for children operated by the Society of Little Mothers. The barn adjoining the mansion burned down in a fire in approximately 1890, and was abandoned by the early 20th century. By the early 1900s, Hunter Island had become a popular summer vacation destination, and it hosted a campsite. The Hunter House had been renovated into a hotel. In 1903, due to overcrowding on Hunter Island, NYC Parks opened another campsite at Rodman's Neck on the south tip of the island, with 100 bathhouses. By 1917, Hunter Island saw half a million seasonal visitors. The park's condition started to decline in the 1920s as the surrounding areas were developed. Hunter Island became popular with European immigrants who built shelters and established summer colonies. This led to the island being closed and camping banned, but was unsuccessful at preventing the beachgoers from returning. Upon taking office in 1934, New York City parks commissioner Robert Moses surveyed every park in the city. Moses devised plans for a new Orchard Beach recreation area after he saw the popularity of the Hunter Island campsite. At the time, the beach was a narrow sand bar connecting Hunter Island and Rodman's Neck. Moses canceled 625 leases for the project, and after campers unsuccessfully sued the city, the site was cleared of campers in June. Moses decided to connect Hunter Island and the Twin Islands to Rodman's Neck by filling in most of LeRoy's Bay, a lagoon located to the west of the island. The deteriorated Hunter Mansion was demolished in 1937 with the construction of the beach. The expanded Orchard Beach was opened on June 25, 1937. In the 1960s, there were plans to expand a landfill in Pelham Bay Park, which would have created the City's second-largest refuse disposal site next to Fresh Kills in Staten Island. A group of preservationists headed by Dr. Theodore Kazimiroff, a Bronx historian and head of the Bronx Historical Society, lobbied the city to create a wildlife preserve in Hunter Island, one of the sites where the landfill was proposed to be expanded. The preservation effort suffered setbacks in August 1967 when the New York City Board of Estimate voted against an initial effort to create the protected area in the proposed landfill expansion site. On October 11, 1967, Mayor John Lindsay signed a law authorizing in the creation of two wildlife refuges in Pelham Bay Park: the Thomas Pell