The Playboy Club Hotel was a domino that never quite fell into place.
Built in the early 1970s in Vernon Township, the hotel complex was meant to transform a valley once packed with dairy cows into the top resort and convention center on the East Coast.
It did not go as planned.
Without a casino, like the highly profitable one at the Playboy Club in London, the resort hotel never achieved the success company founder Hugh Hefner envisioned. After rebranding the hotel as a family-friendly resort, Hefner cut the fraying cord.Playboy Enterprises Inc. officials announced a sale in 1981. The property continued its steady decline.
The neglected site was sold earlier this year to an affiliate of Lockwood Hotels, a real estate investment and development company based in Florida that owns several other hotels. The company's plan calls for redeveloping the property as a 300-room branded hotel, a world-class spa, 150 residential condos and a concert venue, Vernon Mayor Anthony Rossi announced via social media this summer.
The future of the deteriorating but still impressive hotel will likely make far less of a splash than did its past. When Playboy officials found it, the area was primarily farmland sheltered from suburban development by the surrounding granite hills for decades. Nearby lakes long attracted summer visitors, however, and recreation had become the county's calling card.
John Kurlander's new and expandingGreat Gorge ski area, today known as Mountain Creek, was New Jersey's largest, and a strong draw. The neighboring Vernon Valley ski development, which in 1971 merged with Great Gorge, was also popular. Kurlander's second ski resort, the Hidden Valley Ski and Tennis Club, was in the works.
Officials with Playboy Enterprises, a magazine company founded in 1953 that had branched out into a property management and lifestyle corporation, saw metro area high-rollers in need of luxe lodging and entertainment when the slopes closed. The next resort property for its popular chain of Playboy Club properties was coming to the northern Highlands of New Jersey.
Playboy Club in Vernon was supposed to be the best
Playboy Clubs once spanned the globe. From St. Louis to Sapporo, the nightclub and resort properties offered a slice of the high life to anyone who could afford a $25 annual membership. The resort in Vernon was more ambitious than most of the company's city-based clubs. It was expected to be a draw in its own right, albeit amidforested slopes teeming with deer and country roads dotted with barns. Roughly 250,000 paying members lived within driving distance of Vernon, company reports said.
In early 1968, Playboy officials negotiated zoning variances with Vernon Township to construct a towering limestone and redwood hotel and inked an agreement with the adjacent Great Gorge ski resort to provide it with recreational amenities. By the end of September, Hefner, the president of Playboy Clubs International and the founder and editor-in-chief of the eponymous magazine, had announced plans to build a $20 million hotel and resort on 1,000 acres in Vernon.
By the spring of 1970, work had started on a 50% pricier project on roughly 50% of the acreage.
"The cows will have to give way to the Bunnies," The Record staff writer Edward Norton wrote in November 1968. "What is now rural, informal farmland will be changed into the affluent urban family's playground."
The move was welcomed by some, including the local farmers and municipal officials who sold their land to developers, The Record reported. Then-Vernon Councilman Edward Snook was a dairy farmer before he sold his land to a front company for the Playboy project. He took a job as a local school bus driver, moved to a new house and bought a new car. His former barn was used to stall the resort's horses.
Some, such as the late Lakeland Bank founder John W. Fredericks, said they were drawn to the new resort by the high-style pageantry and New York City sophistication on offer. Others, including late civil engineer Christopher “Kit” Norton, found the country club setting with a pool, tennis courts and a playground ideal for his young family, said Norton's daughter Amanda Norton.
Over about a decade, Norton's father took at least 600 photographs at the club, she said. Most were of glamorous women in service, the lifeblood of the resort.
"They're not Playboy-style photographs that portray women from an ornamental, subservient view," Norton said. "They show women in honest, sometimes uncomfortable positions."
Vernon Playboy Club opens its doors in 1971
When the stone-speckled resort hotel opened on a ridge off a winding two-lane road inDecember 1971, it held more than 600 rooms, including Hefner's old suite. Standard rooms cost $35 a night. A double room on the weekend in the winter went for $40.
Recreational offerings includedtable games, swimming and tennis.A 27-hole golf course and more swimming was still under construction outside. While the country club aspect later took priority, the eight-story hotel initially attracted locals looking for an upscale night out, The Record and other newspapers reported.
There were plushdining rooms, lounges and cabarets with world-class entertainment reserved for Playboy Club members and their guests. Performers included Liza Minelli, Tony Bennett, Ann-Margret, Sammy Davis Jr. and Duke Ellington.
Playboy Clubs were far lessrisqué than the far more profitable magazine that made its name off nude centerfold pictorials before shuttering in 2020. Businessmen, such as Fredericks, brought their clients and wives with them to Vernon. Jackets were required in the dining rooms. Consorting with the roughly 150 Playboy Bunnies was prohibited.
None of the Bunnies were allowed to share their last names or fraternize with customers. But they could sometimes be found off-duty nearby at George's Inn. Most made about $1 an hour, plus tips.
Norton has spoken to many. She researched the club and spoke with Bunnies to add dimension to her father's photos. She created a website, vivelapin.com, and crafted a traveling slideshow based on her discovery of the photos and the influence of the Playboy Clubs. She has taken the show to major cities, including Berlin, Los Angeles and London, where the Playboy Club operated a highly successful casino after opening in 1966.
Things never fell into place for the Playboy Club in Vernon
The Vernon resort was built to be the biggest Playboy Club yet. It was certainly big for Vernon, paying about 12% of the township's taxes in its first year while openly welcoming competition to increase the valley's pull and spur further development. Company officials set aside hundreds of acres for expansion, including space for a standalone convention center, The Record reported.
Interstate 80's completion in 1973 helped feed a time ofextraordinary growth in Vernon.The population went from 2,155 in 1960 to 6,059 in 1970 and 16,302 in 1980, U.S. census records show. Land values skyrocketed.
There were rumors that Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Joan Rivers, who performed at the hotel in its early days, were looking for property near the Playboy Club. However, things never fell into place. Real estate agents told The Record in the mid-1970s that Vernon would never be the second coming of the Poconos.
Tourists "don't want to be in a community where everybody goes off to work at 8 o'clock," broker Scott Overton said in July 1976.
The development boom fell short of expectations. A proposed $1 million airport about a mile north of the resort between Route 94 and McAfee-Glenwood Road was ruled out due to its proximity to a local school and church. A proposed 1,000-acre condominium project and hotel and golf complex sponsored byArnold Palmer never came off as planned.The proposed Tocks Island Dam on the other side of the county and its promise to turn Sussex County into the recreational mecca of North America were dashed.Road improvement projects designed to ease the flow of busy weekend traffic during ski season were not completed as developers desired.
Most critically of all for Playboy Enterprises, the planned resort area suffered from a failure by stakeholders to successfullylobby state officials for legalized gambling. Officials in Atlantic City, Asbury Park and Newark had also been pushing for gambling with an ultimate view toward economic revitalization, The Record reported in 1971.
Then-Attorney General George F. Kugler led the charge for the opposition, calling the depiction of legalized gambling as a panacea to the state's tax problems "a cruel hoax."
"Anywhere casino gambling has ever been tried they have had tremendous problems with organized crime," he said. "The Bahamas, Great Britain, Puerto Rico, Las Vegas — they've had problems."
Legalized gambling returned to New Jersey after a 1976 referendum, but only in Atlantic City. A 1974 referendum proposal to permit gambling statewide had failed.
Playboy Club becomes Great Gorge Resort Hotel
The Playboy Club resort in Vernon initially struggled due to a recession and expected operational difficulties, although significant losses were expected in the first few years, The Record reported.
Adding to its issues was the high-profile October 1972 drug arrest of actress and singer Barbara McNair and allegations of sexual misconduct against female employees. The prospect of the resort's gambling-fueled success and the valley's continued development provided promise for a turnaround that not everyone wanted to see.
"Most of the officials, from Sussex County freeholders and the county planning director to the Vernon mayor, have stars in their eyes and nothing but praise for the Playboy spearhead," The Record's Norton wrote in 1972. "A small minority of natives think the hotel complex is too big and a smaller number feels the hotel could ruin the rural character of the town they moved to after fleeing New York or built-up Bergen, Passaic, Essex and Hudson counties."
After the casino project hit a dead end, Playboy Enterprises moved its focus from Vernon to Atlantic City. In 1981, the company opened a similarly short-lived hotel and casino there. By then, Vernon's Playboy Club Hotel had been rebranded as the Great Gorge Resort Hotel.
Property managers in 1975 revamped the resort's operations and rates to lure convention organizers and families, like Amanda Norton's, to stem an estimated $2 million in annual losses, former managing director John Lamers told The New York Times that year. A day camp for children became a pivotal draw and a lasting memory for Norton and others. The area designated for a casino was replaced with indoor tennis courts that doubled as a convention hall floor.
The 230-seat Playboy Club remained through the transition, as did some Bunnies and performers including Cab Calloway, Lou Rawls and George Gobel. The glamour gradually faded, however, and in 1982 Hefner's company fully broke ties with the Vernon property. After a decade in New Jersey's northern Highlands, the hotel was sold in a $42 million deal that included the 340-room, 1,100-acre Playboy Resort and Country Club in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.
Subsequent owners have had limited success. The hotel's last owner was delinquent on a six-figure tax bill. The resort most recently operated as theLegends Resort and Country Club, a faded relic without any of the glitz, glam or Bunnies. It was a hotel with condominiums and, later, long-term rental units. Rooms were often rented by workers for nearby resorts. The last occupants left in April 2018, after a lengthy court battle.
The area, still popular among skiers and golfers, could use a good hotel, Amanda Norton said. Whether or not the resort returns to the grandeur of the original remains to be seen.
