THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER16, 2019 21
ring-do: balcony dives, greased-pole log-
rolling (“we don’t allow that anymore”),
jousting in rowboats (“another thing we
don’t allow”). A heavy-machinery se-
quence, on the Shawangunk Ridge,
evoked Mike Mulligan’s steam shovel,
and then some; onscreen, a worker swung
on a chain hoist, leisurely smoking a cig-
arette. (“No OSHA regulations,” Pril said.)
Winter unfurled in a flurry of snow-
shoeing and Yule-log lugging. In one
scene, a small airplane on frozen Lake
Mohonk prepared for takeoff, assisted
by boys with hockey sticks.
The most remarkable footage, per-
haps, is of ice harvesting. In a long se-
quence, teams of workers and horses
gather lake ice for use in refrigeration
and in guests’ drinks. They harvested a
thousand tons a year. Just as Roberto
Rossellini’s “Stromboli,” from 1950, func-
tions as both a drama and a record of
an unimaginably bounteous tuna mat-
tanza in the Tyrrhenian Sea, the Smi-
ley film depicts bygone and herculean
nature-wrangling, on Lake Mohonk.
“Here’s a horse-pulled saw, starting to
score the ice,” Pril said. “And then this
handsaw, which is down in the barn mu-
seum, is sawing the scored ice rows, and
then blocks. They waited until the ice
was around ten inches thick.” Men hauledblocks up a ramp onto a cart; horses
pulled the carts—and young Smileys—
up a hill to a four-story icehouse, where
the blocks awaited a conveyor belt and
stacking. “We did this through 1964,”
Pril said. Later, the horses rolled around
in the snow. “They’re having a ball!”
The horses make an appearance in
the app, as do the Smiley elders. The app,
Hidden Histories, operates as a sort of
scavenger hunt: walk down the hotel’s
meandering corridors, point your phone
at a piece of art, watch a short film that
animates the work’s subjects. A sepia-
toned family portrait instigates Smiley
footage, including a rare color film: a
chamber-music concert, in Mohonk’s
parlor, in 1942. In the office, Pril played
the video. “There’s my mother, playing
for Toscanini,” she said, pointing to a
young violinist in a white dress. “He came
here for eight days with Madam Tos-
canini. We have his registration card now,
in his famous green ink.” In the film, the
Maestro is present but not seen; so is
Pril. “My mother was two months preg-
nant with me,” she said. “When I was
born, Toscanini sent us a picture of him-
self—‘Happy Day for little Priscilla and
her lovely mother. Best wishes to both.’
That’s one of my treasures.”
—Sarah Larson“It says it’s sick and tired of telling me to update my software,
and if I don’t do it right now it’s going to explode.”• •
other day. Pril, a retired electronic-mu-
sic composer who favors phrases like
“properly irreverent,” is among the Smi-
leys who now run what replaced the tav-
ern: Mohonk Mountain House, a cas-
tlelike lakeside resort hotel of Edwardian
and Victorian design, surrounded by bu-
colic views and very few charred stumps.
Mohonk has remained nature-focussed
and low-tech; guests hike, do puzzles,
exfoliate with Shawangunk Grit, and en-
gage in a practice called “forest bathing.”
(Mindful, plein-air, clothes-on.) But, for
its sesquicentennial, this year, Mohonk
created an app. Its origins are unlike those
of other apps.
A few years ago, when Pril and Mo-
honk’s archivist, Nell Boucher, were going
through Pril’s late father’s basement dur-
ing a black-mold crisis, they discovered
a metal cabinet, long ignored, full of film
cannisters. “There were about a hundred
reels,” Pril said, in a third-floor office at
Mohonk. Nell assumed that they were
“natural-history things, like films of squir-
rels and their behavior.” (Pril’s father, Dan-
iel, was a noted ecologist.) But the films
weren’t Daniel’s. “There, in my grandfa-
ther’s particular blue pencil that he wrote
everything in,” Pril said, were intriguing
labels: “1929,” “Toscanini.” (The Maestro
had spent his seventy-fifth birthday at
Mohonk, in 1942.) She wanted the films
to be digitized, so she brought them to
a film-transfer specialist at a local comic-
book shop; the process took a while. (“The
shop was going under,” she said.) Finally,
she saw the results: films of Mohonk
from before her time. They ended in 1945,
and the Smileys of today hadn’t known
that they existed.
The films are silent and mostly black-
and-white. “My grandfather had a good
sense of aesthetics, and he was docu-
menting everything—people, projects,
family members,” Pril said. She cued up
a film on a laptop. “That’s my great-grand-
father getting out of a carriage,” she said,
pointing to a man in a top hat at Mo-
honk’s entrance. “This is 1929.” Pril’s great-
grandmother Effie welcomed viewers to
a garden. A spring sequence contained
mountain laurel (“there are many reels
of mountain laurel”), a goat in eyeglasses
(“this is Professor Goat”), and Pril’s
great-grandfather’s famous horse, Sun-
shine, who appears in portraits around
the hotel. Summer revealed woollen
tank-style swimwear and lakeside der-