The operations prospectus reflected more than the desires of Superintendent Leavitt and the park staff. In a letter to NPS Director Newton B. Drury, the concession company’s vice-president, R.L. Kron, expressed “complete surprise” at Drury’s pronouncement that:
any new concession contract for operations in this area shall contain the condition that accommodations for the visiting public are to be provided in a new structure, or structures, erected on a site, or sites, to be selected, which will be some distance from the Crater Rim, and that the now existing Crater Lake Lodge will be razed. [42]
Drury’s statement reflected some long-standing problems that the NPS was having with the concessioners, particularly with regard to the lack of adequate fire safety measures in the Crater Lake Lodge. Although visitor complaints of this nature had begun as early as 1916, Director Drury and several inspectors accused concessioners Price and Kron of stalling in their compliance with fire safety requirements. [43] Price claimed that the company could not afford installation of an automatic sprinkler system in the lodge. In June 1947, Secretary of the Interior Julius Krug issued an order limiting occupancy of the lodge to the first and second floors. [44] After an urgent plea based on reservation commitments made for the 1947 season and Price’s assurances that special interim fire protection measures were to be undertaken, Krug allowed operation of the lodge to resume on the condition that fire protection requirements be met for the 1948 season.[45]
Price attempted to sell the concession in early 1948 to a prospective buyer who would then have to make the fire safety improvements stipulated by the NPS. Some of these measures were undertaken after the sale fell through so that the lodge could open for the summer, but the order closing the third floor remained in effect. When Krug found out that the concession was using the third floor to house employees, he threatened Price with cancellation of the contract. [46] A compromise that allowed guest and employee occupancy on the third floor of the annexes was reached in August upon recommendation of Frank Ahern, NPS Chief of Safety. [47]
The compromise did not change the conviction of many people in the NPS that the lodge would be at the end of its useful life as public accommodations in 1960. Rather than raze the building and restore the site, there was some interest during the late 1940s in an adapted structure that would house public contact functions, a museum, and NPS offices. [48] By utilizing the masonry walls of the lodge to develop a two-story building, the problems with securing sufficient appropriations for a visitor center might be lessened.
Most of the improvements and fire safety measures that saved the concession operation in 1948 were due to the efforts of Price’s son-in-law, C.W. Fyock. [49] By 1950, however, the structural deficiencies of the lodge’s Great Hall section were so obvious that it was necessary to add wooden columns for reinforcement of the overloaded laminated beams. [50] After attaching a transformer vault onto the lodge to remedy a fire hazard, the NPS decided to fund a structural survey and condition report on the lodge by N.W. Haner and Associates of Portland. Completed in 1953, the Haner Report recommended rehabilitation of the lodge rather than its replacement. It stated that if the rehabilitation measures were carried out, the building’s useful life as public accommodations would be extended upwards of 20 years. [51]
Price decided not to invest the $72,000 that the Haner Report recommended be spent on the lodge in order to extend its life. Instead, he sold the concession to Harry W. and Harry C. Smith in 1954. Although the Smiths were to implement very few of the rehabilitation measures that the Haner Report recommended, they did some renovation and planned an addition to the dining room for the 1955 season. [52] The expanded dining room did not materialize, but the new
