The Last Resort

WITH SYMBOLISM THAT WAS RIPE AND THICK AS THE MOUNTAIN LAUREL IN JUNE, THE OLD POCONOS DIED NEAR THE END OF LAST CENTURY WITH A SINGLE GUNSHOT WOUND TO THE HEAD.

The victim was Emil Wagner, a 77-year-old immigrant from Czechoslovakia who on a November night stepped into the bathroom of a white mansion just up the hill from the resort complex called Mount Airy Lodge, where he’d spent most of his life. Begun as a small boardinghouse in 1936 by his favorite aunt, Suzanne Martens, and her husband John, Mount Airy had grown — “metastasized” might be a better word — into a sprawling agglomeration of more than 800 rooms on 1,200 acres. For decades it had represented everything that the Pocono Mountains could be — good and bad.

It was glamorous and gaudy. It was sylvan yet shabby. But for several generations of East Coast city dwellers, Mount Airy epitomized the vast 2,400-square-mile rural vacationland in which it was just a small glittering dot. It was a so-called super-resort, its afternoons scheduled solid with games and contests, and its nights reserved for showroom entertainment and frolicking in the quintessential heart-shaped tubs.

For years, the regular ritual in the white mansion on the hill was a cocktail party to welcome that weekend’s headliner — ­everyone from Bob Hope to Engelbert Humperdinck performed in Mount Airy’s Crystal Room in the ’60s and ’70s. The soiree would be hosted, even after she had handed over control of the resort to her three nephews, by Suzanne Martens, the “First Lady of the Poconos,” who would let her guests gather in the marbled entry foyer before she paraded down the long, curving central staircase in gown and jewels. “Very Sunset Boulevard,” the redoubtable television personality Joe Franklin remarked once.

Like most declines, the death of Mount Airy happened first slowly and then all at once. Over several decades, air travel got cheaper, and a mere car ride to the mountains didn’t seem like a real vacation anymore. The owners bet on growth at the exact wrong time, borrowed big to build a new hotel wing, and were subsequently crushed under heavy debt just as an economic recession hit.

Things got bad quickly.

People who knew Emil Wagner well were aware of a subtle and ready sense of humor, but also a strong streak of pride. As he placed the barrel of the 38-caliber handgun to his head that night, Wagner was hours away from a dreaded trip to the Monroe County Courthouse, where he would be forced, after years of tiptoeing on the edge of insolvency, to give up his resort.

“Emil knew he was going to lose the resort, and it was like losing his child,” says a friend. “He didn’t have any family or any kids, so unfortunately, that was the end of him, too.” Squeezing the trigger, Emil Wagner chose to die before Mount Airy did.

EIGHT YEARS HAVE GONE by since Wagner’s death and the symbolic demise of the old Poconos. This fall, what could become a shiny symbol for the new Poconos emerges with the opening of the renamed Mount Airy Casino Resort, an expensive bet by a media-shy mogul that the future of the mountain vacationland can be secured by tens of thousands of slot-machine players. A completely rebuilt Mount Airy, designed to become a kind of Borgata-among-the-trees, ushers in a new industry — one that might have saved the old Mount Airy had it come sooner.