Lake Placid ECACs dining, drinking, lodging

Notes on ECAC hockey tournament. This is general info as of 2019. See below for additional 2020 info.

There was a short term - Friday afternoon [of ECAC quarterfinals weekend] starting around 3 pm - downward blip in hotel prices in Lake Placid for a couple places right on Main Street downtown. Some let you cancel as late as midweek. If you can get a room within walking distances of the Olympic Center, you have greater flexibility in how much you can eat and, I suppose, drink.

[edit add] Lake Placid is a small town of 2,250 (not even one-tenth the size of Ithaca), so an event that fills Herb Brooks Arena stresses the town. It's 250 miles from Ithaca and Boston, 290 from New York City. If you don't have a room yet, good luck. There was still some lodging available Thursday, the day before. Attendance is helped by Clarkson being one of the semifinalists but for Clarkson alumni still in Potsdam (why?), it can be a 70-mile day trip without a stay-over, so maybe that's why a couple rooms are still available.

The majority of what visitors do is all on Main Street. Main Street runs North-South and it's 6/10 of a mile from the the rink at the south end to the last major hotel / bar on the north (red tint on map). Plenty of bars, restaurants, T-shirt shops.

At the south end, of note:
* Lake Placid Olympic Center & Herb Brooks arena (one of three inside), 2634 Main St, Lake Placid, NY 12946. Use this for your GPS. If you are driving straight to the game, just park where the state cops or rink workers point. It's free and at most a five-minute uphill walk.
* Just south of the rink is Lake Placid HS and the 1932 and 1980 Olympic speed skating oval.
* Just south of that is Wiseguys Sports Bar & Grill, 11 School Street. Lots of TVs, decent food (the upstairs part). This may be the best place to meet up after the game because it's easy to move about. ECAC officials often dine there after the game. This being a small town, you should be polite no matter how bad the call was.
* Just off Main Street on Mirror Lake Drive is the Lake Placid Brewery & Pub, a large, low-ceiling bar on the ground floor, finer (for LP) dining upstairs. Pretty decent food, excellent beers.

Along Main Street north of the rink there are plenty of bars.
* The last big one (at north end of Main) is the Dancing Bear in the High Peaks Resort (end of the red-tinted part of the street).
* Two bars with live music along Main Street: Delta Blue (on the left side walking up Main) and Smoke Signals (right, or lake, side).
* Excellent sandwiches at Big Mountain Deli & Creperie, but only until 3 pm.
* Great Adirondack Brewing Co. and Great Adirondack Steak and Seafood Co. (don't ask what the URL is) has served pretty decent food for a couple decades.
* Pizza, Mexican, and Asian fare fairly cheap.
There are plenty of others, most of them acceptable. Some are a little slow on service but they'd just say they want you to enjoy your meal. (You only think Ithaca is small-town New York.) A couple places hire eastern European staff to reduce costs (even if Lake Placid is one place where local kids want to work for min wage) and as you know, customer-friendly is not uppermost in mind. A couple summers back, we asked for a pizza half plain, half sausage and were told by someone who looked like Melania's younger sister, "not possible."

Not quite on the main part of Main Street but worth the trek:
* Downtown Diner (until 2pm), 2278 Main, 3 blocks south of the rink. Really good breakfast fare. Ran into Andy Iles' grandparents there a couple years back. (Walkable if you're staying downtown.)
* Saranac Sourdough, 2126 Saranac Ave (also called Sara-Placid Road), great sandwiches until 4 pm. Think Ithaca Bakery only funkier. I asked last summer if there's a discount for wearing a MAGA hat and the proprietor said, "Yes. If you make it out the door alive." Best place to get sandwiches for the ride home Sunday (less of a line than Big Mountain Deli).
* Lisa G's, 6125 Sentinel Rd, closes 10 pm, pretty good restaurant also a bar, great outdoor view of the pond and millrace if this were July.

Also:
* You can skate and play pond hockey on Mirror Lake at the southern end where it says Public Beach. There's also a tobaggan run (fee) that spills onto the lake. Weather depending.
* Cornell Uihlein Maple Research Forest, 157 Bear Cub Lane, Lake Placid, tours are available (518-523-9337) and this is the best time of year, also the busiest. You can buy maple syrup. Also maple lumber.
* The drive to the top of Whiteface Mountain provides a view all the way to Canada. Scratch that; it's closed for the winter.
* The Olympic Center also has a smallish, quaint Olympic museum. (Fee.)
* There's an excellent bookstore, The Bookstore Plus, on Main. New books.

If you wear a Cornell hat or sweatshirt in the north country, especially with Cornell's Uihlein Maple Research presence, you are an honored presence. Wear a Harvard cap in a seedier part of Allston or Brighton and people think, "twit," do the same with a Cornell garment in Essex County and people smile and think, "Good. He made something of himself." Wear a CALS cap and they might even invite you to milk one of the cows. Just make sure you know the difference, cow vs. bull. Either you get trampled or you've made a friend for life.

If you just want to come up for Saturday's title game, rooms should be available, and keep trying. Very close to the rink:
* Crown Plaza, great hilltoip view, better than the name Crown Plaza might imply.
* Hotel Northwoods, on the upper floors above what looks like a biker bar. Great place. In midtown NYC or on the Boston waterfront, they'd tag you $600 a night.
* Hampton Inn, only 2 years old, in pretty good shape.
* Golden Arrow, on the lake side of Main Street, gets a lot of wear and tear from the youth hockey teams that stay there. But it's good enough.
* High Peaks Resort at the north end of town.
* Mirror Lake Inn, one black past north end of town, old / romantic / quaint

Out of town a couple miles, the High Peaks Resort is costly but has a spa so if you need to bribe your partner to get her/him to come, try this.

So glad that you're starting this thread for people who are PROBABLY GOING TO GO WHETHER OR NOT CORNELL IS THERE.

As it turns out the thread wasn't a jinx. Sure felt like one 48 hours ago...

We should organize an alcohol-friendly post-game rendezvous for Friday.

Notes for 2020 for any ECAC fan planning to attend.

The ECAC tournament is Friday March 20, highest & lowest seeds play 4 pm, middle seeds play 7:30 pm. Title game Saturday 7:30 pm. No consolation game. You can leave the building between games with a handstamp. Tickets are $40, $60 for both days, less for students and OK Boomers. Building holds 8,000, which Cornell and Clarkson would almost fill. Game and ticket info: [www.ecachockey.com]

I posted last March (2019) a long screed on dining, drinking and lodging. Not a lot has changed. To orient yourself: Lake Placid's Main Street runs north-south, the Olympic Complex (with the rink) is at the south end near the high school and post office. The busy part of Main Street with shops-restaurants is the half-mile north of the rink ending at the High Peaks Resort. As you walk into town the lake to your right is Mirror Lake. The business district in town in just the one street. (Lake Placid is one-tenth the population of Ithaca.) There are also restaurants / bars radiating out south and east from the Olympic Center.


For dining I like, close to rink:
Lake Placid Pub & Brewery, excellent beers (their own), good food.
Wiseguys Sports Bar, spacious, decent food for a sports bar, pretty friendly. This is where the LP hockey people (CanAm camp) hang out. If Cornell plays early game Friday, you could get dinner here and be back in time game 2. At the LP brewpub you might miss the first period. For both, walk out of the rink to Main Street, turn right, when you reach the outdoor speed skating oval, turn left onto Mirror Lake Drive for the LP brewpub, go past the oval and turn right for Wiseguys.
Also:
* Big Mountain Deli, middle of Main Street, excellent sandwiches, but closes 3 pm. The menu can be overwhelming to parse but, damn, man, you're an Ivy Leaguer.
* Downtown Diner is the classic diner Ithaca no longer has. Nice breakfast. On Main Street a block beyond Wise Guys.
* Lisa G's, a 3-5 minute drive from the rink has always been good.
Otherwise, most every other LP Main Street restaurant is okay-to-better-than-good.
* The High Peaks Inn if the weather is climate-change-mild, has some outdoor drinking terraces, nice for hanging out. My wife's ancestors once owned that land pre WWI but we're not getting royalties now, alas.
In summer a lot of places bring in international staff from countries where there is no native-language equivalent of 'customer service,' but this is less a problem. I mention this only because our server told us a large pizza, half pepperoni/half plain "is not possible."

For lodging, see last year's report on this same thread. I think you can find decent hotel or AirBnB within walking distance of the downtown that's affordable if you're earning the kind of money Cornell prepared you to do. If you're a student, find a motel outside downtown, bring extra sleeping bags. If you're staying out of town and drank too much, there are rideshares and taxis. The bars will help you find a ride because they worry about liability. Not long ago - okay, during the 1980 Olympics - a 1932 Olympian was hit and killed by a DUI driver who got off because the state police under Olympics duress and 80 hour workweeks messed up the blood draw.

There is one new hotel for 2020, close to the rink, the Lake Placid Inn Boutique Hotel, next to the LP brewpub and the next newest hotel, the Hampton Inn. Priced like its name sounds.

The town library is a quiet place to hang out and there's a reading / laptop room leaning out almost onto Mirror Lake. Also on the middle of Main Street.

Late night there are a couple places with live music.

I know it's woofing if you book now and Cornell hasn't yet gotten by the best-of-three at-home series, but you should get better selection / maybe better lodging prices and for some hotels it's refundable. But jeez, if there's any year since 2003 when Cornell should be in the ECAC final rounds, this is it.


GETTING THERE
You can use for GPS:
Herb Brooks Arena
Lake Placid Olympic Center
Lake Placid High School or Lake Placid Post Office (both adjacent) or just use
Lake Placid, NY (it's not that big) or
2634 Main St, Lake Placid, NY 12946 (arena exact address)

Don't waste time trying to park perfectly close. If you're shunted to a side road, it is to a free parking lot and it is at most a 5 minute walk to the rink. The map icons make it look as if the rink is set back but it's right up against Main Street. Will-call and day of game tickets are in a trailer outside. My recollection of the arena is prohibited-object search is casual and friendly but maybe that's a function of age. Beer/wine is sold inside. With a hand stamp, after the first period you can go out/in between games. It's as if Lake Placid really is glad you came to spend money.

You can skate on Mirror Lake, even play pickup hockey, if the ice is still solid. The first week of spring it couild be anywhere from 0 degrees overnight to 50 in the daytime.

Saranac Lake is only seven miles down the road From Lake Placid.

osorojo
Saranac Lake is only seven miles down the road From Lake Placid.

And Saranac is bigger, 5,300 vs. 2,500, so that's more possibilities for lodging. Cute little winter carnival in Saranac the day after the Clarkson game a year ago. Also there's the motels around Whiteface Mountain, availability improves if it's a poor weekend for skiing, and 10 miles away.

There's a great toy store in Saranac and in a bid to drift this thread I'll mention that I learned about Syracuse's own HiOnFi at that fine establishment.

I wore the right T shirt. Just what is life without drifting?

One additional thing: There is also a Can-Am youth hockey tournament that same weekend (as there has been the past few years). That means there will be more demand on rooms and parking.

And a suggestion, if you are interested in booking a room, try to book directly with the hotel (or hotel chain) rather than a booking consolidator website (e.g. Booking.com). In the unfortunate event that we lose on Friday, if you've booked with the hotel, you can likely get a refund on Saturday night if you decide not to stay for the championship. If you book with a consolidator, that money gets spent when you check in. Not sure how this works with a locally owned hotel, but my instinct is that for those hotels you're a wallet to be milked, and they'd be loathe to refund the second night.

Jeff Hopkins '82
And a suggestion, if you are interested in booking a room, try to book directly with the hotel (or hotel chain) rather than a booking consolidator website (e.g. Booking.com). In the unfortunate event that we lose on Friday, if you've booked with the hotel, you can likely get a refund on Saturday night if you decide not to stay for the championship. If you book with a consolidator, that money gets spent when you check in. Not sure how this works with a locally owned hotel, but my instinct is that for those hotels you're a wallet to be milked, and they'd be loathe to refund the second night.

Thank you.

Jeff Hopkins '82
One additional thing: There is also a Can-Am youth hockey tournament that same weekend (as there has been the past few years). That means there will be more demand on rooms and parking.

And a suggestion, if you are interested in booking a room, try to book directly with the hotel (or hotel chain) rather than a booking consolidator website (e.g. Booking.com). In the unfortunate event that we lose on Friday, if you've booked with the hotel, you can likely get a refund on Saturday night if you decide not to stay for the championship. If you book with a consolidator, that money gets spent when you check in. Not sure how this works with a locally owned hotel, but my instinct is that for those hotels you're a wallet to be milked, and they'd be loathe to refund the second night.

We've almost always stayed at the Golden Arrow. A couple of years ago we did decide to leave early, due to a loss. They did fill the room. We didn't get a refund, but did get a credit, which we used the next year.