Comments

well spoken and too bad for Halcyon

Its amazing how something used so much once, turns out like this.

I grew up in Millbrook and remember Bennett when it was a college. I went to some concerts and other functions there. It was a unique old building with some great turn of the last century features. About ten years ago, I passed through the town and was stunned to see the ruin it had become. I remember sitting on that hillside with a girl I liked when it was a mowed lawn. I couldn’t believe how ruined and overgrown it had become.
Now I run a civil and environmental engineering company that has worked on redeveloping some large, old abandoned properties. I can tell you from firsthand experience that Bennett is done. Whatever it once was, it cannot be put back together. If the developer is willing to pay $4M for the facility as a tear-down, then the cost of restoring Halcyon Hall alone must be several times that. Until you have done the work of putting one of these sites into useable condition, you really can’t understand the economics of it. This building CAN’T be restored. If it were right back in the condition it was in the seventies, it would still need to be torn apart and refurbished to be useable now. The plumbing, heating, and asbestos issues in the photos I have seen online alone would crush the project.
My experience has been that lots of casual onlookers want these types of “grand old buildings” restored because they make nice scenery as they drive past and local folks get very sentimental for the way it was back when, but very few of these people will ever put a dime to the massive cost of rebuilding it. If you think that Halcyon Hall would work as a hotel, then you haven’t done the math. If the place charged more than high end Manhattan hotels and was full every night, it would take decades to make even a meager ROI on rebuilding it. “Adopt a room?” That idea will work if people will pay a couple of hundred K per room and the rooms would have to be demolished and rebuilt anyway.
From what I have read (and I was sad to hear that the Round Table had folded) there are only two likely paths for Bennett. If the town is lucky, a developer will turn the property into something viable that retains some features of its past architecture. If you can’t find somebody to do that, or if well-meaning, but overly sentimental folks drive the developers off, then the ruin will end up as municipal property (town or county) and will crumble slowly for decades. I have seen way too many properties like this where passionate folks with good intentions run off the developers, celebrate their righteous victory, and then gripe for years after about why nobody will do anything with the ruin.
It is really sad to lose such a distinctive property, but Bennett failed as a college and nobody came up with a viable use for it over the last 30 years. If there was one, it surely would have surfaced during one of the real estate booms during those years.
And take it easy on the cranky caretaker. I knew him in high school and he was a nice (if somewhat intense) guy.

That is quite the find. I wonder where one would obtain a pencil in a place like this.

What an interesting torture tactic. A tease to the prisoners that they can't even hardly see the outside of their very own cell let alone the world ever again. How facsinating.

I prefer not knowing what it says. It really adds to the mystery. What a spectacular photo, Motts. This one is permenant in my memory :)

How wide is this room? Wide enough for a person to lay straight width wise? I'd say I'd rather sleep on the floor, but not if there wasn't a bathroom.

It just awes me that such a beautiful place has hardly been touched [if touched at all] by mischeivious teenagers with spray paint cans.

I love the curtains. Can you imagine how beautiful this place must have been?

I kind of liked that comment, Amazed. It seemed to fit this....

^Tell me about it. It runs away from the light because the chair likes the dark.

Goregous!

How did it die? Any dried up blood left? I like it. :) You crazy people...that is not disturbing.

Ech! Thats extremely odd. Maybe the paients left their suits thinking they'd come back...but I guess not.

Almost looked like a vintage casset player.