Ode to the Courtesy Hotel - on Its 50th Anniversary

The ad above that appeared in Newsday in 1963 heralded the opening of the Hempstead Motor Hotel, later to become the infamous Courtesy Hotel, at 130 Hempstead Ave.  Believe it or not, at the time of its opening 50 years ago, the Hotel was actually a comfortable and classy option for visitors and tourists who wished to stay local.  Aside from offering a good central location in Western LI, the hotel was conveniently located adjacent to the WHH LIRR station, was across the street from some great shopping at S. Klein and within short walking distance to a number of good eateries including the West End Tavern.    The hotel featured well-appointed rooms (for 1960s standards), a spacious lobby, a steak pub called Winston's, a rooftop swimming pool and sun deck, and an underground bowling alley.  These photos below in full 1960s Technicolor appeared in some promotional postcards for the hotel, and give a sense of what the hotel looked like in those early days ---

A front view from Hempstead Ave

A view of the lobby

The rooftop pool and sun-deck

Interior of a room

In the 1960s and into the '70s the hotel played host to numerous conventions, job fairs and merchant shows.  In June 1964, that sunny rooftop sun deck pictured above was the site of the Miss Long Island beauty pageant, a contest that selected LI's representative for the Miss New York pageant later that year.

In 1971, Winston's reopened as the popular eatery Steak & Brew.  That decade was a period of transition for the hotel, and not in a good way.  By the end of the '70s the hotel's reputation started a long downhill slide that led to its ultimate demise a couple years ago.  In 1978, Nassau County DA Dennis Dillon, predecessor of current DA Kathleen Rice, ran his own version of Operation Flush the Johns with an undercover sting that nabbed a number of area motels, including the Hempstead Motor Hotel, for offering their guests pornographic films on pay-per-view.  Management began advertising "hourly rates" and thereafter the hotel became a magnet of crime with murders, rapes, drug busts, you name it.  The place caused a major strain on emergency resources for both the 5th Precinct and the WH Fire Dept.

In 1989 ownership changed hands and the place was renamed the Courtesy Hotel.  The community came out by the hundreds that year to oppose new owner Frank Zwelsky's plan to expand and enlarge his operation, and that episode galvanized the neighborhood's 20+ year long effort to shutter the hotel.  Indeed, one of the main issues at the forefront of the creation of the WH Civic Association in 1995 was to force the closing of the Courtesy. By the mid 2000s the owners of the hotel found a firm willing to buy the property and develop an apartment complex that won the approval of WH residents, but it took a few years and a number of Mother's Day rallies before the Town of Hempstead finally agreed to rezone the property into "transit-oriented" status in order to accommodate the developer's plans.  In May 2011, the wrecking ball dealt the final death-blow to the Courtesy and, roughly 16 months later, arose West 130, the luxury apartment building pictured below that took its place.

Front view of West 130

Freddie Voelpel's

The photo above depicts Freddie Voelpel's restaurant as it stood at 372 Hempstead Avenue between the years 1950-1957.  Freddie Voelpel was a bowling legend who at one time captured the Long Island bowling championship in 1944. The following year, Voelpel was on track to win a second championship before he suffered a serious mishap.  At his day job in the NY Daily News print room, he lost the tips of a couple fingers on his bowling hand when it got caught in a print roller.  He managed to continue to bowl competitively after that, but he never returned to the top of his game.

Freddie Voelpel was part of a pretty substantial bowling culture that existed on Long Island back in the '40s and '50s, wherein names like George Young, Andy Varipapa, Joe Falcaro and Tony Sparando would compete in tournaments and bowling halls like Mid Isle Lanes (formerly Heinemen's) on Peninsula Ave in Hempstead (now the site of a public storage facility) and Falcaro's own hall in Lawrence (Falcaro's closed down only about ten years ago).

In 1944 Voelpel took his winnings and bought a stake in a bowling venue called Baldwin Modern Lanes, but then he made a business decision that would later come back to haunt him, one that he would later regret.  Thinking that there was no commercial future in bowling, in February 1950 he sold his stake in Baldwin Modern and bought the restaurant you see pictured above. (He named it after himself because, well, he couldn't find a better name for it). This was right around the time when the deployment of automatic pin-setting machines was about to revolutionize the sport by obviating the need to rely on "pin-boys" to reset the pins. (Voelpel never gave these newfangled machines a chance but was the first to admit his mistake years later in an interview). As a result, commercial bowling would enjoy a huge upswing in the coming decades.

On the other side of the coin, around the same time that he got bought his restaurant, those local, family-run eating establishments such as Voelpel's were getting crowded out and losing business to cheaper fast-food joints that were popping up all over Long Island.

Freddie Voelpel was simply a victim of bad timing.  Aside from that, the combination of his day job and managing the restaurant left him averaging around four hours of sleep a night with no time for any leisure activity. In 1957, he sold the tavern and moved to the South Shore where he bought a boat and lived his life in semi-retirement.

West End Tavern

The undated above photo, from the Hempstead Public Library collection, is an early view looking east into Hempstead Village at the corner of Fulton Ave. and Front St. A couple features of this photo are noteworthy:


1) The 20MPH speed limit signs on both sides of the intersection. When the automobile came of age in the early 1900s, villages like Hempstead had a real problem with motorists speeding right on through its streets, frightening horses and endangering pedestrians and bicyclists. As noted in a previous post, Hempstead cracked down on speeders every now and then by setting up speed traps and issuing hefty tickets. Newspaper reports show that residents of West Hempstead were none too pleased that no such speed restrictions existed in their neighborhood so that once motorists left Hempstead Village's speed zone, it was all petal-to-the-metal from that point. (One can only wonder how big of an impact enactments such as these had on the decision of so many municipalities on Long Island to incorporate during this period).


2) At the center of the photo is the front steps of a home that is mostly obscured by the trees. This home would later become the landmark West End Tavern, a popular local eatery in the first half of the 20th century. At first the tavern also operated as a hotel, whose proprietor, Frank Wettstein, was a WWI vet and prominent citizen of Hempstead. The innkeeper was John Pfortsch, a German immigrant who, like so many other Bavarians, hailed from Ridgewood, Queens. On New Year's eve 1935, a terrible fire damaged much of the building, but it was soon remodeled to appear as it looks in the terrific 1943 photo below, taken at roughly the same angle as above.







In this pic below, the tavern is decked out in patriotic bunting to celebrate the 300th anniversary of Hempstead Village, as the sign on the traffic island indicates. What can also be made out are two gas stations on the right; a Texaco, the site of which is still a gas station today; and an Esso in the foreground.

The 1943 photo shows the tavern in its heyday, before the proliferation of fast food restaurants that would replace the West End as the preferred venues for eating out. The West End would soon become crowded out by the stiff competition of nearby chains that provided waitresses with drive up service popularized in the '50s, the first of which was White Castle which opened up where the Esso is located in the picture. The Tavern survived at least until 1960, but how much longer after that is unclear. As if to accentuate the void left by the Tavern, the '60s brought to that area of WH an explosion of food options including Wetson's in 1963, a burger joint located across Hempstead Ave. from White Castle, now currently a KFC; Steak & Brew, a restaurant located inside the Hempstead Motor Inn (currently the infamous Courtesy Hotel), built in 1963; and the IHOP on Hempstead Tpke in 1964 (still there after all these years).

Comparing the two 'then' shots to the 'now' shot below, one is struck by the comparative lack of trees left in the area. The magnificent trees that once gracefully lined the streets and made our town beautiful and rural have been felled and sadly not replaced.

The WH Community Support Association is currently is spearheading the Hempstead Avenue Revitalization Project (HARP), an effort to beautify West Hempstead's main thoroughfare by planting trees and placing banners (among other things). If there was ever a visual argument for the success of HARP, this would be it.