“For lovers only: if you’re in love, you’ll love Penn Hills!”
ANALOMINK, PA — So goes the motto of the Penn Hills Resort, a now-defunct honeymoon destination buried deep in the Pocono Mountains. Once wildly popular with honeymooners and swingers alike, it’s now a shaggy, moldy relic of a time when the Poconos were king, when heart-shaped jacuzzis and mirrored ceilings were all the rage.
Penn Hills — which at one time sprawled out over 500 or so acres of land in tiny Analomink, Pa. — grew from humble roots. Founded in 1944 by Italian immigrants Frances and Charles Paolillo, the resort began its life as a small, quaint roadside inn, the “Penn Tavern.” Originally designed as a family destination, the getaway evolved during its first decade of existence into a honeymoon resort, one of many in the Poconos.
“This property was up for sale and we fell in love with it,” Frances Paolillo told the Pocono Record in 2006.
Charles Paolillo died in 1953, leaving the resort in the care of Frances and their son, Charles Jr., who would rebuild it almost entirely in 1955, after it was wiped out by massive flooding in August of that year. Mother and son didn’t just rebuild, they expanded, adding scores of new cottages and rooms, an indoor pool, and an indoor ice rink — the first one in the Poconos.
And the centerpiece of the resort? A wedding bell-shaped outdoor pool, of course.
During the ’60s and ’70s, the resort continued to grow not only in size but popularity. A ski resort and golf course were added, as was a large “indoor sports arena,” with tennis and basketball courts. Beautiful, multi-colored street lamps were planted about the grounds, imported from the 1964 World’s Fair in nearby New York City. Guests could take a boat ride on the resort’s pond or enjoy a stroll along Paradise Creek, which cut through the resort. Jesus, just look at the place:
As attitudes toward sexuality progressed and changed, so did Penn Hills’ clientele. No longer was the resort only a destination for honeymooners: It became a destination for swingers as well. The “Pocono Palace of Paradise” was an ideal venue for couples looking to indulge themselves for a few days, trade the dreariness of the office and apartment for the relative excitement of a Steve Miller cover band and an all-you-can-eat buffet.
The decline of Penn Hills is one shared by many resorts in the Poconos. Travel became far more affordable through the ’80s and ’90s, and driving a few hours into the mountains no longer really seemed like a vacation. Why would somebody spend $300 a night on a room at Penn Hills when the could probably fly to the Caribbean for that?
The resort began to fall into disrepair. In some ways, the downfall of the place is memorialized on TripAdvisor, where you can scroll through one bad review after another. Here’s a particularly indignant passage:
It is horrible, rundown and filthy!!! My husband and I went away for a weekend and it was a huge waste of our preciously short time away from the kids….The brochures and the web site are totally deceiving….Our first clue should have been when the desk atttendant gave us a key and told us to check out the room before we gave her any money….The corridors and stairs leading to the room were so dark you could hardly see…The room itself was dark, hot and had the look of an abandoned tenement apartment….The supposed fireplace was a decrepit unit of fake logs and a red light that also was broken — there were wires hanging down!! The parking was along a busy road or on stones in a wooded area. I would not have even dared eating any of the food that is included had we stayed — assuming that the kitchen was as clean as the rest of it. Save yourself time — go somewhere else!!
Charles Paolillo Jr. began to lose interest in the place, and his son (we’ll let you guess what his name was) cared even less. (I tried to reach Charles Paolillo by phone, but my messages weren’t returned. A visit to his front door this week also proved fruitless.) By the time Frances Paolillo passed away in 2009 — at the age of 102 — the place was on its last legs. “It’s like we work for a haunted hotel,” an employee told a local paper at the time. “The rooms are around $300 a night. You can get a better room at the Howard Johnson’s for $55.” Penn Hills closed two months later. Many workers never received their last paychecks, and some $1.25 million in back taxes were owed to Monroe County.
Some of the resort has been auctioned off — the golf course, ski resort and several undeveloped parcels of land have been sold — but the cottages, villas and other buildings on the hotel grounds remain untouched. Nobody wants them.
***
“You wanna buy the place?”
I’ve come to the resort to see what’s left, and those words are yelled at me by someone in a rusty pickup truck, idling on the shoulder of PA route 447, which cuts through the middle of the facility. I’m nervous — I’m not keen on getting run out of town, arrested or shot. I walk toward the voice, camera in hand, prepared to talk myself out of a bind.
“I’ll give it to you for forty bucks!”
The driver of the pickup truck is smiling, and he extends his hand out his window, introducing himself. “Melvin Fish, at your service.”
I’m relieved. Melvin, it turns out, worked at the place some 40 years ago. From 1970 to 1972, to be exact. He owns an excavating company now, and on this particular day he’s out plowing snow. Fish is happy to share his memories of Penn Hills. “I took care of the grounds — did odd jobs, changed light bulbs, cleaned carpets. This place was hoppin’, man!”
Penn Hills certainly isn’t hopping anymore: Its last balloon has been popped, last bottle of champagne uncorked. What’s left of the resort — villas and cottages on one side of 447 and recreational facilities on the other — sits vacant, crumbling and falling back to Earth. Both pools are full of stagnant, frozen water. Somehow, a tire has managed to make its way into the indoor one.
Offices have turned into disaster areas. Invoices, records and cancelled checks have found their way out of crates and filing cabinets and onto the floor, which is covered with mold and ice. The ice rink and “sports arena” have both been converted into makeshift storage areas, while the dining area, lounge and bar have been completely gutted.
And the guest rooms — those “Palaces of Pleasure” — have been smashed apart, stripped for every penny’s worth of copper and steel. Heart-shaped tubs have been strewn about, thieves in search of the plumbing beneath them. Like any other abandoned place, vandals and idiots have smashed windows and mirrors for no real reason. Graffiti is nearly everywhere.
“When the county moved in and [Charles Jr.] realized he was going to lose the property, he gutted the place,” Fish tells me. “The township was going to take the land, and it got into a lawsuit. They let him keep it for a while. He destroyed everything. They stripped the kitchen, the lounge, everything. Smashed everything with sledgehammers for scrap.”
Melvin points across the way at a single-story house. “That’s where Charlie used to live.” I trek across the grounds and take a look; the place is in shambles. The house is about as ’70s as you can get, from the silk drapery to the brightly colored carpeting and wallpaper. There’s a piano in the living room, which — shockingly — is in tune, and a pool table in the basement.
Back across the highway, I stroll past the outdoor pool and into a tiki lounge, long since vacated. Low-back chairs sit around an island bar, which is, of course, padded. A player piano sits in one corner, an old television in another. The entire room is full of the colors of the period, those warm browns and oranges and greens that everyone seems to hate now but that I still happen to love.
It’s my kind of bar. I really do wish I could stay, but, sadly, the love is gone at Penn Hills.
