After floating a last-ditch plan to keep the Enfield roller skating rink open, owner Peter Martin has decided to close Great View Roller Skating, the once-popular recreational venue, and turn the 4-acre site on Route 4 into a day care and overnight boarding facility for pets.
Martin, besieged with pleas to keep the rink open after he disclosed last year he intended to convert the money-losing rink into a “pet resort,” announced in March that he would offer $200 memberships for a season’s pass in an attempt to help cover the facility’s $120,000 annual operating costs.
“I didn’t get enough (members) to make it work,” Martin told me last week. “It’s the end of an era. We’re sad to see it go. But it’s time. It’s the end of an era.”
Martin and his wife, Diane, bought the roller rink, then known as Al’s Casino, in 1987. The last roller rink in either New Hampshire or Vermont, Great View had its heyday in the late ’80s and ’90s but, like drive-in movie theaters, bowling and laser tag succumbed to a new generation hooked on video games and cellphones.
Martin said Great View will welcome skaters until the end of June and then reopen as a pet care facility “no later than Aug. 1.” He said the 15,000-square-foot facility will be able to accommodate up to 60 dogs and cats and have an “indoor park” for dogs to play around in.
Although it had a remnant of die-hard skaters and until a couple years ago was home to the Upper Valley Vixens roller derby team, customers have fallen off in recent years. Martin at various times toyed with selling the site and had it listed for sale, but he always came back to give the roller skating rink another go-round, hoping he could capitalize on nostalgia among Upper Valley parents who remembered the days growing up when they spent Friday and Saturday nights skating under the disco ball and seeking to pass the good times on to their own children.
“Kids today are on their phones. They don’t know how to have fun,” Martin said.
The facility will be renamed Chosen Valley Pet Resort, and even though the only pets Martin and Diane have are two Maine Coon cats, Martin said he’s more than fine with dogs.
“I grew up with Saint Bernards and Great Danes,” he said.
Describing it as a “very, very soft opening,” Brian Kenny of Key Auto Group said the new Chevrolet dealership in White River Junction is now open for business — it sold its first, a Silvarado pickup with an extended cab, on June 1 — as it gears up for the “official grand opening” later in the month.
The newest 25,000-square-foot, $4.8 million dealership to sprout on Sykes Mountain Avenue — Upper Valley Honda is also planning to relocate there from Lebanon — will employ 35 to 40 people, roughly evenly split between sales and service personnel, according to Kenney.
“This area has been deprived of a Chevrolet dealership for some time, and we’re super-excited to be here,” Kenny told me last week as he showed a visitor around the spanking new facility that includes 13 repair service bays, a two-floor auto parts storage room and a spacious customer lounge.
Kenny, regional vice president for Key Auto in Rutland and motorman in charge of overseeing the new White River Junction dealership, said in the coming weeks Chevy cars and trucks, many of them from Key Auto’s base of operations in Portsmouth, N.H., will be rolling in to fill the 338-vehicle lot.
He’s brought in Chris Stromberg, who worked at Key Auto in Plymouth, as general sales manager and hired Sean Shisko, formerly with Newport Chevrolet GMC, to run the service department.
The Upper Valley has been without a Chevrolet seller since Miller Auto closed its Chevrolet and Cadillac dealership in Lebanon in 2015 and sold the land to Concord Coach Lines, the operator of Dartmouth Coach, to build the bus line’s new passenger terminal. Since then the nearest Chevy dealerships have been located in Newport; Wells River, Vt.; Ludlow, Vt.; and Rutland.
Kenny acknowledged that Key Auto is looking at moving all or part of the Chrysler Jeep Dodge Ram dealership in Lebanon it acquired from Miller Auto earlier this year to White River Junction, although he said no decision has yet been made.
Key Auto, a group of 12 dealerships owned by Portsmouth developer Anthony DiLorenzo, acquired land in 2015 along Sykes Mountain Avenue from Valley Land Trust for $1.6 million. Key Auto then received approval from the Hartford Planning and Zoning Department to subdivide the 65-acre parcel into three lots: an 8.2-acre lot for the Chevy dealership, a smaller 5.43-acre lot and a 51-acre lot.
The Windsor Mansion Inn, which closed last winter while its owner put the historic property up for sale, reopened Friday and may soon have a new innkeeper.
The 17-room property, which had been extensively renovated under its prior owner, has been sold at auction and is currently in escrow, according to Collin Foran, the sales agent on behalf of the seller.
Foran said via email that he is precluded from releasing details about the buyer until the sale closes, but the Windsor Mansion Inn is again open and now operating with an “interim staff assisting ownership.”
Windsor Mansion Inn is owned by HHK Hospitality LLC, an entity with ties to New York Yankees team owner Hank Steinbrenner. Steinbrenner is friends with the inn’s former owner and manager, who transferred ownership to HHK Hospitality after experiencing legal troubles.
The inn initially was put up for sale last year with an asking price of $1.4 million and later knocked down to $950,000 before being listed for auction with a minimum opening bid of $950,000.
But anyone who has ever wanted to run their own New England county inn isn’t completely out of luck: The Chase House Inn in Cornish, which was put up for sale in April following the passing of its owner, is still currently listed with an asking price of $790,000.
The Upper Valley is seeing a boomlet in “co-work space” — typically a mini office and desk area with some common office services available on short-term rental. So-called co-work spaces target freelance workers who don’t want or can’t afford the overhead commitment of an office lease.
Originally an urban phenomenon, co-work spaces have popped up over the past couple years in Claremont; Bradford, Vt.; White River Junction; Woodstock; and Randolph.
Now, befitting the village’s hipster image, a second co-work space, called OnTrack.Space, has opened in downtown White River Junction at 15 Railroad Ave. in a building owned by Bill Bittinger and partners (White River CoWorks, owned by Mike Davidson, opened in Davidson’s Engine Room event center in 2016 before relocating a year later to one of his neighboring buildings).
The business’s second-floor quarters above Norwich Solar were formerly the offices of digital startup DailyUV, which moved around the corner to Matt Bucey’s renovated American Legion Hall building on South Main Street.
Preferring to go by “community work space” because of what it sees as its own twist on the co-work space concept, OnTrack.Space rentals range from open desktop areas and partitioned workspaces to private offices and rent for between $200 per month to mid-$500, said David McManus, community manager. Minimum contracts range from one month to six months, depending on the space rented, which different from hourly, daily or weekly options offered at similar businesses.
There are conference rooms available for booking and an eating room dubbed the Rail Car Cafe with the requisite Keurig pod coffee maker (but, alas, no foosball table).
“The whole town is buzzing with new ideas and concepts,” McManus said of White River Junction, explaining that the co-work space is hoping to attract “social impact, creative and tech” people “who have been working from home and may be getting a little weary of that.”
Two of the nine private offices are already rented, McManus reports: one to a retired DHMC anesthesiologist and the other to a studio painter.
John Lippman can be reached at jlippman@vnews.com.
