Jul. 21, 2003 - Electricians and workers in hard hats mingled with guests checking in at the lobby of the Fort William Henry Grand Hotel Friday afternoon. 

Furniture and linens still were being set out in some of the rooms. Painters still were applying the finishing touches in the lobby. And some carpeting still needed to be laid. 

It would be another few days before everything was in place, conceded Robert Flacke, president of Fort William Henry Corp., the owner of the hotel. 

But ready or not, guests were arriving for a busy summer weekend, and the hotel officially cut the ribbon Friday on its $7.1 million renovation and expansion, built to resemble an earlier Fort William Henry Hotel torn down in 1969. 

"No one else has this style or the make-up that we have here, and it all looks like the old hotel," Flacke said. 

The five-story hotel adds 96 suites -- ranging in price from about $110 to $500 a night, depending on the room and season -- to the 99 standard hotel rooms already on site in two separate buildings. The property, 18 acres in all, is on a hill at the south end of the lake. 

That makes it pricier than most of the village's offerings, according to Smith Travel Research, the Hendersonville, Tenn., firm that tracks the lodging industry. The average room rate in Lake George was just above $99 last year. 

The all-suite layout is also rare in the village, which is dotted with hotels, motels and cabins that cater to the summer crowds. 

"The trend in the tourism industry is to build more all-suite hotels, so this will give us a chance to see how it will play out here," said Jason Sherry, executive director of the Lake George/Adirondack Region Convention and Visitors Bureau. 

A Fort William Henry Hotel has stood on the site since the mid-1880s, though the first one burned down around 1909 and the second was torn down six decades later. 

About 85 different contractors and subcontractors worked for eight months to re-create the look of the second hotel -- about 80,000 square feet of new lobby, common space and hotel rooms. 

Friday's ceremony capped what at times had been a controversial project. Some environmental groups questioned the height of the hotel as well as the Adirondack Park Agency's quick approval of it last year -- Flacke is a former chairman of the APA and past commissioner of the state Department of Environmental Conservation. 

After those hurdles were cleared, Warren County and the state amended Empire Zone boundaries to include the project, bringing tax credits and other benefits in return for job creation. 

The expanded hotel has added 50 full-time and 40 seasonal workers, though Flacke said the total is higher when factoring in jobs at other restaurants and shops that Fort William Henry Corp. owns on the site. 

Shortly before the afternoon ribbon-cutting, Flacke was on an upper floor of the hotel, looking out over the lake. Low clouds obscured the tops of the surrounding mountains. 

"It's a world-class view," he said. 

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(c) 2003, Times Union, Albany, N.Y. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.