Greenwood Lake: Warwick’s Waterfront Playground Turns 100

Greenwood Lake, Orange County’s largest lake at nine miles long and between 17 and 57 feet deep, actually straddles state lines: Half is in Hewitt, NJ, while the other half is claimed by the eponymous village in New York. Next year, the village of Greenwood Lake celebrates a century since its official municipal founding in 1924—and 100 years of the lake’s use for industry, transportation, and a playground for locals and visitors alike. Despite the area’s growth from an indigenous home to a hotspot for bars, restaurants, and primary and second homes, the central focus remains the picturesque lake that asks nothing more than simply to be enjoyed.

“It’s been quite an evolution,” says Peter Lyons Hall, digital content manager for the village and a wellspring of history. The lake originally known as Long Pond was the homeland of Lenni Lenape, who signed a treaty in 1702 that became known as the Cheesecock Patent—trading their land to colonists from Britain, who nudged the Lenape further into the wilderness as they built their homes and businesses around the lake. The Industrial Age in the late 1700s ushered in an ironworks at Long Pond, refining ore mined at nearby Sterling Forest.

Chugging around the Lake

The clear waters of the lake froze solid in the winter, providing another welcome resource: ice for New York City, harvested and sold by the Mountain Ice Company. The city needed iron and ice quickly, and the Erie line provided rail service through the Montclair and Greenwood Railroad (later the NY and Greenwood Lake Railroad) from Hoboken, NJ, to a station along the east side of the lake, on the site of the current Cove Castle restaurant.

City residents soon discovered the beauty of the area that was a half-day’s travel away, and the train line began carrying passengers by the mid-1800s. Public roads did not exist in Greenwood Lake until 1889; the lengthy and difficult overland trip from the depot to the hotels that sprang up around the lake was eliminated by steamboats that crisscrossed the lake itself. Nowadays, you can stroll down to the town-owned Thomas Morahan Waterfront Park to enjoy a lake view, catch some live music, and even swim at the small, sandy beach. But back in the day, visitors would disembark from a steamboat onto the dock of the once-bustling Windermere Hotel at that spot. Steamers—the largest was the 400-passenger Montclair—had regular routes, picking up train passengers and docking at waterfront resorts. The late 1800s saw at least a dozen or more big hotels and inns along the lake, which was the muse of several artists of that time—including landscape artist Jasper Cropsey, whose pre-Civil War Greenwood Lake, New York depicts the vista.

Celebrity Visitors

By the time the village was incorporated in 1924, Greenwood Lake’s beauty, seclusion, and proximity to New York City—attributes that still hold true today—made it a popular vacation spot. The railroad and the steamboats faded away, and the Great Depression’s Works Progress Administration helped build more roads to accommodate burgeoning automobile travel. Those roads brought celebrities who vacationed at the Lake, like Greta Garbo, Gypsy Rose Lee, and legendary baseball slammer Babe Ruth. Ruth was a frequent visitor from the late 1930s until his death in 1948. Local hotels were his stay of choice before he regularly rented a cottage at Greck’s Maplewood Inn, run by Doris “Granny” Greck. Like most guests at the lake, Ruth would gamble, drink with friends at the many watering holes, and cruise the lake in a custom-built mahogany boat. Greck’s was a restaurant by the time Doris’ great-granddaughter Jackie Lowenberg grew up there, long after Ruth passed away, but Doris still ran a tight ship. “Granny had a personality that definitely wasn’t for the faint of heart,” Lowenberg says, “or the sensitive types.”

Breaking the Color Barrier

Ruth’s stays at Greck’s included frequent visits to a camp where up-and-coming boxers would train for their next big bout amid the mountain air and fresh water. Joe Murchio opened the training camp at Greenwood Lake in 1939; over its 30-plus years of operation, big names like Floyd Patterson, Rocky Marciano, Sugar Ray Robinson, and Joe Louis perfected their punches. The camp was known for welcoming trainees of all races, setting an example for future integration in all sports. The now-weekly Warwick Advertiser has reported on the town of Warwick and its villages—including Greenwood Lake—since 1866. In 1941, it detailed an eventful visit by Louis that took place on the lake waters: The legendary boxer was a guest on a friend’s speedboat when a nearby canoe capsized. Louis helped yank aboard one of the wet but uninjured canoeists “as though she were a featherweight,” the article said. Murchio sold the camp in the 1940s to new owner Eddie McDonald, who renamed it The Long Pond Inn—upstairs was a bar and nightclub, and downstairs was the training center where visitors such as Ruth would watch the fighters.

Gloria

Modern refrigeration may have eliminated the need for lake-harvested ice, but the frozen expanse remained the center of community action with skating and ice-fishing; and on February 9, 1936, 500 spectators gathered on the ice to see something no one had ever seen. An “airplane,” roughly six feet from nose to tail, with a wider wingspan, sat on a triangular steel structure, its nose pointed towards the New Jersey end of the lake. In fact, it was a rocket with wings, powered by liquid oxygen and denatured alcohol. Inside asbestos bags in its nose were 6,148 pieces of mail. The goal? To have the first airmail delivered over state lines by rocket.

The February 1936 Airpost Journal described the scene: Five-year-old Gloria Schleick—the rocket’s eponym—christened the airship with a tin cup of snow. Asbestos-suited rocket scientist Willie Lay lit the fuse. A 30-foot column of fire burst from the rocket’s tail, but alas…the weighted catapult failed, and it did not launch. A second attempt got the rocket off the catapult, but it skidded to a stop short of its goal. Two weeks later, though, two more launches proved successful, sending the rocket plane a few hundred feet and just over the state line, where the Hewitt, NJ, postmaster happily postmarked the delivery. Gloria (the rocket, not the girl) now resides in a museum at Teterboro Airport.

Nightlife

The 1950s brought a slew of bars and nightclubs to Greenwood Lake. In New Jersey, the drinking age was 21 at the time. In New York, drinkers could be 18. Hence, the 50 or so establishments within a five-mile radius in Greenwood Lake were packed on Friday and Saturday nights. The couple of topless girl bands at the lake could have contributed to its popularity, as well. Unproven legend has it that the Mafia couldn’t resist the gold mine that was Greenwood Lake, and held ownership in many of those bars. Nonetheless, the lake remains a bastion of entertainment, from the free summertime live music at Waterfront Park to countless bars and restaurants—some with their own docks for boaters to tie up before they tie one on. Greenwood Lake’s proximity to New York City attracted full-time residents over the years: From 1950-1990, the population quadrupled from 800-3200, and is a mix of longtimers and newcomers, full-time residents as well as weekenders. Jackie Lowenberg still lives in Greenwood Lake with her family and is a 20-year volunteer firefighter at the local fire department. “There’s a sense of community here,” Lowenberg says. “As a kid, it was frustrating, because you couldn’t do anything without somebody knowing about it and telling. But, now that I’m older, I appreciate that there is a community of people who go above and beyond, whether you’re family or not. It’s that feeling of support that makes Greenwood Lake special.”

Centennial

When the boats are dry-docked for the season at one of the many marinas that surround Greenwood Lake, the village doesn’t “roll up its sidewalks” and shut down. The lake becomes a beautiful backdrop for winter’s slower pace, and you can still shop for upcoming holiday gifts at Fitzula’s Gift Shop, grab a hot cuppa at Greenwood Lake Coffee Roasters, and plan to attend one of the many events that the village’s Centennial Committee is planning. The past will meet the present in August, when a circa -974 time capsule—encased in a donated child-size coffin!—is opened. In fact, any time of year is a fine time to visit and take in the vista that’s drawn boxers and baseball players, steamboats and celebrities, in a century’s worth of lake life.