Memories of a Catskill Hotelkeeper


Book Description

Gonifs, tumlers, fressers, along with a cast of waiters, busboys, chambermaids, chefs, counselors, gardeners, dishwashers, musicians and even family-Carrie Komito encounters them all in a more than a half century of presiding over a thriving Borscht Belt. In this collection of stories, she shares with readers her memories, often touching and ironic, but always filled with the humor and vitality that characterized that now historic era.




Memoir of a Catskill Hotelkeeper


Book Description

Gonifs, tumlers, fressers, along with a cast of waiters, busboys, chambermaids, chefs, counselors, gardeners, dishwashers, musicians and even family-Carrie Komito encounters them all in more than a half century of presiding over a thriving Borscht Belt hotel. In this collection of stories, she shares with readers her memories, often touching and ironic, but always-always filled with the humor and vitality that characterized that now historic era.




Catskill Culture


Book Description




The Catskills Alive!


Book Description

Less than a day's drive from New York City, Boston or Philadelphia, the Catskills have long been a popular weekend and summer retreat for city folk. The area offers fine accommodations, top-notch dining and spectacular surroundings. This book profiles hundreds of hotels and restaurants, with an emphasis on the very best places. Daytime activities - shopping, antique-hunting and more - are featured.




Catskill Hotels


Book Description

At one time, according to the Catskill Institute, there were more than a thousand hotels spread across the mountains of Greene, Ulster, Delaware, and Sullivan Counties. The Catskills were an exciting world full of pleasures to be enjoyed, with summer and winter activities characterized by entertainment, food, sports, card playing, and food again. Catskill Hotels, with a collection of some two hundred images, tells the story of this world, which began with America's first resort hotel, the Catskill Mountain House, continued with places such as the world-famous Grossinger's, and can still be found today at Kutsher's Country Club, the Mountain House at Lake Mohonk, and a few other hardy resorts.




New York Hotel Experience


Book Description

For more than two hundred years hotels have played a significant role in American history. The modern hotel is even an American invention. In five case studies of iconic New York hotels, this book presents the hotel experience of the white upper class, literati, young artists, African Americans and Jewish Americans in the twentieth century. Using a variety of texts, including autobiographies, movies and novels, the impact of hotel experience on society and culture - which has been neglected until now - becomes apparent. This unique approach offers a new way of reading New York and helps to better understand the city's special dynamics.




In the Catskills


Book Description

“A nostalgic pastiche of fiction, memoir, photography, art, postcards, menus, etc., celebrating Jewish resort life in the Catskills.”—Providence Journal With selections ranging from literature to song lyrics, this book highlights the Catskills experience over a century, and assesses its continuing impact on American music, comedy, food, culture, and religion. It features selections from such fiction writers as Isaac Bashevis Singer, Herman Wouk, Allegra Goodman and Vivian Gornick; and original contributions from historians, sociologists, and scholars of American and Jewish culture that trace the history of the region, the rise of hotels and bungalow colonies, the wonderful flavors of food and entertainment, and distinctive forms of Jewish religion found in the Mountains. What was life—the work, the play, the food, the romance—like at Catskills Mountains resorts? These very personal recollections capture the special sense of community and freedom that developed among Jewish families leaving the city behind for a summer vacation and enjoying a cultural space of their own. From “Bingo by the Bungalow” by Thane Rosenbaum to “Young Workers in the Hotels” by Phil Brown to “Shoot the Shtrudel to Me Yudel” by Henry Foner, this charming anthology captures an era that has had enormous impact on the Jewish experience and American culture as a whole. “A warm, charming, and valuable work. Much of the writing is simply gorgeous.”—Contemporary Sociology




The Catskills


Book Description

The Catskills (“Cat Creek” in Dutch), America’s original frontier, northwest of New York City, with its seven hundred thousand acres of forest land preserve and its five counties—Delaware, Greene, Sullivan, Ulster, Schoharie; America’s first great vacationland; the subject of the nineteenth-century Hudson River School paintings that captured the almost godlike majesty of the mountains and landscapes, the skies, waterfalls, pastures, cliffs . . . refuge and home to poets and gangsters, tycoons and politicians, preachers and outlaws, musicians and spiritualists, outcasts and rebels . . . Stephen Silverman and Raphael Silver tell of the turning points that made the Catskills so vital to the development of America: Henry Hudson’s first spotting the distant blue mountains in 1609; the New York State constitutional convention, resulting in New York’s own Declaration of Independence from Great Britain and its own constitution, causing the ire of the invading British army . . . the Catskills as a popular attraction in the 1800s, with the construction of the Catskill Mountain House and its rugged imitators that offered WASP guests “one-hundred percent restricted” accommodations (“Hebrews will knock vainly for admission”), a policy that remained until the Catskills became the curative for tubercular patients, sending real-estate prices plummeting and the WASP enclave on to richer pastures . . . Here are the gangsters (Jack “Legs” Diamond and Dutch Schultz, among them) who sought refuge in the Catskill Mountains, and the resorts that after World War II catered to upwardly mobile Jewish families, giving rise to hundreds of hotels inspired by Grossinger’s, the original “Disneyland with knishes”—the Concord, Brown’s Hotel, Kutsher’s Hotel, and others—in what became known as the Borscht Belt and Sour Cream Alps, with their headliners from movies and radio (Phil Silvers, Eddie Cantor, Milton Berle, et al.), and others who learned their trade there, among them Moss Hart (who got his start organizing summer theatricals), Sid Caesar, Lenny Bruce, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, and Joan Rivers. Here is a nineteenth-century America turning away from England for its literary and artistic inspiration, finding it instead in Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” and his childhood recollections (set in the Catskills) . . . in James Fenimore Cooper’s adventure-romances, which provided a pastoral history, describing the shift from a colonial to a nationalist mentality . . . and in the canvases of Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, Frederick Church, and others that caught the grandeur of the wilderness and that gave texture, color, and form to Irving’s and Cooper’s imaginings. Here are the entrepreneurs and financiers who saw the Catskills as a way to strike it rich, plundering the resources that had been likened to “creation,” the Catskills’ tanneries that supplied the boots and saddles for Union troops in the Civil War . . . and the bluestone quarries whose excavated rock became the curbs and streets of the fast-growing Eastern Seaboard. Here are the Catskills brought fully to life in all of their intensity, beauty, vastness, and lunacy.




Sullivan County


Book Description

Sullivan County, the Borscht Belt, the Catskills-all are synonyms for the greatest American Jewish resort area, the playground of about one million visitors a year during its peak from 1920 to 1970. The Sullivan County of Borscht Belt legend really consists of the eastern part of Sullivan County and a bit of southern Ulster County. Here are the large towns of Liberty, Monticello, and Ellenville and the small towns of Woodbourne, Hasbrouck, South Fallsburg, Livingston Manor, Fallsburg, Loch Sheldrake, Greenfield Park, Mountaindale, Accord, Ulster Heights, Kiamesha Lake, Kerhonkson, Swan Lake, Glen Wild, Hurleyville, Ferndale, White Sulphur Springs, Rock Hill, Parksville, Woodridge, and White Lake. In Sullivan County: Borscht Belt, you will find the lost world of the kuchaleins and bungalow colonies and the hotels, great and small. This was a world to be enjoyed, whether swimming in the Neversink River, watching unmatched entertainment, or eating the legendary Borscht Belt meals. Join us on the lawn, on the handball court, or at the Ping-Pong table. Dive into the pool. Welcome to day camp. All of this and more are here in Sullivan County: Borscht Belt.




Making Mountains


Book Description

For over two hundred years, the Catskill Mountains have been repeatedly and dramatically transformed by New York City. In Making Mountains, David Stradling shows the transformation of the Catskills landscape as a collaborative process, one in which local and urban hands, capital, and ideas have come together to reshape the mountains and the communities therein. This collaboration has had environmental, economic, and cultural consequences. Early on, the Catskills were an important source of natural resources. Later, when New York City needed to expand its water supply, engineers helped direct the city toward the Catskills, claiming that the mountains offered the purest and most cost-effective waters. By the 1960s, New York had created the great reservoir and aqueduct system in the mountains that now supplies the city with 90 percent of its water. The Catskills also served as a critical space in which the nation's ideas about nature evolved. Stradling describes the great influence writers and artists had upon urban residents - especially the painters of the Hudson River School, whose ideal landscapes created expectations about how rural America should appear. By the mid-1800s, urban residents had turned the Catskills into an important vacation ground, and by the late 1800s, the Catskills had become one of the premiere resort regions in the nation. In the mid-twentieth century, the older Catskill resort region was in steep decline, but the Jewish "Borscht Belt" in the southern Catskills was thriving. The automobile revitalized mountain tourism and residence, and increased the threat of suburbanization of the historic landscape. Throughout each of these significant incarnations, urban and rural residents worked in a rough collaboration, though not without conflict, to reshape the mountains and American ideas about rural landscapes and nature.




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