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Grand hotel

When he bought the vacant Mountain View hotel, Kevin Craffey planned to reopen it in a few months. But reviving the New Hampshire landmark has proved tougher than he thought.

NEW HAMPSHIRE'S OLDEST hotel was the last thing on Kevin Craffey's mind in 1998. He was looking for a summer home on Martha's Vineyard, an oceanfront retreat for his family. But then he happened onto a newspaper article about the Mountain View House, a 200-room grande dame in Whitefield, 20 miles from North Conway.

The hotel, vacant since 1985, was for sale, listed at $1.3 million. The buyer would get 360 acres, a nine-hole golf course (still in use), a clubhouse, a conference hall, and carriage houses as well as the vast main building. To Craffey, a Duxbury, Massachusetts, resident who owns two contracting firms in Hanover, that sounded like a deal worth a second look.

Craffey was also smitten by the hotel's architectural beauty and its history. For more than a century, the Mountain View had been run by members of one family, the Dodges, who began their career as innkeepers literally by accident. On a cold, rainy night in 1865, a stagecoach overturned near William and Mary Dodge's small farmhouse. The stranded passengers stayed for only a few days, but several were enchanted with their refuge, and they urged the Dodges to expand their 1-story Cape to make room for more guests.

By 1891, the family had transformed its humble homestead into a stately three-story sprawl adorned with a medley of period details. Among its most striking additions were a two-story piazza, a Colonial Revival pavilion, and spired observatory towers that offer breathtaking views of the jagged crests of Mount Washington and the Presidential Range - the views that gave the hotel its name.

In its heyday, the Mountain View played host to a long list of Hollywood celebrities and political dignitaries, including Groucho Marx, Mary Pickford, and President Dwight D. Eisenhower. But the luster faded in the 1970s, as a shortage of gasoline and tourists took its toll, and finally the Dodges sold out.

In the ensuing years, owners with plans came and went. Some tried to revive the hotel; others had grander ideas, such as knocking down the Mountain View to build a boys' prep school. But in 1987, the bank foreclosed on the property and locked it up.

Craffey was confident, though, that he could succeed where others had failed. He had never been an innkeeper, but he had worked in construction since high school; he had even been hired, at 17, as the carpentry steward of Fenway Park. Now, at 34, he was the owner of Craffey & Co., a general contracting firm, and K & J Interiors, a subcontracting company. The businesses were based in Massachusetts but had done work as far away as Los Angeles, where Craffey built a $7 million mega surf shop. He would buy the hotel, he figured, and use his own crew to restore the picturesque antique, financing the work with a combination of state aid and bank loans. It would be his biggest venture ever, costing around $12 million in all. Then he would run the hotel and maybe even move there someday.

Craffey's wife, Joanne, his high school sweetheart and first business partner, saw the appeal of the Mountain View, despite her doubts. "I remember my first time driving to the hotel," she says, just after Kevin had signed the purchase-and-sale agreement in 1998. "It was November, it was hunting season, and there was nobody around. I wondered what he was getting us into." Then, she says, "when I actually saw the Mountain View House, I was just overcome with how beautiful it was. I could envision the people in their long gowns and hats back in its glory days. I knew if anyone could bring it back, it was Kevin."

As timeworn as the hotel was, its grand spaces - the Federal-style library, tea room, octagonal dining hall, and spacious lobby, where a wall of wooden mail slots still held old letters - made it easy to envision it as a thriving enterprise. So easy, in fact, that when Craffey closed on the purchase of the Mountain View, in December 1998, he planned to open it the following Fourth of July.

Kevin Craffey soon found that carrying out his grand ambitions wouldn't be quite that easy. No bank would touch the renovation deal: Loan officers said refurbishing an over-the-hill, "outdated destination resort" was too risky. There was no guarantee, they said, that if he rebuilt it, the tourists would come.

Thinking that if others showed some confidence in the restoration, the banks would change their mind, Craffey went to the town of Whitefield and asked for a property-tax waiver, forgiving taxes on the hotel during the period of reconstruction. The town fathers would have been happy to oblige - they were eager to see the hotel reborn - but it turned out that the New Hampshire Constitution didn't allow such waivers.

But Craffey persisted in his campaign. Until then, his only experience with New England's north country had been skiing Loon Mountain with his mother, but this was his neighborhood now, too, and he needed help. "I went to Wal-Mart and bought a flannel shirt, then I grew a beard," says Craffey. When the beard was ready, in late January 1999, he paid a visit to state lawmakers in Concord. He doled out a half-dozen coffees from Dunkin' Donuts, listened to fishing stories from the group of white-haired politicians in a State House conference room, and eventually, in the spring of 1999, won a constitutional amendment granting the Mountain View a tax waiver. Written to apply only to the restoration of historic hotels with 200 rooms or more, the waiver lifted the hotel's annual $1 million in

property taxes for the next five years.

Still, the banks wouldn't budge on lending money for the restoration. So Craffey went to the state Department of Resources and Economic Development, asking for $1 million in combined loans and grants to the town of Whitefield to allow it to install sewer lines to the hotel. He had to keep trying - he even camped outside the commissioner's door for a day - but finally got the money. There was just one problem. The town, fearing it would have to pay back the money if Craffey failed, didn't want to accept it.

Craffey knew he could change the minds of Whitefield's 1,900 citizens only by having someone they trusted assure them that there was no risk in accepting the money. So he set up a town meeting and brought in Jeff Taylor, executive director of New Hampshire's Office of State Planning, the agency that would issue the grant. Taylor didn't have to say anything complicated, he recalls. He had worked for 12 years as the town planner in nearby Berlin, so he knew people in Whitefield. "I wasn't just a flatlander bureaucrat coming up from Concord or a flatlander coming up from Massachusetts, because that's even worse," he says. "I could give them an explanation that didn't sound like it was coming out of a federal regulation manual."

The personal assurances seemed to satisfy the townspeople, but the Whitefield Board of Selectmen threw up another roadblock. They were concerned, said the selectmen - a schoolteacher, an arrow maker, and a postman - about a potential liability from the Mountain View's 72-year-old water tower. "What if it falls and hits some kid on the head?" one selectman demanded. Craffey offered them an indemnity clause, accepting all liability in case of an accident, but that wouldn't do. He finally won them over when he agreed to replace the water tower with an underground storage tank.

There was one more source of government funds: Craffey persuaded the New Hampshire Community Development Finance Authority to pledge $2 million in tax credits to help the hotel. In New Hampshire, the state funds development by selling tax credits through a nonprofit economic organization; companies that buy them get a credit of 75 percent of the amount on their annual business tax returns. A for-profit business is not eligible to receive tax credit funds, but Craffey persuaded the finance agency to pledge them to a local nonprofit economic council that could legally distribute the proceeds to benefit the hotel's development

Joanne Craffey had been holding down the fort at the couple's home in Duxbury with their two young children, Felicia and Nicholas. Their third, Juliet, was due the coming winter. Joanne was beginning to wonder if Kevin was in over his head. "I was concerned that he didn't know how to let go" and sell the place, she says. "To be honest, I was terrified."

But now, in September 1999, Craffey had $4 million in owner's equity, and the banks were finally interested. Citizens Bank in North Conway was sending some of its executives to take a look at the hotel. Craffey would have to persuade them that the Mountain View, once restored, could be a moneymaker.

Craffey nervously prepared for the all-important meeting. He had already spent nearly $1 million fixing up a section of the hotel's east wing, but he worried it wouldn't be enough to win the bankers over. Still, he needed a way to show them the hotel's potential, a sort of sneak preview of what he envisioned. So, on the big day, he went into Whitefield and rustled up some townsfolk to play the merrymaking patrons at the hotel's clubhouse.

Among them was realtor Frank Mai, who remembers that there were "at least 10 or 12 bankers there. I had my ear on their table, if you know what I mean; they were very involved in their conversation. Anyone with half a brain who walked into that room could've seen [that] whatever they were talking about, they had a deep interest."

The plan seemed to be working. After leading the bankers past the hotel's lobby and through its massive halls, Craffey showed them into the Mountain View's grand library, where the shelves were filled with books he had had his father-in-law fetch at a penny sale at the Randolph, Massachusetts, Public Library. There the bankers sat in their Martha Washington armchairs, feasting on coconut shrimp, and there Mike Kirk, the bank's vice president, told Craffey the deal looked promising.

A few days later, Kirk told Craffey he would have a decision by Friday. When the day came, Craffey "guarded those phones like a junkyard dog," recalls Jim Conathan, who had recently been hired as the hotel's project manager. "It was pins and needles all day; no one could call in or call out." Citizens Bank, however, didn't call that Friday. It never called at all. Kirk acknowledges the meetings and conversations he had with Craffey, but he won't discuss anything specific about the Mountain View deal, explaining only that hotels are a risky investment. "You can't say with any level of confidence, 'I'm going to sell $9 million worth of rooms,' " he says.

After hearing of the Mountain View's latest letdown, New Hampshire's governor, Jeanne Shaheen, phoned Craffey and offered to organize a bank summit for him.

A month later, in March 2000, at another luncheon at the hotel, three small New Hampshire banks - including Siwoogancock Guaranty Savings, the state's smallest bank - came forward with the needed loans. Just 20 days later, Craffey had a commitment letter from all three institutions. But success still eluded him. The bank financing was conditional on the sale of the tax credits, and with only four weeks to go till the deadline for the first installment of the credit sales, the North Country Council, the agency that was handling them, hadn't managed a single dollar's worth.

But Craffey pushed on. If he personally could sell the first $300,000 worth of the credits, that would keep the loan afloat. So he put his best sales skills forward: "I begged," he says. Craffey tapped into what he knew best - the construction business. He called every supplier he'd ever done business with in New Hampshire: hardware stores, paint shops, lumberyards. He even called makers of tennis and golf balls, promising them future business at his resort in exchange for some much-needed help now.

And in a scene right out of the Christmas classic It's a Wonderful Life, Whitefield locals came forward to buy what tax credits they could. "I really couldn't afford it," says Bob Stiles, 65, who pledged $10,000 in the name of his small home heating fuel company. But, he notes, "I lost 20 percent of my business when the hotel closed. Kevin's got his share of skeptics, but I'm not one of them." Sure enough, Craffey's perseverance paid off, and in just two weeks' time, he had sold the $300,000 in tax credits and saved his hotel once again.

But in November 2000, as winter took hold in the White Mountains, Craffey learned you can be snowed under on the sunniest of days.

The already overburdened North Country Council suddenly lost its director, leaving it too understaffed to market the remaining $1.7 million in tax credits. The Office of State Planning, in a final effort to help Craffey, gave him a $20,000 grant and even a state employee to help sell the credits himself. But $1.7 million was too much for even the indefatigable Craffey to sell in such a short time. Finally, says Craffey, he felt beaten. He shut down his provisional sales office, issued a press release announcing he had lost his fight to save the hotel, and went back to his home in Duxbury to tell his family the bad news.

"My daughter walked up to me and punched me in the stomach," recalls Craffey. "She said, 'Daddy, that's my castle, and you said winners don't quit.' " It was a mantra he had instilled all too well in Felicia, but one he couldn't live up to himself - not this time.

A few days later, eager to get out of the office and away from everything that reminded him of his failed dream, Craffey was on a commercial flight heading for Los Angeles in late December to check on one of his company's construction projects. But he couldn't get his daughter's words out of his mind. So he did something bizarre. "He stood up on the plane and began telling passengers about some historic hotel in northern New Hampshire," recalls Belmont resident Mark McVay, a former adviser for the Boston Consulting Group, who was sitting just behind Craffey on the flight.

After talking a bit to McVay, he enlisted five passengers for their advice. They were a national sales representative, a housewife, a Web site designer, an accountant, and a secretary - a group Craffey would later dub the Delta 5. In the back of the DC-10, with dark skies all around and drinks in hand, compliments of Craffey, the five strangers debated whether Craffey should go back to Whitefield and try one more time to save the hotel. They decided to take a vote. "I promised, no matter what, I would honor the results," says Craffey.

Several hours after the plane touched down in LA, Craffey was on a charter flight headed east to the Whitefield Airport. The vote had been 3 to 2 - in favor of one more try.

So Craffey returned to his makeshift command post inside his cold, rundown, vacant hotel, and tried "not to turn into Jack Nicholson in The Shining," he remembers.

Craffey knew it was time to aim for the long shots. He hadn't yet gone to the manufacturers of drywall, a building material his company used tons of. Now he phoned the two biggest companies, and one of them - National Gypsum, which sells 6 billion square feet of drywall a year - called back and left a message.

Before returning the call, Craffey worked on the pitch he was about to make, even writing a script and practicing it on the hotel clubhouse's general manager. But as it turned out, eloquence was beside the point. Craffey had gotten lucky again. The man who had left the message was Mo Dichard, the sales manager for National Gypsum's Northeast headquarters in Danbury, Connecticut, and he knew the Mountain View very, very well: Some 20 years earlier, when he had worked as a golf pro, Dichard had won one of his most treasured titles by breaking the hotel's course record, with a score of 62 that hasn't been beaten since.

"When I called [Craffey] back and got the recording - 'Thank you for calling the Mountain View' - I thought, gee, maybe somebody wants me to come back to the golf business," says Dichard. A few days later, National Gypsum bought the remaining $1.7 million in tax credits. The Mountain View was saved.

Craffey had a long list of people to notify, including the governor. But at the top, ahead of all the VIPs, was his daughter Felicia. When he gave her the news, she dropped the phone and went into a fit of utter jubilation. After her mother calmed her down, she got back on the phone and asked, with the presence of a seasoned opportunist, "Daddy, will you name the ballroom the Felicia Rose Ballroom?"

Craffey now has the full $12.6 million it will take to bring the Mountain View back to its glory days. Appropriately enough, he also has the plaque recording Dichard's golf triumph: A few weeks after the National Gypsum deal went through, he found it under a pile of guest receipts in the conference center.

Both Craffeys admit the process put a strain on their marriage at times. "There's been laughter and tears," says Joanne. "There have been times where I wanted to say, 'Just forget this place.' But when I actually met the people of Whitefield and learned of all these wonderful and different connections they had with the hotel, I knew Kevin was doing the right thing."

Craffey has continued his creative search for unconventional sources of help. William Zinsser & Co. sent four wallpaper experts from New Jersey in November after Craffey called to tell the company that the six to eight layers of wallpaper on the walls of the Mountain View's 200 rooms could land the firm in The Guinness Book of World Records for the most wallpaper removed. The company, which makes specialty paint and wallcovering products, was so taken with the grand inn that it came back this winter to make an ad of the first field test of its new gel spray wallpaper remover.

Craffey also has some luxuries in mind for Mountain View's guests, including a full-time elevator operator and a marriage proposal table for two, with its own waiter, in the main tower. He hopes to open the restored hotel on May 1, 2002, followed by a celebration on Memorial Day weekend. And yes, the colossal ballroom, with its gleaming maple floors, double doors, and massive columns, will be renamed the Felicia Rose.