After the Million Dollar Beach and the Adirondack Northway came the Prospect Mountain Highway. The last of Lake George’s three great public infrastructure projects, it was completed in 1969 and opened on June 14 of that year. In other words, at the end of the 1960s. The Age of the Automobile was giving way to the Age of Aquarius.
The modernist building that was to be the project’s literal and figurative crown, its vertex – the so-called Summit House – was never built, a victim, perhaps, of the public’s disenchantment with automobiles, grandiose public projects and even with government itself.
Famed Architect Paul Rudolph’s Proposed “Summit House”
As reported by the Lake George Mirror in 1962, the Summit House was to consist of “a restaurant, cafeteria, cocktail lounge and bar, a fire lookout tower and observation platform for the public.” The Mirror also reported that “Water for the summit buildings is to be obtained from Lake George Village and forced through pipes by automatic pumps… Water capacity will be based on 7,000 persons per day. A comprehensive sewage disposal system, with biological treatment process, will equal any in existence…. Certain Conservation Department offices will be maintained at the summit by the state, together with radio communications facilities.”
The Summit House was expected to be completed at about the same time as the highway, which in 1962 was believed to be 1964. The Lake George Mirror was also told the building would be open year-round. As late as opening day in 1969, local officials still hoped that it would be built. The estimated cost of construction was $1.5 million, or $9 million in today’s dollars.
The architectural rendering of the unbuilt Summit House reproduced on this page was the product of Rudolph Associates, the atelier of Paul Rudolph, “one of the most significant architects of the 20th century, a second-generation modernist who rose to prominence during the 1950s and 1960s, alongside peers such as Eero Saarinen and I.M. Pei,” according to the Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which mounted a survey of Rudolph’s work last fall.
Rudolph was one of several prominent architects favored by Nelson Rockefeller and who, as a consequence, were often awarded commissions by New York State – as reasonable an explanation as any for why his studio was asked to submit a design for the Summit House.
According to the catalogue for “Materialized Space: The Architecture of Paul Rudolph,” the title of last fall’s exhibition at the Met, “Rudolph’s talent for networking and skillfully navigating the bureaucracy became his personal superpower in the 1960s, when he was working on a stacked roster of major civic, academic and corporate commissions, and was required (in order) to deal with government agencies, University boards and business leaders.”
1928: Advocacy for the Highway Begins
The Prospect Mountain Veterans Memorial Parkway – to use the highway’s official name – emerged from the same forward-looking, unquestioning optimism about the future that brought the Million Dollar Beach and the Adirondack Northway to Lake George. Its origins, however, lie farther in the past. As early as 1928, Rotarians, the Lake George Association and the Lake George Mirror were advocating for such a highway, arguing that “visitors should be able to get to the top without the arduous task of making it on a ‘shank’s mare,’” as the Lake George Mirror editorialized.
To encourage visitors to make it to the top, albeit on the shank’s mare, the Chamber of Commerce commissioned coins to be awarded to anyone who reached the summit, according to historian Joseph Zarzynski.
“Engraved on one side were the words, “I Have Climbed Prospect Mountain,” along with an image of a motorboat and sailboat upon Lake George. The obverse side showed a winter skier with the phrase: ‘Winter Ski Trails–Lake George Village, N.Y’” writes Zarzynski.
The program was introduced in 1935 and discontinued in 1939. An attempt to revive it in 1952 was, it appears, not the success the Chamber anticipated. The coins are now collectors’ items.
A Brief History of a Tourist Attraction
The summit of Prospect Mountain was always a tourist attraction. As early as the 1820s, James Fenimore Cooper and a party of English visitors traveled from Saratoga to Lake George, where they boarded the Mountaineer for a voyage down the lake and climbed to the top of Prospect Mountain. Much of the description of natural scenery in “Last of the Mohicans,” arguably the first important work of American fiction, was based on impressions Cooper received during that trip. The climb up Prospect Mountain, for instance, was the inspiration for this scene from the opening of the novel: “To the north stretched the limpid, and, as it appeared from that dizzy height, the narrow sheet of the “holy lake,” indented with numberless bays, embellished by fantastic headlands, and dotted with countless islands… Directly on the shore of the lake, lay the extensive earthen ramparts and low buildings of William Henry.”
A deluxe hotel, the Prospect Mountain House, was built at the summit, 2,208 feet above sea level, in 1877. In 1895, a cable railway was constructed from the base of the mountain to the hotel. Leaving the village every half hour during the summer, the car made the round trip for fifty cents. By 1905, the property comprised a 160 to 174-acre sized lot, which included the summit, the hotel and the incline railroad. That year, it was purchased by George Foster Peabody – the individual most responsible for Shepard Park and Hearthstone campground. It’s not clear what Peabody intended to do with the property other than to allow its views to be enjoyed by the public. It’s been said that he had heard that the hotel was to become a gambling casino, a use he found objectionable. The mountain was, after all, a popular destination for guests at Wiawaka, the working women’s retreat he had helped to finance. Peabody might have retained the railroad, but after the US entered World War I, he scrapped the railway and donated the steel to the war effort. We do know that Peabody did not wish Prospect Mountain to become ‘forever wild.” State law, however, required that any property in any county within the Blue Line acquired by the state become part of the Forest Preserve. It was not until 1925 that the legislature found a way for Peabody to donate the land to the state without it reverting entirely to wild forest land. That year, a bill was adopted that authorized the state to accept lands within the Forest Preserve “for park or reservation purposes.” Two months after the bill was signed into law, Peabody gave his Prospect Mountain lands to the state.
Building the Highway: “A Strain on Men and Machines” (and Money)
Governor Thomas Dewey authorized the construction of a highway to the summit in 1954, approving legislation sponsored by the Republican Speaker of the Assembly, Oswald Heck, who owned a camp on Pilot Knob. Funding was approved in 1965, when an appropriation bill sponsored by Assemblyman Dick Bartlett of Glens Falls and Fourteen Mile Island was signed into law by Governor Nelson Rockefeller.
To build the highway, which was already over budget two years before it was completed, the contractor hired by the state was required to use 300,000 pounds of dynamite, excavate more than 400,000 cubic yards of material and truck 60,000 cubic yards of gravel and 16,000 tons of asphalt to the site.
The mountain’s “rugged terrain and steep slopes” were among the difficulties faced by the contractor, New York’s Commissioner of Transportation J. Burch Moran noted. “Furthermore, the rock formation made extensive blasting necessary. All these contributed to a strain on men and machines and a construction cost that exceeded $3 million.”
(In other words, there were good reasons why contractors throughout New England and New York declined to submit bids to construct the highway when invited to: “the state engineers’ estimate was too low for a mountain road,” they concluded.)
From Opening Day to Earth Day: Learning to Live Within Nature’s Limits
Opening day at the foot of Prospect Mountain dawned hot and humid. Hundreds of spectators (this reporter included) withstood the soaring temperatures to witness the dedication at the highway’s new toll gate. Bob Flacke, the Master of Ceremonies, spoke on behalf of the veterans for whom the highway is named. The Lake George High School Band played “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Charles Tuttle, Franklin Roosevelt’s Republican opponent in the gubernatorial campaign of 1930, gave the dedicatory address. It was a denunciation of Vietnam War protesters. “Let what we do here today be a rebuke to those who have adopted irresponsibility as a goal and who would scuttle our ship of state before they themselves have even learned to make a raft,” Tuttle declared.
By the time the highway was opened to that first caravan of cars on June 19, 1969, it was already a relic of another time. Within two years, only five hundred cars a season were ascending the mountain, whereas the local officials and boosters who claimed the highway “would be of tremendous economic importance to the entire Northern New York region” once anticipated 7,000 cars a day. Lookouts were designed to accommodate as many as 40 cars at once.
Harold Wilm, Rockefeller’s Conservation Commissioner at the start of construction, stated publicly that perhaps New York should just have resurrected the incline railway rather than building a new, 27 foot wide, 5.87-mile-long highway at a cost of more than $3 million – the equivalent of $33 million in 2025 dollars.
Commenting on an item about the highway, a reader of the state’s Conservationist magazine asked in a letter to the editor, “Must our scenic areas be threaded with roads? Why bring the problems of the cities into the countryside?”
One and a half years after the opening of the Prospect Mountain Highway and six months after the first Earth Day, on December 31, 1970, President Richard Nixon signed into law the long-delayed legislation to limit vehicle emissions and combat the air pollution discharged from the tailpipes of America’s cars.
That same year, Ralph Nader, linking the hazards of unsafe auto design to dangers to the environment, declared that “the battle of the environmentalists is to preserve the physiological integrity of people by preserving the natural integrity of land, air and water.”
Ironically, or perhaps appropriately, New York State kicked off its 40th anniversary celebrations of the first Earth Day in April, 2011 at the summit of Prospect Mountain. Appropriately, because the public’s negative reaction to projects like the Prospect Mountain highway accelerated the expansion of the environmental protection movement. Rather than attempting to overcome nature, we were learning, however slowly and imperfectly, to live within its limits.
“Welcome to Lake George: Vacation Paradise of the ’50s and ’60s,”
“Welcome to Lake George: Vacation Paradise of the ’50s and ’60s,” the Bolton Historical Museum’s 2025 exhibition, looks at the impact of the automobile and the interstate highway system on Lake George. After World War II, Lake George changed from a summer-long resort for the wealthy few to a place where everyone could come by car for a two-week vacation. “Welcome to Lake George” documents that transformation through colorful displays that highlight motels and cabin colonies, nightlife, waterfront recreation, tourist attractions and the coming of the Northway. Located at 4924 Lakeshore Drive, with an entrance in Rogers Park, The Bolton Historical Museum is open 7 days a week, 10 am to 4 pm.
