Phones on desks, linens on beds, catalog cards spilling out of the filing cabinets—all covered with a fine patina of dust. 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.
But this isn’t fodder for the next Dean Koontz thriller; it’s real, and it's 100 miles north of New York City. 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.
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.
Grossinger's was the very first that introduced indoor swimming pools in the Catskills...
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.
The advent of the railroad brought droves of vacationers at the end of the 19th century during what Conway refers to as the Silver Era, and for a while Sullivan County was an important destination where tuberculosis patients could convalesce.
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. 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.
After a fruitful year (earning $81 total) he expanded his enterprise. But Grossinger wasn’t alone, Conway notes. “By the 1920s the rise of big hotels took the Catskills by storm, almost all of which were exclusively Jewish.”
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.
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.
As 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.
mayhem...
This is the Pine Hotel, but it might as well be the Grosssinger's, Kutsher's or the Nevele... fiber-glass galore to insulate against the bitter cold of winter-time in the mountains...
the earth suddenly reclaimed its souls
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.
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.
Sports, too, were an important part of the kingdoms of the Catskills. 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. “Wilt Chamberlain quite famously spent some time in the mountains, working as a bellboy at Kutscher's during the day and playing ball on the resort’s team in the evenings,” says Conway.
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.
'Marjorie Morningstar', a 1958 WarnerColor melodrama romance film based on the 1955 novel of the same name by Herman Wouk. Directed by Irving Rapper and starred by Natalie Wood, Gene Kelly, and Claire Trevor, tells a fictional coming of age story about a young Jewish girl in New York City in the 1950s. The film's trajectory traces Marjorie Morgenstern's attempts to become an artist - exemplified through her relationship with the actor and playwright Noel Airman.
The central conflict in the film revolves around the traditional models of social behavior and religious behavior expected by New York Jewish families in the 1950s, and Marjorie's desire to follow an unconventional path. The film is notable for its inclusion of Jewish religious scenes - including a Passover meal, a synagogue sequence and Jewish icons in the Morgenstern house. These depictions were one of the first times Jewish religion was portrayed overtly in film since The Jazz Singer in 1927. The movie received an Oscar nomination for Best Song ("A Very Precious Love"), sung by Gene Kelly.
29 years later, 'Dirty Dancing' (1987) became a blockbuster movie starring Jennifer Grey as the daughter of a wealthy Jewish family, and Patrick Swayze as a working-class dance instructor. 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.”
electric golf carts left to rot...
bus-boys' & waiters' uniforms...
The former coffee shop at Grossinger’s Catskill Resort Hotel in Liberty, N.Y., in “Echoes of the Borscht Belt,” an exhibition of Marisa Scheinfeld’s photographs at the Yeshiva University Museum.Credit...Marisa Scheinfeld.
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.
“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. In 1958 Grossinger’s revealed a mammoth natatorium bedecked in a generous surplus of art deco detailing. Constructed at a huge cost, it forced the neighboring properties to take on a similar financial burden, and four years later there were over 30 indoor swimming pools in the region.
“Unable to recoup the insurmountable costs, the hotels struck lending deals with local vendors and banks,” says Conway, but the act of keeping up with the Joneses ultimately proved unsustainable, even for the hegemonies like Grossinger’s, and by the late ’60s most resorts had reached the point of no return.
Although the end was truly nigh by the end of the decade, rabid overspending wasn’t the sole conspirator in the demise of the Catskills' golden era. Conway refers to the other important factors as the “three ‘A’s”: air conditioning, assimilation, and airfare.
Sullivan County had long garnered a reputation as a place of wellness, often being quite literally what the doctor ordered for those unable to properly convalesce in the city, but the advent of air conditioning made it less of a necessity—especially for vacationers with smaller budgets—to escape the Big Smoke for breezier weather.
Dr. Phil Brown, a sociology professor at Northeastern University, founder of the Catskills Institute, and author of Catskill Culture: A Mountain Rat’s Memories of the Great Jewish Resort Area, cites the gradual melting away of anti-Semitism in America as “the primary reason for the decrease in the region’s Jewish clientele.”
As prejudices waned, it became easier and ultimately desirable for Jews to fully assimilate. Once other holidaying destinations around the country lifted their ban on Jewish patrons there was less of a need to coalesce in the Catskills, and as Brown says, “it became easier for young Jewish professionals to find jobs in the city,” meaning that they no longer needed to subsist on summer resort wages to fund their education.
But on a greater scale, the assimilation slowly chipped away at the tight family bonds formed long ago in the shtetls of Eastern Europe; a great number of American Jews intermarried with other faiths, and divorce became more commonplace in general. The younger generation, keen on being defined as American first before any other trait, saw little need to participate in Jewish activities as well.
“The broader acceptance of the nation’s Jewish population also led to a massive migration of Jews within America,” notes Brown. They left New York City for Los Angeles and Miami with the same spirit that led the previous generation over from the Old Country, as documented in Debra Dash Moore’s book, To The Golden Cities.
By 1970, Los Angeles held the world’s third-largest Jewish population after Tel Aviv and New York City, and few newly minted Californians saw the need for a forested holiday retreat when they were now living year-round in what Brown dubs “vacationland.”
For Brown, an increase in affordable airfare further encouraged American Jews to travel within the U.S. and beyond: “Jews were comfortable returning to Europe for holidays by the 1960s.” Brown believes that the all-inclusive structures of the Catskills hotels were the inspiration for the resort schemes in the Caribbean.
Suddenly, like a slap in the face, it seemed as though the Catskills were completely out of fashion. “It was so opulent that no one ever thought it would sink, then boom—it was gone,” says Conway. Although the majority of the 500-plus hotels have been rendered to ash, there are still a few places like Grossinger’s—a veritable college campus in size and scope—that stand silent amongst the encroaching weeds.
For some, the wreckage has become a tourist attraction in its own right, like traipsing through the Ukranian city of Pripyat, abandoned after the Chernobyl disaster. Multi-story hotel towers stand stripped of any ornamentation, and seem almost Soviet in their austere and honest decay. Tattered curtains flutter out the cracked windows, roofs collapse under the cruelty of weather and time, and empty hallways echo with the footsteps of curious trespassers.
At Kutsher’s, one of the last great resorts to bite the dust, a security officer stands guard, warning onlookers of the threat of asbestos within. Tractors have parked in front of the ruins.
Sorry, Ruins of Grossinger's Resort is permanently closed.
Until cheaper airfares made trips from New York to Miami more commonplace, the height of a luxury summer vacation for affluent Jewish New Yorkers in the 1950’s was to head up into the Catskills to one of the many holiday resorts.
Nicknamed the Borscht Belt, the jewel among the many competing vacation venues was the Grossinger’s Resort. Set in the hills around the small town of Liberty, New York, a review for the Commentary magazine in 1954, described Grossinger’s as “to resort hotels as Bergdorf Goodman is to department stores, Cadillac to cars, mink to furs, and Tiffany to jewelers … it has been called Waldorf in the Catskills.”
For decades, Grossinger’s was a by word in luxury. Over 150,000 people visited every year, entertained by the likes of Eddie Fisher, Jerry Lewis, and Milton Berle in the opulent nightclubs. The facilities were so state of the art (it was the first resort in the U.S. to offer artificial snow for year round ski runs) that Rocky Marciano used it as his training camp. The resort became the inspiration for Dirty Dancing.
Grossinger’s started as a small family run hotel in 1917 owned by Austrian immigrants Asher and Malke Grossinger. But it was under their daughter Jennie Grossinger that the resort boomed. It soon spread to over 35 buildings covering 1,200 acres including its own private airfield. The main building contained an enormous dining room capable of seating 1,300 guests; under the dining room there was a vast, cavernous night club called the “Terrace Room.” The resort was so prestigious that Elizabeth Taylor married Eddie Fisher there. After Jennie died in 1972, the resort started to fall into decline. With guests choosing to fly elsewhere for the summer, the hotel closed its doors for the last time in 1986.
Since then it has been left to gradually fall into ruin. The Commentary magazine review noted that “the feeling one gets everywhere … is of pleasantly solid permanence.” But like Charles Foster Kane’s Xanadu, the pleasure palace of the 1950’s has gently been reclaimed by the forests of the Catskills. The outdoor tennis courts and swimming pools lie abandoned. The ice rink, hotel rooms, and golf pro’s clubhouses are covered in moss and ivy. The indoor swimming pool has turned into a living greenhouse. Where once guests in the high spirits of summer vacations dove off the high board, dined and danced the night away, there is now only the silence.
Update September 2018: Sadly, this abandoned borscht belt resort is being razed to make way for new development opportunities in Liberty, New York.
Asher Selig Grossinger moved from New York City to Ferndale in Sullivan County in the Catskill Mountains in the 1900s. There he rented rooms to visitors from New York City. His wife, Malke, operated the kosher kitchen, and Jennie Grossinger (1891-1972), his daughter, was the hostess. They called their home Longbrook House. In 1919, they sold it and purchased a bigger house on 100 acres, calling it Grossinger's Terrace Hill House.
During his fighting days Rocky Marciano would train at the resort. But in the late 1970s and 1980s, resorts like Grossinger's or the Concord could no longer attract younger guests.
In August 1984, Grossingers, in its dying years, promoted a Woodstock weekend to mark the 15th anniversary of the festival. It featured a workshop in tie-dyeing, a musical performance by David-Clayton Thomas, formerly of Blood, Sweat & Tears, a midnight showing of the four-hour documentary "Woodstock," and an appearance by John Sebastian, who advised, "Don't eat the purple tzimmes." Abbie Hoffman, who was thrown off the Woodstock stage by Pete Townshend of The Who for making a political speech, was brought in by Grossingers for the promotion.
In 1986, the Grossinger descendants sold the property to Servico. Grossinger's main hotel and main resort areas closed in 1986, but the golf course is still open as of 2014. The members of the golf clubhouse call the course "Big G". Servico failed to reopen the hotel due to the massive costs associated with it. Numerous other companies also failed the same feat. It is owned by Louis Cappelli as of September 2013, who is hoping for casinos to come to the area.
After the closing of Grossinger's at Liberty, N.Y. n 1985.
Liberty, N. Y., 22nd July 1964
Harry Grossinger, the man behind the scenes at one of the world's largest and best known resort hotels, Grossinger's of Sullivan County, died this afternoon of an acute coronary thrombosis at Maimonides Hospital here. His age was 76. He had been stricken in his quarters at the hotel early in the morning.
Conducted daily business
In the public eye, Mr. Grossinger was obscured by his wife, Jennie, who was the official hostess at the hotel. She is an outgiving person who probably knew and called more people by their first names than any full‐time politician. But intimates said it was Mr. Grossinger who actually ran the hotel, assisted in recent years by their son Paul as general manager.
Mr. Grossinger, for instance, did the buying for the hotel kitchen, going to New York's Washington Market twice a week in his chauffeur‐driven, custom‐built Continental limousine to inspect the vegetables and meat that would go into Grossinger's menus.
He also supervised the building of all the additions that had been raised during the last 50 years to the original seven-room farmhouse. He continued his activities even after a severe heat attack this year had sent him to a hospital in New York for several weeks.
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