Casperkill Watershed Oral History Project

Between 1951 and 1968, Vinnie Bihn’s parents ran an inn on Route 9 called the Rochambeau Motel. At the time, they lived in a house on a hill overlooking the motel property, which included a pond created by damming the Casperkill. The motel has changed owners, but Vinnie Bihn still lives in his childhood home. He has many fond memories of the motel:

When did your family come to live here?

We bought in ’41, I think, and moved up in ’49. My mother didn’t want us growing up in [New York City]. I was just an infant, so she wanted to get out of the city and moved up here. She hated it up here. She was a city girl. She didn’t get any of this, you know? So, we grew up here, but we always had deep roots in the city.

We used to grow vegetables up here and run down to the city during the war. There was a turkey-chicken farm down there (pointing) and this was all vegetables up in here. And they used to help support our restaurant [in New York City]. And that (pointing to another house across the pond) became a restaurant in 1941 or ’42, a German restaurant that wasn’t awfully popular even though it had a French name: Rochambeau.

Where was your motel?

Our motel was right where [the Mercury Grand] is. The landscape was totally different then. We had little cabins. It was a hill with pine trees, white pine, and there were cabins and then later on we built a unit up on top of the hill overlooking the road. But people didn’t know that there was a motel there because you couldn’t see it from the road. All you could see was the sign. And actually, for years we lived here and the motel was down there. And they ran an electrical line up and down there across the pond was “Ring bell and wait.” If somebody came in in January and there was two feet of snow and they rang that bell my father or my mother would have to go all the way down the lawn across the bridge to the bell. Yeah, it wasn’t until ’55 or ’56 that we moved down and had an office.

When did the motel cease to belong to your family?

Around 1967 or ’68, roughly. Now, it’s Mercury Grand but it was Best Western and Ramada before that. It started off as a Camelot; we leased the property for the Camelot. And then Ramada took over and they wanted to buy the property. Because they couldn’t use the Ramada unless they owned the property; you couldn’t be leasing it.

Who used to come to the motel?

Well, in the old days it was a lot of salesmen. We had regular customers that came out of the city.  You can’t understand what this place was like then. It was the wilderness to them. So we had regular customers that would come up. Actually, some of them were kind of semi-famous, even. And they all had their favorite cabins. But then, of course, IBM started going. So we rented to a lot of IBMers: either students who were up here, or families.  Our little motel units had kitchenettes, so a family could come up here and stay while they were looking for a house or having their house built. And they didn’t have to go out for dinner, breakfast or lunch. We had a little stove, little refrigerator, the whole thing. So we rented a lot to IBM. We did very well, for the most part.

Owning a motel, it’s crazy; you get crazy stories. You get characters.

They were these two middle-aged office workers from the city. And they would come and get completely blind for the whole weekend. They’d be out, they didn’t drive so my father would go out and get them. And they always won these trophies for the best dancers. They’d go to the bowling alley and they would dance. And they would be schloggered. Got home at about three o’clock in the morning. Seven o`clock and they were ready for mass. They were as sober and as straight and as neat as a pin. We never knew how they did that.

The Maynards, they were cute. They were this old couple that came up. They loved to fish. And he had Mitchell 300 which to me was like a Rolls Royce, and he would let me use it. And they would sit on the patio, on the wooden chairs, before they got burned, and they would hold hands and read the same book.