Time, and travelers, pass by the Red Apple Rest

Southfields - When the end finally came, the Red Apple Rest on Route 17 in Southfields was a rusted derelict. Once, it swarmed with customers on their way to the Catskills. Now it’s deserted. Once, it was known for its savory vegetable-barley soup. Now the sign on the front door says the place has been condemned. From its opening in 1931, the Red Apple was a popular stop for New Yorkers heading to the mountains. It was about halfway to the resorts and camps of Sullivan County and thus the perfect spot for lunch, ice cream, a slice of pizza, a cup of coffee. Or a visit to the bathroom. Sandy Damon made the trip as a kid in the fifties. Her parents stopped on the way to Narrowsburg where they dropped her off at Camp Kiowa. “It was a three-hour trip from Long Island to camp and it took forever,” recalled Damon, the administrator of the Monroe Temple of Liberal Judaism. “The Red Apple Rest was like a castle in the sky. As soon as you saw the first signs for it, it was, ‘Hey! There it is and we’re stopping! “It always seemed to be hot,” she added. “But that didn’t matter. It was just great to get out of the car. I’d get my ice cream cone and a cold drink.” Those were the Red Apple’s last great days, and the walk-ups were shuttered for years - so dramatically had business fallen off by last fall when the place closed for business. In January, Town of Tuxedo officials slapped a red “condemned” sign on the door. A dismal end for a place that had hummed in the years before the Thruway and the Atlantic City casinos gave vacationers other choices. The restaurant was opened by the late Reuben Freed who remained active until he was close to 90. Some customers were startled to see an old man in suit and tie busing tables, wiping them down and gesturing to a hungry traveler to have a seat. The man with the rag was the boss. There’s a long standing tale that once, decades ago, Freed lost the key to the front door and never replaced it because the place was never closed. Nice, but the full story is better. Freed’s daughter, Evelyn Marshak, said not only was there no key but there was no lock on the front door. “We were ahead of all the others on the expression ‘24/7/365,’” she said. There was a distinctly New York flavor to the Red Apple’s bill of fare. Here in Southfields, 42 miles north of Times Square, you could order lox, vegetable cream cheese and thick slices of raw onion on enormous bagels, corned beef and pastrami sandwiches, knishes and tomato herring sandwich. Even as late as the seventies, you could depend on the Red Apple for great soup, but you knew fewer people were stopping. After Freed died in 1980, his family ran the place for five years before selling to Peter Kourakos. But the Red Apple’s glory was long past. Sometimes you’d order lunch and find that almost any table was yours for the taking. Toward the end, Kourakos knew the Red Apple needed major renovation but understood that such an undertaking wouldn’t guarantee a return of hungry travelers. Moreover, he told The Record of Hackensack, N.J., in 2003, that he and his wife Vicky were tired. They were 56, had been in business for 18 years and sometimes seemed to be running the place as a two-person operation. He would cook a meal. She would serve it and one or the other would dash to the cash register to ring up the sale. Recently he would say only that the Red Apple Rest is for sale and that he’s uncertain about the future. Damon says it has been almost 20 years since she last visited and even then it was nothing like the place she remembered. “It wasn’t exciting anymore. It was quiet, just kind of - well - dumpy,” she says. “But of course then I was seeing it through adult eyes.” Today, the parking lots are empty. The American flag that flies on a pole on the roof is torn and badly faded. Just outside the front entrance is a telephone booth with no phone. The red apple on the roof is now a muddy green. What happened? A line often attributed to the late Milton Kutscher, owner of the resort near Monticello that bears his name, was: “What killed the mountains? Airplanes and air conditioning.” The former, he said, could take you to places more exotic than Monticello and the latter could make summer in the city bearable so that escape wasn’t essential. Places and A/C may have helped kill the Red Apple as well. After all, if you didn’t go to the Catskills to cool off, you didn’t find yourself on Route 17 in Southfields looking for a strawberry ice cream cone.