“Each year the largest properties would unveil their latest gadget or gimmick to lure patrons back for the following season,” says Conway, the best example of which was the advent of the indoor pool. The hotels were, for a couple of decades, truly magnificent, but Conway insists, “It was all built upon smoke and mirrors.” Behind the resorts’ veneer, unbeknownst to its guests, was a vicious game of one-upmanship that escalated with each passing summer. The action takes place at the fictitious Kellerman’s, an idyllic world of holiday bliss, which, according to Conway, was “inspired by the real-life Catskills resorts like Grossinger’s.” Sullivan County’s summertime influence on American sports and entertainment become such an important fixture in society that several films were created about the era, most notably Dirty Dancing, the wildly popular 1980s movie starring Jennifer Grey as the daughter of a wealthy Jewish family, and Patrick Swayze as a working-class dance instructor. “Wilt Chamberlain quite famously spent some time in the mountains, working as a bellboy during the day and playing ball on the resort’s team in the evenings,” says Conway. Basketball matches were orchestrated for entertainment purposes, and entire NCAA teams would take up residence at the different estates to hone their craft during the extended interim between semesters. ![]() Sports, too, were an important part of the kingdoms of the Catskills. These summer havens were the training grounds for future television and film stars, and, as Conway explains, “It was the Saturday Night Live of its time, spawning the great entertainers of the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s-it was the Catskills’ Golden Era.” Even after the proliferation of TV, the major resorts would lure big-ticket names like Joan Rivers and Rodney Dangerfield for a night of laughs. Thousand-person theaters sprung up, and the casts of resident entertainers, which included the likes of Milton Berle (né Mendel Berlinger), Sid Caesar (né Isaac Ziser), and Alan King (né Irwin Kniberg), were largely credited with birthing American comedy as we know it today. In the Catskills they could eat kosher food, spend time with their extended families, and engage in the very American practice of vacationing, a pastime that didn’t exist in the Old Country.Īs the popularity of these Jewish resorts continued to grow, many of the estates expanded to epic proportions, eschewing the appeal of the surrounding nature in favor of becoming a beached version of the modern-day cruise ship, offering everything anyone would need under one roof. The sliver of Sullivan County that the newspapers dubbed the “Borscht Belt” was a haven for Jewish immigrants who were turned away from other holiday destinations. “By the 1920s the rise of big hotels took the Catskills by storm, almost all of which were exclusively Jewish.” ![]() But Grossinger wasn’t alone, Conway notes. He bought a farm for $750, and quickly realized there was more money in renting rooms to summer boarders than there was in tilling the land.Īfter a fruitful year (earning $81 total) he expanded his enterprise. In 1914, Selig Grossinger, a Jewish immigrant living in New York, moved his family to the Catskills in an attempt to cure his health issues caused by urban life. John Conway, the official Sullivan County historian, adjunct professor at SUNY Sullivan-and author of six books including Remembering the Sullivan County Catskills-dates the start of tourism in the Catskills to well before the Civil War, when tales of mammoth trout lured sport fishermen up to the region. ![]() Walking through the haunting wreckage-thirsty swimming pools filled with garbage, and rows of hotel towers tagged by vandals-it’s almost impossible to believe that area was one of the most important vacation destinations in America for well over a century. Sullivan County once boasted 538 hotels and over 50,000 bungalows, but today practically nothing remains of this illustrious, vacationing era, save crumbling towers and abandoned estates. Neglected for years, and abandoned in seconds, it’s like a modern-day Pompeii in which the earth suddenly reclaimed its souls as they went about their daily business.īut this isn’t fodder for the next Dean Koontz thriller it’s real, and it's 100 miles north of New York City. Phones on desks, linens on beds, catalog cards spilling out of the filing cabinets-all covered with a fine patina of dust.
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