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Take advantage of the unseasonably warm weather and visit the Big Top in the Cross County Center's parking lot!

|Updated Fri, Feb 24, 2023 at 12:02 pm ET

WESTCHESTER COUNTY, NY — The nation’s first open-air mall — the Cross County Center — will host two special events in March to help us enjoy the unseasonably warm weather and the approaching spring season.

Back by popular demand, Flip Circus will perform circus shows daily from March 3-20. Amazing acts include acrobatics, aerial and trapeze, clowns, jugglers, motorcycle globe, magic and more!

The big top tent will be located in the north parking lot, across from Olive Garden and Longhorn Steakhouse.

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NEW YORK - The City of Mount Vernon Center for Animal Care is getting ready to close its doors for good next month, citing inhabitable conditions.

There are 14 dogs and about half a dozen cats left inside the popular animal shelter, but come the end of January, the city will shut down its only animal hospital.

Aponte has been a dedicated staff member since August. She has been volunteering for years and worries about what future the dogs and cats have beyond the facility. But she knows the nearly 50-year-old facility needs a major overhaul.

"The kennel's heat is not good," said Aponte. "The big overall issue is mice. They're crawling over the dog’s food, the dog’s treats."

Mount Vernon Mayor Shawyn Patterson-Howard claims the shelter has been neglected for decades and no administration prior to hers attempted to fix the issues. She says it will be a temporary closure with the hopes of reopening the animal shelter in the future, but it’s something they can’t invest in right now.

There are dogs at the shelter who have been living in the conditions for years. Aponte says most people don’t want a dog who isn’t friendly with other dogs or a cat who needs medication around the clock. She just hopes all the animals will get adopted before the Jan. 31 deadline.

The Humane Society of Westchester will be handling adoptions in Mount Vernon for now on. They’ll also be taking any animal that hasn’t been adopted by the end of next month, evaluating each one.

VERNON — Legends, the now-shuttered former Playboy Club that hosted sold-out performances by Frank Sinatra, Liza Minnelli, Sammy Davis Jr. and other big-time entertainers in its heyday, may be on the verge of a second act under terms of a proposed legal settlement with the township.

Mayor Howard Burrell, who will present it to the Township Council for approval Tuesday, said the township has already received hundreds of thousands of dollars in past due property taxes and is betting the house's money the agreement can resurrect the late Hugh Hefner's once-palatial resort from mothballs into something that can again be a revenue generator for the township.

The linchpin of the proposal is the agreement by Metairie Corp., the facility's current owner, to make good on $860,000 in delinquent property taxes due to Vernon. Of that amount, $472,000 was paid at the end of last month with the balance due by June 30, 2021, Burrell said.

Metairie would also be required to find a buyer or obtain financing for the redevelopment of the property, located at the junction of Route 94 and Route 517, by June 30 or find an auctioneer to sell it off by October.

Vernon, in turn, would forgive about $60,000 in building and fire code violations and drop its opposition to renewing the resort's cabaret liquor license, a major consideration for any investor.

"The assumption is that anyone who buys this will know what the situation is and have some plan to make it useful," Burrell said. "I can't see somebody paying a lot of money for it without a plan."

Vernon residents have heard this song before, from proposals to turn it into a convention center or satellite college campus and again two years ago when a hedge fund investor claimed to be finalizing a deal to turn it into a retirement community. All came to naught.

But with the new Legoland theme park set to open next year in Goshen, N.Y., Burrell said the time is right for Vernon and its resorts to cash in on an expected spillover of tourism and demand for hotel rooms across the region. He believes this spillover will be key to resurrecting the resort.

Built at a cost of nearly $30 million, the Great Gorge Playboy Club had eight floors and over 800 guest rooms as well as a penthouse suite famously reserved for Hefner himself when it opened in 1971. The resort had a cabaret, ballroom, 27-championship hole golf course, bowling, tennis, jacuzzis, indoor swimming pools and an Olympic-sized outdoor pool plus access to nearby skiing and riding. These amenities, coupled with its nightly entertainment and ubiquitous Playboy Bunnies, enabled the club to flourish in its first few years.

Things started to go south once the novelty wore off and hopes for the legalization of casino gambling at the hotel were dashed. In 1982, the facility was sold to the Americana hotel chain and later was resold and rebranded as Seasons.

Many of the units were subsequently converted to timeshares and condominiums. In 1998, the remaining units and building were rebranded as Legends Resort & Country Club and acquired by Hillel Meyers, a Florida-based timeshare industry executive whose Metairie Corp. remains the facility's primary owner today.

Much of the building has since been shuttered and the unused units leased to short-term tenants including a Tennessee Gas pipeline worker from out of state who was murdered at the hotel in 2008. With reports of drug dealing and vultures, bats and other vermin taking up residence in the building, Vernon took steps to have the remaining 60 or so low-income tenants evicted three years ago for health and safety reasons.

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Burrell is hopeful the removal of legal and tax encumbrances will make the former hotel more palatable to an investor. However, he acknowledged the sale could be complicated by the multiple unit owners and more than 2,200 people who bought timeshares here in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Some are believed to still hold title to those units.

"All of the people who still own condos are unknown and probably unknowable to a great extent," Burrell said. "For us, the important thing is that all of the taxes and anything else that's financially due Vernon will have to come off the top, so it's going to be up to the new owner to deal with those people. He'll have to do that."

Although the township could seek to condemn the facility through eminent domain, Burrell said it would do nothing to put it back on the tax rolls. Additionally, the township doesn't want to be in the hotel business or left to shoulder the $1 million in annual carrying costs to keep its infrastructure from deteriorating, let alone the $15 million or more it may take to refurbish it.

Burrell said the settlement will be a win-win if it leads an investor to come forward and restore the facility to the tax rolls.

Eric Obernauer can also be contacted on Twitter: @EricObernNJH or by phone at 862-273-5349.

Vernon's lawsuit accusing the Sussex County Municipal Utilities Authority of overcharges for sewer services for more than a decade was dismissed.

Superior Court Judge William McGovern dismissed the lawsuit filed earlier this year, "with prejudice," but Vernon has 45 days to appeal it.

The judge ruled the time limit to object to the fees charged by SCMUA expired 20 days after the original bond issue was proposed in 2008.

At that time, Vernon sought to join the county's municipal sewer system at it looked at development in the town center, which included the Mountain Creek resort complex. That system had a treatment plant just south of Hamburg Borough which discharges into the Wallkill River.

The town and county's municipal utilities authority worked to expand the sewer service into Vernon's town center. The town at that time created the Vernon Municipal Utilities Authority to be the formal bill collector. The two sides also settled on how much the sewer system would handle and set a fee schedule that included a minimum annual flow.

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However, over the years, there was little development and the existing businesses and residences did not produce enough to meet that minimum flow, but the Sussex County authority continued to charge the minimum rate.

In its lawsuit, Vernon accused the county authority of overcharging for sewer services and intentionally misrepresented flow rates for the entire system served by the Wallkill facility.

The lawsuit also included the Vernon Township MUA as a co-plaintiff. As part of his decision, McGovern noted the Vernon authority had no standing to be a party to the suit as it was not a party to the original agreement.

And while Vernon paid more per gallon than any other participant, except Wantage, in most years. the judge also wrote: "It is also undisputed that Vernon contractually agreed in its Service Contract with SCMUA to an AMF of 461,000 gallons per day – more than any other participant."

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The judge also wrote: "Vernon views the Service Contract with SCMUA to have been, in retrospect, 'a bad deal,' and now asks this Court to cancel the contract, through the guise of rescission, and make a better deal, and write a better contract for Vernon than that which Vernon previously reviewed, approved, and executed."

Near the end of his 24-page decision, McGovern concluded that "intervening circumstances or economic conditions have now rendered those terms unattractive to Vernon" but, according to the state's laws, there is "no basis for the Court to intervene, or to write a better contract for the parties."

Thomas Prol, who represented the county authority said he had no comment and agreed with the judge's written decision.

Sussex County was also a named defendant in the case since the county backs the bonds issued for the SCMUA expansion of sewer services.

Neither Brian Tipton, who represented the county, nor Joshua Zielinski, who represented SCMUA, returned messages asking for comment.

Staff Writer, @karayorio

A small but triumphant voice came through the fog that had descended the mountain.

“I did it!” she yelled.

A little earlier in the day, an instructor could be heard through the mist praising a different skier – “Good job, Anna!” the woman yelled. “Look at you! Look at you!”

Visions of just these kinds of moments are what inspired the re-imagining of the former Hidden Valley skiing site in Vernon into the National Winter Activity Center.

A non-profit facility formed by the National Winter Sports Education Foundation and dedicated to an instructional and competition program for kids 6 to 17, the activity center's mission is to improve the lives of young people through winter sports, but its focus isn’t simply on the snow.

It also promotes healthy eating -- giving the kids snacks, a meal and a little nutritional education while they are there -- and attempts to instill some core values that include “persistence, respect, humor,” according to Schone Malliet, the center's CEO.

“At the end of the day, our goal is to improve the life and health of youth through winter activities,” Malliet said. “We do that with this facility, which is dedicated, by giving the opportunity to develop as young men and young women, the opportunity to compete if they want to. ... The other things you need are a healthy meal and equipment. We provide equipment, a healthy meal, instruction and mentorship.”

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The organization runs programs for instruction and competition in alpine and cross-country skiing and snowboarding. The Vernon site provided the perfect place for a dedicated facility and mountain. There are no adults weaving around the children, who are just learning. As a private center, there are no crowds of people filling the line to the ski lift.

The activity center began with a pilot program in 2015, when it had 180 kids. Last year there were 800, and this season it's pushing past 1,000.

One weekend in late January, the facility is loud and bursting with activity as kids get off their buses, then rush into the building to eat, gear up and hit the slopes. On the first floor, near the stairs down to the locker room where the equipment waited, were racks with winter coats and ski pants. For kids who can’t afford or don’t have any of their own, these are theirs to take and keep. The skiing equipment is provided as part of the cost of the program, which Malliet stresses is for children of all socioeconomic levels.

“We could take any kids from anywhere along the spectrum of skills, from any economic environment or geographic environment,” he said. “The idea is to make sure kids who wouldn’t necessarily have access, that’s who we seek out. That access is more than socioeconomic. Sometimes they don’t know.”

The activity center runs it programs for groups, partnering with youth organizations such as Boys and Girls Clubs, the YMCA and schools, which offer the program at a cost generally much lower than it would be for a family to take a child to a public ski facility and rent equipment, get lessons and lift tickets, etc. The programs run six to nine weeks for one day on weekends or on Tuesdays and Thursdays after school.

The Wayne YMCA is one of the organizations that has sent kids the last couple of years. The majority of kids who attend the program enjoy it, according to Albana Maliqi, site supervisor for the group.

Some kids are so excited they get to the Y as early as possible to wait for the bus and rush eating so they can get out onto the mountain as soon as possible, Maliqi said.

“They really love the program,” she said, adding that when an instructor praises a student they are quick to excitedly tell their parents when they are picked up, clearly proud of their accomplishment.

Out on the mountain in a constant drizzle that day, most of the kids seem to be enjoying themselves and trying hard. The instructors keep it fun – especially for the younger and more inexperienced skiers, who spend some time warming up by walking around in hula hoops to work on balance before clicking their boots into the ski bindings (and being reminded repeatedly that it’s toe-first).

A couple of hours later, at the end of their lesson, the same group takes off their skis, walks up a small incline and makes some snow angels while their instructor points out all the positives and improvement from the day.

Samantha Walter from the Sussex County YMCA is out on the slope with that group, encouraging them as they go. Also part of the program last year, Walter has seen the children not only improve in their skiing skills, but in their attitudes toward trying and in their belief in themselves.

“It builds confidence,” she said.

The afternoon lessons end with generally happy but exhausted kids taking off their equipment and heading upstairs for a well-earned snack before boarding buses for home. Another successful day on the slopes, despite the slightly inclement weather.

Malliet intends for this to be just the beginning, the anchor of a national program.

“We hope to replicate, if not the facility, the program in other places around the country ... maybe 70 to 80 miles from an urban area with a large population of kids, whether urban, rural or suburban, who don’t have access, and to use the program to continue to make a difference.”