For decades, LeRoy Eckert looked down the hill from his front yard and watched as his birthplace seemed to sink into the water that gathered around its foundations.
By the time it closed five years ago, mud was climbing the Point Phillips Hotel's exterior walls. The business, once known in different circles for its cheesesteaks, video poker machines and barroom brawls, had become a crumbling stack of asphalt shingle siding. The centuries-old tavern it had been — the place where Eckert's parents carved out a living —- had long since dissolved.
Then Dan Tanczos stepped in. In 2008, he sold his interest in a Bethlehem beer distributor and bought the old tavern, namesake of the unincorporated Moore Township village of Point Phillips. Tanczos spent the next five years researching its history, damming the water and buffing the place to a sheen it never had .
In a few weeks, Tanczos says, he'll reopen the hotel as a bar and restaurant with two apartments.
"I'm looking forward to giving the people of this area a nice place to go," he said, pressing his palms to the polished bar he installed in a room where a grocer once sold flour and salt. "Something they can be proud of."
Tanczos, a broad-shouldered guy with a smile stamped above a dimpled chin, hopes visitors will come from all over the Lehigh Valley. But he renovated it — learning how to install floors and Victorian ceiling tiles on the fly — for people like Eckert and himself.
On Aug. 6, 1928, in the same room where Tanczos recently planted his bar, Eckert was born. Growing up, he could step out the front door of his parents' house behind the hotel and find forest and swampland to hunt deer and squirrels. He played shortstop and second base on the old Point Phillips Hotel baseball team. In the bar, his dad served Horlacher, Old Dutch and Neuwiler, three mugs for a quarter. State law required you to offer hotel rooms, so, in six rooms on the second floor, they changed sheets on beds nobody ever slept in.
Since those days, ranchers and Cape Cods have pushed the forest aside. The one-room Point Phillips School, where Eckert learned English and math, closed eons ago. Even the 4-foot-high concrete letters that spelled "Point Phillips" his father installed on the embankment across from the hotel — the town's version of the Hollywood sign — eventually toppled.
When Eckert built the stone house next to the hotel in 1956, his mom asked him to take over running the place. Eckert said no. Tavern ownership wasn't for him. In those days, he explained, the place was pretty rough. Brawls were par for the course for neighborhood bars all over the area, in Petersville and Beersville, for example.
The quickest way to add a fresh look to a room or any part of a home (door or even a floor) is a fresh coat of paint. Every year - paint manufacturers come out with a new color to satisfy whatever trends might be going on. “Neutrals such as C2’s Scout - which is a kind of taupe and Reindeer which is a darker brown, are still popular. But eggplant and lime green are among the trendy colors this year,” said Frank Agrusa, who owns Van Jaarsveld Decorating Center in Utica.
You can also add richness and depth by applying a specialty paint treatment. As one decorator explains Trompe L’oeil is French for an art technique that involves using realistic imagery to create an optical illusion. Instead of rolling out two coats of flat paint you can use several paints to create the look of linen or leather. There are also metallic paints that can be used to create patterns. One of the home office photos on Houzz showed a walls covered with a black paint - once dry becomes a chalkboard surface.
Sculptures, hand blown glass vases, tile work and jewelry sparkled in the sunlight Sunday as people made their way through artists’ displays at Frances Stevens Park.
The three-day Desert Art Festival continues from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. today with more than 100 artists presenting original work in all mediums of two- and three-dimensional art, including paintings in acrylic, oils and watercolors, photography and etchings, all sprawled out on the corner of North Palm Canyon Drive and Alejo Road.
It’s the diversity of art and the quality of the work that keeps festival-goer Marilyn Dorman of Boise, Idaho, coming back, she said, along with the scenery of the surrounding mountains.
She and her daughter, Diane Dorman, also of Boise, were looking over the mixed media work of Fortune Sitole of Oakland.
Sitole’s depictions of life in South Africa are made with recyclable materials — wood, sand, aluminum, oil and acrylic paint, sticks, bottle caps, soup cans, and other objects on a plywood background.
Across the way from Sitole, Marquis Leo of Palm Desert was surrounded by his brightly painted, glossy, ceramic tiles that varied in size from coasters to wall hangings.
The figures on each were painted on canvas first and embedded into the ceramic through a firing process.
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