Night Film

Trip to Crowthorpe Falls, NY, and The Peak Estate

S. McGrath

April 3 — 13, 2006

The Peak, c. 1912

The Peak

The estate known as The Peak, once a Rockefeller vacation property and designed by the architects Harrison, Taylor, & Woods, sits north of Lows Lake in the wilderness of the Adirondacks in upstate New York.

The nearest town is Crowthorpe Falls, one of the poorest in the region. Mobile home parks, abandoned barns and parking lots, motels, roadhouse saloons, and topless bars comprise the town proper (nicknamed Crow by locals). To make one’s way through Crow to The Peak one must know the area well: Almost all of the roads are unpaved and unmarked.

Stanislas Cordova and his first wife, Genevra, a descendant of the Italian Castagnello family, purchased the property in foreclosure from British aristocrats, Lord and Lady Sludely of Sussex. Shortly after moving in to the estate in 1976, Cordova began the construction of massive soundstages throughout the 300-acre grounds where he could shoot, edit, and sound mix his films without ever leaving the property.

With the termination of his production deal with Warner Bros., Cordova started self-financing his films, turning The Peak into his official one-man studio — and only adding to the mystique of the director as an agoraphobic recluse and madman.

Source: Wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislas_Cordova

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