Origins

The Tailor Who Came at Twenty-Seven

Thomas Buchacek was about twenty-seven when he left Bohemia — then a Czech-speaking crown land of the Austrian Empire, in what is today the Czech Republic — and crossed to America around 1856. He was a tailor, and like most Czech tailors of his generation he found his first work in the needle trades of Manhattan.

In February 1859 he married a young Czech woman named Chernuska in Manhattan. Not long after, the couple went out to the scrub-oak country of Islip Town, to the settlement that would one day take the name Bohemia. They were, as the Brooklyn Daily Times later put it, “among the first there.”

Thomas kept at his trade for another three decades. The family held property on Smithtown Avenue, and in March 1896 the Suffolk County News noted that “Mr. Thomas Buchacek of Islip has moved his furniture here to his cottage on Smithtown Ave. and expects to spend the summer here” — a small item telling us the tailor had by then made his home down in Islip village and kept the Bohemia house as a summer place. Around 1892 he had put down the needle for good and gone to live with his son.

That son had a hotel.

The Orowoc

Proprietor First, Owner After

The Orowoc Hotel opened around 1889–90. The property belonged to George W. Clock, the town’s Excise Commissioner; Frank Buchacek ran the house, as the Suffolk County News later put it, “since it was first opened.” In those early years he had help from his brother-in-law Ernest Johrens, an experienced hotelier in his own right.

Then, in August 1895, Frank bought the place. He purchased from Clock “the hotel and its adjacent buildings and grounds” — the terms were private, but the village understood the figure to be $15,000 — and announced that the house would shortly be remodeled and enlarged. At about thirty-one, the tailor’s son owned outright the best hotel in Islip. Some papers called it the Orowoc House. Everyone in Islip simply called it the Orowoc.

It was not a commercial travelers’ inn. Islip in the 1890s and 1900s sat at the edge of the South Shore estate country, and the Orowoc served the people who came with it. A single week’s guest list from May 1901 gives the flavor: the Zimmermans, Miss Motley, M. L. Bowden Jr., Mr. and Mrs. John D. Adams — who had taken the Milderberger place on Awixa Avenue in Bay Shore for the season — Dunbar B. Adams, the C. F. Hubbses, and E. A. Breecher, all of New York, with a Brooklyn man named Clarence E. Early booking the house for a “social and smoker” later that month. Frank’s obituary would say the hotel was “patronized by numerous well-known families who owned extensive estates in the surrounding country,” and the guest books bear that out. The Brooklyn press called him “one of the best known hotel men and all around caterers on Long Island.”

He was equally rooted in the village’s own institutions. He joined the Islip Fire Department on January 4, 1887 — two years before the hotel opened — as a member of the old Protector Engine Company, which survives today as Engine Company 2. He held a life membership, and long after he stopped running to fires he was carried on the rolls as a privileged member. He was a life member of Meridian Lodge No. 691, F. & A. M., of Islip; of Patchogue Commandery No. 65, Knights Templar; and of Awixa Lodge, I.O.O.F., of Islip.

Fire Island

The Hotel That Was Never Built

The most ambitious thing Frank Buchacek ever attempted, he never finished.

In December 1900 he bought from Sarah A. Nicoll — widow of William Nicoll of Islip — land in the Great South Bay that had been part of the original Nicoll patent granted in the reign of Queen Anne and held by that family ever since. It lay about a mile and a half northeast of the Surf Hotel, the famous house the late D. S. S. Sammis had built and run for years, and it was one of a group of five islands — the “Five Islands” from which, the old papers insisted, Fire Island took its name. He paid something on the order of $2,500.

In January 1901 the Brooklyn Daily Times announced that the proprietor of the Orowoc would build there “a summer hotel during the coming season that will surpass anything of its kind ever erected hereabouts.” By May, Frank had thought better of the schedule: the papers were signed, he said, but the season was too short, and the house — a “day hotel,” with meals served through the day and evening — would be ready early the next year.

It never was. Ten years later he still owned the islands, and the only structure on them was, in one reporter’s phrase, “a crude house for occupancy during the gunning season.”

Then, in March 1911, he sold two of them for $35,000. The buyers — Edward Thompson of Brooklyn and Northport, Edward Lyon of Brooklyn, and Selah T. Clock and Dr. George S. King of Bay Shore — meant to dredge the surrounding water to seven feet, use the spoil to raise the land, and lay out villa plots on some fifty acres. The Brooklyn papers ran the story under a headline that was really the whole point: $32,500 IN TEN YEARS — Islip Hotel Man Makes Good Profit on His South Bay Investment.

The grand Fire Island hotel had never been built. It had simply, quietly, made him rich.

Prohibition

The Dry Law and the Welcome Home Dinner

Prohibition ought to have broken a hotel like the Orowoc. In May 1919 the Brooklyn Eagle reported that Frank Buchacek “believes he has found the solution of the hotel proposition under the ‘dry law.’ He has dispensed with the bar, and has opened a lunch room.”

It was enough. That same month Islip chose the Orowoc for the dinner welcoming home its soldiers and sailors from the Great War — a parade up Main Street beneath a Victory Arch near the Town Hall, dinner at the hotel, and a dance afterward at the fire headquarters. He remained a Bohemia landlord as well: that July, carpenters from Islip were at work on his house on Smithtown Avenue, where the Rudolph Voska family were then living.

The Last Buchacek

Union Cemetery, Bohemia

Frank Buchacek died at Southside Hospital on December 18, 1939, at seventy-five. He never married.

He left two sisters, Mary Johrens and Minnie Gleichmann, both of Mineola, and three nephews and a niece. His estate came to a little over $500 in personal property and more than $5,000 in real property; he left the furniture of the Locust Avenue house to his sisters, and divided the rest among them and his Nohowec niece and nephew, “both formerly of Bohemia.”

Fraternal services were held at the Overton Funeral Home in Islip, religious services the following morning. He was buried in Union Cemetery in Bohemia — the village his father helped begin.

A Note on the Record

The Grover Cleveland Story

One story about the hotel has been repeated in Islip for generations: that President Grover Cleveland stayed at the Orowoc while fishing at the nearby South Side Sportsmen’s Club.

It is a fine tradition, and it may well be true. But the Society has not yet found a contemporary source for it, and the club maintained its own lodging on the Connetquot — so we pass it along as local memory rather than established fact. If anyone can point us to a newspaper account or a hotel register, we would very much like to see it.