The North Hero House Inn & Restaurant
The North Hero House
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The North Hero House Inn & Restaurant
About the Memoir
About the Memoir
From Seven Days Vermont's Independent Voice
Modern Vermont Innkeeping: A Memoir, a Modern Family, and 26 Years of Unexpected Adventures at the North Hero House
Walter Blasberg, Onion River Press, 250 pages. $24.95.
When he opened the door to the rear room, it was filled with smoke.
There was a whole lot of orange shag carpet to rip up when Walter Blasberg, a summer resident of the Champlain Islands with a successful investment management career, bought the North Hero House in 1997. Replacing it was a small part of the structural upgrade and complete redecoration he then embarked on — all of which was almost derailed by a fire in the third-story eaves the month before reopening.
Blasberg sold the lakeside lodging and its two associated restaurants on North Hero’s main drag in 2022. Modern Vermont Innkeeping, a memoir written in retirement, recounts the property’s history as well as his own later-in-life coming-out story. Like black shale tossed across the lake from the inn’s Steamship Pier, Blasberg skips gracefully from one recollection to another. The result is conversational, as though Blasberg is welcoming a guest at the inn, handing over a dose of local color along with the room key.
— Jordan Barry