Page 58 - Jeffersonville Journal Visitors Guide

the factory closed. They are now happily housed at the North Branch Inn. Mindful of the history of the Inn, Sims said that “The North Branch Inn is a much different feel than The Arnold. The Arnold is very 20th Century Catskills. North Branch is a town that didn’t go through that heyday change of the Catskills. This town feels very set in the 1890s. It’s very Americana. This building was built in 1868, when Ulysses S. Grant was president and Lincoln had just been killed. We keep trying to go back to that.” As their logo states, “the good ole’ days are now.”
Dining area at North Branch Inn with the orginal bowling lanes in the background.
Just after closing on the Inn, they saw a for sale sign at the house across the street. They said “there’s no way we can’t” to each other and bought the building. A full on renovation took place over nine weeks. The only salvageable items were a few light fixtures, the floor, the doors and the staircase, which has been left as they found it. The Library House, as it is now called, has four rooms and a communal living room with comfortable and casual seating and eating areas and a small wood stove. Kids and pets are welcome. Kirsten oversaw the design of this house as well, and the aesthetic is clean, simple and functional. Modern design fits neatly into this old house. Guests take their meals across the street at the Inn and the movement back and forth gives each guest the experience of small town living. Further enhancing that experience will be their third project in North Branch. They will close on the building housing the Post Office this spring. Many of us know that the Post Office is the lifeblood of every small town, and guests will soon be able to experience that feeling. Sims and Kirsten hope the Post Office will stay in the building far into the future.
will add another dimension to the business. It will “add an extra flavor to what’s already here,” he said. “We want to keep that Mountain Lodgy Catskill Old Hotel feel to it. Part of the fun of doing an old building is working with what’s already there. We took our cues from what the building had already and just kind of embellished that. We want people to feel like they are in an old hotel, but then look around and see little touches of the modern world woven in with the past.”
It’s all about the guests for
Sims Foster and his wife
Kirsten Harlow Foster. After a
successful launch of The
Arnold on Shandelee, they
bought the North Branch Inn
last year and have built on the
foundation set by the previous
owner’s renovation. “Victoria
had done a lot of work and that
is what made it attractive to us.
We love re-doing places and
bringing them back, but it was
nice to have new furnaces and
pressure tanks. She’d done a
lot of that stuff that’s not fun and is not guest-facing,” Sims related in a recent conversation. They’ve changed the furniture, stripped it back and made it “much more of a template for guests to dream about it being theirs.”
A guestroom at North Branch Inn.
At the end of this renovation, there will be 14 rooms, two communal living rooms, a bar, restaurant, bakery and cafe in the old apartment space at the Inn. And, of course, the bowling alley, which doubles as a movie theatre. The Post Office property has three acres which go back to a brook and they have a long range plan to landscape and develop gardens there. Like the Arnold, they will grow some of the food for the restaurant.
Communal tables have been set up in the restaurant, with wooden dividers placed so that you can either “mark your territory” or “jump over the fence” and join your neighbors for a meal, to quote Sims. Kirsten noted that people have really enjoyed eating communally. What they believe is the special message of the restaurant is that they “just buy things from people we know. It feels right and is really important to us. We’re telling people that the personal value of what we’re doing is that we want to be on the right side of history.” “All the food is from New York State and all the liquor is American with a heavy lean from New York State.” The kitchen remains at the back of the bowling alley. After operating through the winter and making some small adjustments, Sims said that they now see what the kitchen wants to be. He said that the challenges have been just the same as any restaurant -- breaking in and getting the systems down.
The communal living room in The Library House.
The bowling alley is a central feature of the Inn, working like new but with the original pins. As you enter the restaurant there are two framed pictures of the Fifth Annual Banquet of the Sherwood Ten Pin Makers which took place in February of 1943 in Livingston Manor. At the center of the photographs are Sims’ grandparents. Sims smiled when he told of finding that the pins in the alley were made locally with a family connection. He glowed when he told the story of finding boxes of unused pins that had been put into storage in the Manor before
56 Jeffersonville Journal • 2016-2017