Champagne, Mirrors and Romance at the Poconos’ Honeymoon Resorts
ROMANCE
Love, in 2018, is taken seriously. Couples got to therapy, read self-help books, listen to Esther Perel’s TED talks — you look for the one (at least for a certain length of time) but also work for the one. The mechanics of sex and relationships, though elusive, are fairly well-documented. At the same time, you’re also not supposed to show you’re trying too hard to love. The actions of love, it seems, are supposed to happen just under the surface, the imperceptible emotional labor of understanding another person and being understood.
So you might not talk about — or do — something that smacks of trying too hard to love or, more accurately, of romancing someone. Showing up in red lingerie on Valentine’s Day, for instance, or having a designated date night — these things, for some, lack the nuanced spontaneity we’re supposed to masterfully employ. But then you plan a weekend to float with your lover in a heart-shaped pool, enclosed in a red-and-pink tiled room, before seeing your reflection in a many-mirrored wall and falling asleep together under lit-up constellations. And then you know that sometimes planning for romance — and having fun while doing so — very much has its place.
“We all fall in love, we all have special romances with somebody else,” Kyle Kuczma, PR coordinator for Cove Haven Resorts, says. “I don’t think there’s quite the same openness about it now as there was before. Before, love could be fun, and it could also be kind of silly. It can be kitschy, too, and I think we help to take a lot of those younger audiences, and they’ll look at our resort, they’ll have heard of us through pop culture, or their parents came here. They’ll laugh about it and say, that’s the silly place with the heart-shaped tubs, right?”
I’ve been obsessed with honeymoon resorts — or love motels — for as long as I’ve known they exist, which isn’t more than a few years because I’m from Texas where honeymoon resorts mysteriously aren’t found. I pore through the Instagram of Cove Haven or just Google Image search heart-shaped things at least once a week. Learning that honeymoon resorts exist, with their blood-red heart-shaped tubs and Grecian detailing and many themes, is the closest I’ve felt to disappearing into a tangibly imaginary world as a child. And that’s because they’re supposed to be fun and magical! Not many things in adulthood are built with the specific intention of having these qualities.
“Love is supposed to be fun, and it’s supposed to be funny, too. We’re trying to get people who look at love very seriously and use us because they want the recharge on their romance. But we also want to get the younger audience who are looking for something experiential. But also we’re not just a bucket list item,” Kyle says.
And I understand why he says that. Adhering to the aesthetics of a honeymoon resort is a commitment not for the faint of heart. Heart-shaped jacuzzi tubs and champagne whirlpools and red carpet in front of a fireplace and lots of mirrors sound like my idea of heaven, but it’s also generally considered a campy thing. Which, of course, it is, but also it’s beautiful. It’s very emotional, too. Susan Sontag said: “What is extravagant in an inconsistent or an unpassionate way is not Camp. Neither can anything be Camp that does not seem to spring from an irrepressible, a virtually uncontrolled sensibility.”
Aleia makes exquisite and transportive miniature environments of everyday fantasies — shrimp and hot tubs, snail movie stars on silky gold beds, ferns and ambrosia. She creates complex, surreal Polly Pocket universes, and the essential ingredients of a motel built for romance are some of her main themes. In trying to piece together the words and reasons for a purely emotional connection with these places, I asked Aleia why these nostalgic yet intriguing places speak to us.
“I think these spaces epitomize the idea of escaping reality and indulging in pleasure,” she writes to me. “It’s funny though, I stayed at Cove Haven last summer and I expected it to feel like a spectacle — almost like Disneyland for Love. It was at capacity that weekend, full of couples that felt like they were there with new partners or rekindling an old love. It was so inspiring to me that a place designed for people to celebrate love was thriving. I kind of realized these sites are designed to make you feel special, and that’s an ageless desire.”
THE PLEASURE ZONE
The property for Cove Haven was purchased by Morris Wilkins and his partner Harold O’Brien back in 1958. It was originally a small lakeside hotel developed into something romantic. There are two stories behind the invention of the heart-shaped tub, Kyle tells me. One of them is that the design came to Morris in a dream, and he woke up in the middle of the night to sketch out a chalk outline on the floor of his garage. The other story is that while Morris and Harold were carrying a regular whirlpool up a stairwell and trying to get it around corners, it folded to look a bit like a heart.
The heart-shaped tubs were rolled out in 1963 and exploded in popularity in 1971, when LIFE magazine did a feature on the honeymoon resorts in the Poconos. Morris also invented the champagne-shaped jacuzzi tub, dreaming up the design in 1971 and rolling it out in 1984. This design, the design that puts the champagne in Cove Haven’s Champagne Tower Suites, was this time patented by Morris, which explains why the heart-shaped tub is a ubiquitous feature of honeymoon resorts but the champagne tub is a Cove Haven exclusive.
A 2007 Philadelphia magazine article painted a glamorous picture of an evening at a Poconos resort:
“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.”
Mount Airy Lodge, Penn Hills Resort, and Cove Haven all were reinvented as honeymoon resorts in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, perfect escapes for tri-state residents who wanted accessibly remote and accessibly luxurious vacations. Mount Airy’s commercials were so ubiquitous to East Coasters that Roy Lichenstein copped an image from the ad that now hangs in the Met. Cove Haven’s three properties are the only ones that have lasted.
I at first wanted to dive deeper into why these resorts have faded a bit in popularity, but realized that the reasons are pretty simple — almost as simple as this Wikipedia mention that read like a Closing Soon sign on a door: Due to the loss of interest by consumers and increasing competition from cruise ships and Caribbean tourism, as well as increasing interest in vacations in areas such as Atlantic City and Las Vegas, Mount Airy went into foreclosure in November 1999.[4] Mount Airy Lodge closed for business on October 29, 2001.[5]
THE AESTHETICS OF LOVE
Romance is defined as “a quality or feeling of mystery, excitement, and remoteness from everyday life.” This definition explains perfectly why, then, romantic moods are hard to create in 2018. Romance comes in flavors delicate and heady — nuances that bright screens and social media feeds and IKEA environments tend to lack.
Reading Learning From Las Vegas helped put my feelings into words. “The big, low mazes of the dark restaurant with alcoves combine being together and yet separate as does the Las Vegas casino. The lighting in the casino achieves a new monumentality for the low space. The controlled sources of artificial and colored light within the dark enclosures expand and unify the space by obscuring its physical limits.”
The emotional aesthetics of a love motel or honeymoon resort do exactly this. Expand and unify a space by obscuring its physical limits. It’s the closest an adult human-being can get to make-believe. And romance is make-believe, in the sense that it’s a world you must create for yourself.
“I make these miniature fantasy worlds so I can disappear into them and temporarily escape daily life,” Aleia writes. “Heart-shaped things have become a motif of mine because, to me, it represents the idea of indulgence and self-care. My scenes are often empty — it is meant to be occupied by one, the viewer. It’s about the comfort and intimacy you have with yourself. There is something cathartic about looking into another scene and mentally transporting yourself there.”
It’s an indulgent scene for you and you only — or also the person you’ve chosen to be in that room with. It’s a terrific place to be together and alone in. It’s openly seductive and endlessly yours. You see your body and the other person’s body, naked if you’re doing it right, reflected back to you in decadent lights and surfaces — mirrors above and surrounding, pool water, on beds and in tubs. It’s one of the few spaces I’ve ever been in where windows would seem garish.
I’ve had the good fortune of staying in three honeymoon-themed rooms this past year (It’s been a good year!), and in each room, I’ve done a lot of standing and staring. At first I felt like I needed to participate more in these spaces, ride all the rides, but actually, it’s nice to have a dreamland space — and a reason — to stand and stare off into space, physical limits obscured. Alone and together! It’s hard to tell what the future holds for these sorts of places, but I do know this: There have lately been more and more ads for Cove Haven Resorts popping up on New York City trains. Once again, we’re looking for a reason to get away from it all, for a little bit.
April 10, 2020
In "Features"