In the 1950s, Lake George Village transplanted the style of a boardwalk beach town to north central New York's most beautiful lake. Motels sprouted up and down Route 9N, many of them with ocean-themed names like the Anchorage or the Dunes. These "Cozy Cabins", a refreshing throwback, gave a nod to the woodland tradition, although their style was more Colorado mining camp than classic Adirondack log cabin.

Although they were eventually flanked by a more modern motel building, the cabins' evocation of rough woolen blankets, the scent of pine sap mixed with charcoal lighter, and giant moths fluttering under a yellow porch bulb kept them in fashion long after the guests stopped arriving in tail-finned DeSotos. But on July 4th weekend of 2006, while the cabins' webpage still promised the vacations you remember from the 1950s and 1960s, the bulldozers finally moved in.

The cabins were too classic to have ever gone out of style. I suspect that the culprit was intense development spreading south down 9N which demanded more intensive use of this beautiful pine-forested tract.

ABOVE: The cabins were grouped village-style in the shelter of majestic Northern Pines.

BELOW: While demolition can be as dramatic as a tank running over a house, it is usually a calculated and controlled process. Here a front end loader nudges a cabin loose from its concrete pad.

ABOVE: With a deceptively gentle touch, the bulldozer breaks each of the cabin's corner posts without cracking a pane of glass.

BELOW: After a few more nudges with the bulldozer blade, the cabin flows into what seems like an impossible shape but does not totally disintegrate. Its window panes are still intact.

BELOW: After a few more determined bulldozer thrusts, the cabin splits into pieces, which are in turn crushed into splinters by bulldozer treads and shoveled into a dump truck.

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