Mountain Eagle on October 5, 2018
