It's Gone!

I just walked into the office for an appointment and looked up as I have been doing all this year at the Old Stone Mill. The little top - what was it used for? - on the roof that was probably some sort of ventilation/cupola is gone.


The Old Stone Mill which to me was the center of Skaneateles is being renovated. It will eventually be condos and some kind of retail, I think. I've always thought it would make a good village center for boutiques and candy stores and a coffee house, a small restaurant looking out over the lake. It will certainly be beautiful, I am sure, in its new incarnation.


I remember trying to entice a friend years ago to create a coffee and book shop in it. He disagreed, saying it would never go, that it needed to be on Genesee Street. Ah well! (Creekside Coffee and Books down Fennell Street has proved him wrong - but then I broached my idea 15 years ago.)


Back to the Old Stone Mill: For years it housed Under the Stone, the place where we went as young adults to drink and eat and talk. The restaurant above closed on New Year's Eve, 2001, I believe, never to open again. I showed the building in the fall of 2002, and there were the place settings, the ketchup still on the tables, the still-decorated Christmas trees drying in the hallways. I felt it was like the Titanic and the people had just disappeared.

But it will reopen with a new roof that it badly needed, much, much scraping and cleaning, a whole new interior and additional exterior, with just the outer stones remaining to remind the world that it once proudly served Skaneateles as an old stone mill.