My usual trolling of the internet for ephemera turned up this postcard of the Gloversville Dance Pavilion at Mountain Lake near Gloversville, NY. If you follow this blog, you know that I complained a little about the slick, concrete floors of the Moonlit Pavilion at Cincinnati’s Coney Island and how difficult it was to dance in that venue. Coney Island's got nothing on Gloversville - imagine having a freight train go by while you’re two-stepping! Nothing like a blast of desil smoke to take the starch out of your suit.

Coming from the Midwest, I’m no big fan of NY. I automatically think of the choked, polluted, crime ridden city instead of the state whose name it bears. It’s an error on my part – a lot of NY is rural, pastoral land with beautiful mountains and forests instead of tenements and tourist traps. The attached postcard (below) of Mountain Lake shows the extent of my misconception. The scene could be of a park here in Indiana, except for the mountains – we tend to specialize in flat.

Actually, I discovered the train that zipped by the dance pavilion was electric and not diesel or steam-powered. Still I can’t imagine the sound of a passing train of any sort being condusive to a good night of dancing. A web site about the area reads:

“After five years of daunting construction work, the electric railroad made its inaugural run from Gloversville to Mountain Lake on August 23, 1901. The line started near the corner of North Main and State streets and climbed 767 feet over a mere 4.76 miles.


At the summit, the company had built a hotel, rental cottages, a shooting gallery, a casino, an outdoor theater, picnic areas, and a dance pavilion on a 140-acre wooded park surrounding the lake. Visitors could swim, boat and fish on the spring-fed waters, and the shore was served by foot trails and a small steam launch.”

I couldn’t tell whether the pavilion still stands. Aside from a few post cards and mentions related to railroading sites, evidence of the place has vanished. Maybe that's a subject to delve into on some cold winter day when all the outdoor dance venues in the country have fallen silent and all the bandstand play host only to ghosts. Dancing has become a kind of archeological dig for me, unearthing parts of the American experience that I never had the opportunity to be part of. Then again, maybe this is my part in them.