Kutsher's abandoned & demolished

Kutsher's Country Club's main entrance. 

Milton Kutsher (*1916, in Monticello, N.Y. +16 November 1998) & Helen Wasser Kutsher (*11 July 1923, in Brooklyn, N.Y. +19 March 2013, in Philadelphia).

Born Helen Wasser on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, on 11 July 1923, she first came to the Kutsher’s at age 10 after her mother’s death. She later introduced her widowed father Sam to his future second wife, Rebecca Kutsher, the widow of Max Kutsher, co-founder of the resort with his brother . Her children said Helen Kutsher essentially grew up at Kutsher’s.

In 1946, she married Rebecca Kutsher’s nephew Milton Kutsher and they had three children. Milton Kutsher died in 1998. She continued to work at the hotel into her 80s.

photo:  Paul and Birdye Sann

We shouldn’t forget that the Jewish resorts in the Catskills “were created in large part because other hotels in the region refused to admit Jews around the turn of the century through the 1930s,” Rosenberg reminds audiences.

“The phrase ‘No Hebrews or Consumptives’ were included in advertisements for these restricted hotels,”he adds.

The culture of Kutsher’s and other Jewish hotels in the Catskills evolved to accommodate religiously observant patrons, providing Friday night and holiday services as well as kosher cooking. For the first time in history, it was possible for strictly religious Jewish families to go on holiday.

The story of Kutsher’s also is a tale of assimilation. Ironically, the oppressed people who initially sought refuge and release in the form of an affordable and accessible family vacation ultimately outgrew the resorts that had nurtured their prospering culture. The Catskills no longer appealed to newly affluent Jews.

One poignant moment in the film recounts the effect the advent of jet travel had on the hotel. “As things went on, people were asking for all the amenities with the hotel,” family matriarch Helen Kutsher, often called the “First Lady of the Catskills,” says.

“Do you have an indoor pool? Do you have a golf course?” callers would often ask before making a reservation, according to Helen. “They wanted everything. … I asked many people, ‘Do you play golf? Do you like swimming?’ ‘No,’ they’d answer, ‘but I like to know that you have it.'

Competition for Kutsher’s was intense as luxury hotels proliferated around the country, offering deluxe packages with no discriminatory barriers to entry. Likewise, Caribbean cruises came into vogue. Even more alluring, the prospect of buying property in Florida, where aging patrons could live on what became known as “permanent vacation,” defined decades of exodus from the Catskills tradition.

Perhaps the most nostalgic description of a vacation culture in decline can be found in the popular film “Dirty Dancing,” which shows a Jewish resort “largely believed to be based on Kutsher’s,” Laskow says. Toward the end of the film, Max Kellerman (Jake Weston), a fictional hotel owner, watches the season-ending pageant and remarks, “It all seems to be ending. You think kids want to come with their parents to take foxtrot lessons? Trips to Europe, that’s what the kids want. Twenty-two countries in three days.”

From the 1970s through the 1990s, diverging interests and a widening generation gap unraveled the close-knit traditions that Jewish families had established at their favorite Catskills resorts. What exactly are these traditions? “Welcome to Kutsher’s” won’t leave you hungry for details. The documentary focuses on the Jewish home cooking that earned the region its Borscht Belt nickname. Viewers will enjoy learning about the unique personalities in the Kutsher family, who contributed to the hotel’s family-oriented atmosphere. Dedicated employees recount the warm feelings they harbor for the owners, and guests share fond memories of their family vacations.

Rosenberg and Laskow admit that they arrived late to the Kutsher’s scene, making their first trip to the hotel in 2002. But thinning crowds and unrented rooms aside, there was still plenty of magic. The experience inspired them.

“Ian learned to ice skate after an impromptu lesson with Celia Duffy, whom we would later feature in our documentary,” Laskow recounts. “We took the Seabreeze special cocktails out to the pool, attended a still-life art class, and enormously enjoyed our many meals.”

Perhaps time was running out for this form of entertainment and the Catskills resort atmosphere, but it’s clear that this filmmaking duo taps into an essential aspect of Jewish American culture. “Welcome to Kutsher’s” offers a heartfelt view of an iconic Jewish establishment, chronicling cherished memories.

Kutsher's dining room.

ice-skating shoes.

Echoes of the Borschet Belt

By Edward Rothstein

25 September 2014.

Some 20 years ago, whenever the self-styled King of Simon Says (a.k.a. Allan Tresser) performed in the Catskills, he would display a pasteboard panel boasting of his television credits: As seen on “The Jack Paar Show”! And “Wonderama”! And ... well, I forget the rest, but not the idea: The king’s prime was decades past. And the billing presumed a similar vintage for his listeners as they prepared to obey whatever Simon Says — or doesn’t. But if Mr. Tresser had long since peaked, hadn’t the Fallsview Hotel of Ellenville, N.Y., in which he was resident tummler, also seen far better years? And the Nevele? And Kutsher’s? The last was celebrated in an elegiac 2012 documentary, “Welcome to Kutsher’s: The Last Catskills Resort,” which is being updated in December with a final section chronicling the hotel’s demolition to make way for a yoga retreat. In the 1980s, when films like “Dirty Dancing” or “Sweet Lorraine” were set in such hotels, they were already relics from another era.

I came to know these places during their years of decline, accompanied by multiple generations of my family. And though signs of sclerosis were apparent — often, those of us of a less than certain age would affectionately roll our eyes — I don’t think we could have imagined the scenes of disintegration in the photographs by Marisa Scheinfeld, on view at the Yeshiva University Museum in an exhibition titled “Echoes of the Borscht Belt.”

By one count, there were over 900 such summer establishments in Sullivan and Ulster Counties, known informally as the borscht belt for its association with the Eastern European Jewish immigrations of the early 20th century. After the Second World War, the cold beet soup flowed with extravagant ease. And then, after the 1950s, came a change, and the region began a slow-motion decline. The reasons are well known: air-conditioned homes, cruise ships, Las Vegas, the 1960s. ... And a rising middle class descended from Jewish immigrants had begun to discover other ways to celebrate making it.

These photographs, taken from 2010 to 2014, portray an almost casual apocalypse. It’s as if places like those I had visited had not just closed but had been abandoned to an encroaching wilderness, with nothing taking their place. We see the remains of resorts like Grossinger’s or the Pines being gradually assailed by entropy or subsumed by natural surroundings. Strips of insulation drop from ceilings; moss and fern sprout from moist carpets; graffiti and plunder deface grand spaces. Some photographs also seem to be commenting on earlier vanity or vulgarity: In one, bar stools with turquoise cushions stand in a row like shunned roués, rusting in the wreckage.

These images are affectionate without being nostalgic. The wreckage they show is almost lush with new growth. And while they really can’t compete with history’s vast iconography of ruin, their effect is unusual: The landscape of abandonment still retains signs of vitality — and we’re aware of the remarkable impact that this vitality had on American popular culture.

Hints of that life can also be glimpsed in a nearby display case featuring souvenirs, many of them from Ms. Scheinfeld’s personal collection: matchbooks, napkins, menus, poolside photographs and images of the swankier hotels’ performers: Sammy Davis Jr., Eddie Cantor, Duke Ellington. These pictures remind us that Las Vegas began its rise as the borscht belt began its fall: It was its de-Judaized transformation.

During the period when I was sampling some of the belt’s last surviving notches, the energy was already long past, and everybody knew it. Many places were scraping by on ritual and habit, hoping that casino licenses — a possibility that remains under debate — would offer salvation. Everything had a ghostly tinge. “Nightclubs” on Saturday nights featured disco lighting; comic shtick could veer toward vaudeville. Dollops of bad taste and a dated sensibility mixed with halfhearted attempts at currency.

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For those of us visiting from more urbane habitats, it was occasionally tempting to approach all this with condescension or even scorn. But we also felt something else, almost a life force: These old forms retained elements of extraordinary vigor, even in their most mundane aspects. Veteran waiters, for example, would never use a pad or a pencil but commit a dozen orders to memory and then balance them all on enormous trays, each of which might have fed a village for a week in the old country. And entertainments were delivered with an unmistakably sincere and warm embrace, somehow managing to be old-fashioned without seeming campy.

Days would pass without our missing in the least the more urbane and decorous cultural precincts we had embraced for ourselves, even as we yielded to bingo, indoor miniature golf, Simon Says and limitless appetite.

Was there something intrinsic to these hotels that inspired this complex mixture of sentiments? Their history suggests we were not the first with such feelings. Many Catskill hotels evolved out of early-20th-century Jewish farms: Owners would supplement their meager earnings by renting out accommodations to city visitors. In Stefan Kanfer’s fine history, “A Summer World,” we learn that in 1913, the Galician refugees Selig and Malke Grossinger were encouraged by the Jewish Agricultural Society to set up a bucolic refuge in the Catskills.

By the 1920s, that world had already inspired jests about an urban immigrant population with no traditional ties to outdoor life that had started to vacation in “the mountains.” The Jews have finally “had their revenge on the Gentiles who didn’t want to accept them,” the Yiddish newspaper The Forward observed. “Their gardens have now grown peyes (sidlocks or sideburns), and their trees have been circumcised.”

These hotels and bungalow colonies reflected the growing prosperity of their communities. Post-immigrant taste is almost always vulgar in some way, because it seeks to imitate what it cannot yet acquire. That was one reason for ostentatious displays. At the Concord, the Cordillion Room, where meals were served, accommodated 3,000 people. Grossinger’s indoor pool had 20-foot-high glass walls. These resorts were declarations of ambition and accomplishment: The immigrant past could be transcended. Some even shed ethnic associations, with names like the Raleigh or activities like horseback riding. And some had begun to inspire condescension from guests who felt they had already overcome the circumstances of their birth, despite their continuing return.

But at the same time, these hotels celebrated that identity, offering an atmosphere of communal confidence. Even in their declining years, when they were marketing themselves as cosmopolitan resorts, remnants of a Jewish past were evident in the jokes and in the food. A Grossinger’s menu in the exhibition offers a “Boiled Young Fowl en Pot, Matzo Ball.”

Somehow this hothouse mixture of opposing sentiments — self-derision mixed with self-embrace — also ended up transforming 20th-century American culture. Vaudeville had always mocked ethnic types. It relished caricature, masquerade and accent: Humor would dissolve difference into laughter. Jewish comics at these hotels played with similar impulses, freely dispensing mockery and self-mockery. One star of the 1930s borscht belt, David Kaminsky — Danny Kaye — became a sensation with his impressions. He teamed up for a while with Sid Caesar, a master at nonsensically imitating foreign tongues. Yet out of it came an almost sentimental affection, a broad affirmation of American variety and difference.

Ultimately, it all went mainstream. In the early 1930s, Mr. Kanfer notes, Moss Hart was one of the region’s most successful tummlers. Dore Schary was on his staff; Don Hartman, the social director of Grossinger’s, was one of his rivals. Mr. Schary became head of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and Mr. Hartman the head of production at Paramount Pictures. Moss Hart became Moss Hart. And there’s no need to list the region’s comedians.

You won’t find all this at the exhibition, but if you have any experience with the complex relationship between identity and American culture — and who doesn’t? — you’re still hearing echoes of what happened in these now overrun ruins.

Follow Edward Rothstein on Twitter; twitter.com/EdRothstein.

“Echoes of the Borscht Belt” continues through April 12 at the Yeshiva University Museum at the Center for Jewish History, 15 West 16th Street, Flatiron district; 212-294-8330, yumuseum.org.

There goes the neighbourhood... 

Kutsher's demolition in full swing in 2014. 

the end of an era... 

Sid Caesar (Isaac Sidney Sizer) (*8 Sept 1922 +12 February 2014) and fiancee Florence Levy in the Catskills in the 1940s.

Caesar later when he was really famous. 

A 24 year-old Danny Kaye née David Daniel Kaminsky; Yiddish: דאַװיד דאַניעל קאַמינסקי‎; born on 18 January 1911 + 3rd March 1987 - the 2nd from right to left back row - with the staff at White Roe, Livingston Manor, N.Y. in the summer of 1935.

White Roe, the summer resort Danny Kaye worked at was in Livingston Manor, N.Y. not too far from Liberty or Monticello... and Ellenville for that matter. 

Danny Kaye (on the right) with Harvey & a friend on a Broadway show.

Danny Kaye in person at RKO Palace in Manhattan in 1953, some 18 years after his summer job at the Catskills...