{"id":36562,"date":"2021-03-19T01:26:11","date_gmt":"2021-03-19T08:26:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/?p=36562"},"modified":"2021-03-18T14:41:57","modified_gmt":"2021-03-18T21:41:57","slug":"recalling-the-catskills","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/2021\/03\/19\/recalling-the-catskills\/","title":{"rendered":"Recalling the Catskills"},"content":{"rendered":"

A postcard of the legendary Kutsher\u2019s resort.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

After the Lower Eastside of Manhattan, there is perhaps no place that holds so enormous a place in the imagination of Jewish life in North America as the Catskills.<\/p>\n

The Catskill Mountains, really a region of the larger Appalachian Mountain range, is a sprawling section of southeastern New York state. Just 160 kilometres from New York City, the area is a world away from the workaday life that lower- and middle-income Jews of mid-century America experienced. The relative proximity to the world\u2019s largest Jewish population centre made the Catskills a destination for generations of Jewish (and other) Americans.<\/p>\n

Phil Brown, a professor at Northeastern University, author of Catskill Culture: A Mountain Rat\u2019s Memories of the Great Jewish Resort Area<\/em> and founder of the Catskills Institute, delivered a webinar March 3. It was presented by the Jewish Study Centre.<\/p>\n

The resort region emerged, to use an inapt metaphor, by farmers trying to create a silk purse from a sow\u2019s ear. The land was not good for farming. Chickens and dairy cows were about all it would sustain, and farmers began opening their homes to temporary lodgers.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou didn\u2019t come to a hotel, you didn\u2019t come to a resort, you came to our house,\u201d Brown reflected. \u201cYou came to our family and they treated you like family. And it didn\u2019t matter if you wanted another potato because we grew them here, we grew the corn, we made the cheese, we made our own butter and the cows were giving us milk twice a day. We could make all the butter and cream and sour cream that you needed\u2026. It was served with a full hand because that\u2019s what people came up here for.\u201d<\/p>\n

Elaborate menus were an invitation to excess. \u201cSo many things to choose from,\u201d said Brown, \u201cand it wasn\u2019t like you chose one or two of these things for breakfast, you had one from each group. You had the fruit, you had the appetizer, then the cereal, then the eggs and the pancakes.\u201d<\/p>\n

In addition to the three meals a day the all-inclusive resorts offered, there was a concession to buy snacks while lounging by the pool or playing tennis, then noshes during the evening program at the \u201ccasino\u201d \u2013 this wasn\u2019t a gambling den, just the name most resorts gave to the theatre space \u2013 and, after that, maybe a drive into town for a bite at one of the late-night diners.<\/p>\n

In an astonishing array of about 500 \u201cresorts\u201d \u2013 ranging across every quality \u2013 and another 500 or so \u201cbungalow colonies,\u201d there was something for everybody. One colony, with accommodations that were a cross between cabins and tents, attracted single young people and newlyweds.<\/p>\n

\"image<\/a>
Pool scene at the Pines Resort in the heyday of the Catskills.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In many cases, families would come for the entire summer \u2013 two months for a manageable price. Mom and kids might stay all through, with fathers commuting back to the city on Sundays. At its heyday, the Jewish Catskills drew 500,000 visitors a year, making it, in the 1950s and \u201960s, the world\u2019s largest resort area.<\/p>\n

The glossy catalogues produced by the local tourism agency had subtle and less-subtle code words to segregate their clientele. \u201cDietary laws observed\u201d was the signal for a Jewish resort, while \u201cChurches nearby\u201d sent the opposite message. The phrase \u201cNo Hebrews\u201d left less to the imagination.<\/p>\n

Brown\u2019s own family story is a microcosm of Jewish American strivers taking entrepreneurial risks in the Catskills hospitality industry. \u201cMy parents began in 1946 as the owners of a small hotel called Brown\u2019s Hotel Royal on White Lake,\u201d he said. \u201cThey had that hotel until 1952. Not very long \u2013 six years.\u201d<\/p>\n

Economic challenge was a part of the Catskills experience in part because of extended families and the porous boundaries between work and play in vacationland. \u201cIt was a place where the family came to work, the family came to stay and no one could tell the difference if they were working or staying,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd this is partly why my parents went broke. People thought they would have a job there and they didn\u2019t really do much work.\u201d<\/p>\n

After losing their hotel to bankruptcy, they worked for others. \u201cMy mother, always a chef, my father having other jobs, running a concession, working as a ma\u00eetre d\u2019, working as a chauffeur,\u201d Brown said. Young Phil started working in the resorts at a early age. By definition, the places that employed them were the smaller ones; the larger, swanky resorts only hired male chefs.<\/p>\n

\u201cAfter they lost their hotel in 1952, they moved down to Fort Pierce, a little town 150 miles or so north of Miami,\u201d he said. \u201cThe idea here is that they would get a new start here and that all of the Jews coming down to go to Miami Beach would be so hungry for good New York food by the time they got to Florida that they would stop in here on the way.\u201d<\/p>\n

Opening a restaurant with a large sign declaring \u201cBrown\u2019s Jewish Restaurant\u201d in a community where the Ku Klux Klan was still openly marching took chutzpah. They crossed local norms when an African-American family walked in and was served like any customers would be. But it was not racism or antisemitism that did the business in. \u201cMy parents, having lost a hotel because they were good businesspeople, did not do well running restaurants,\u201d he said wryly.<\/p>\n

They found their way to Miami Beach and they ran the coffee shop at the Haddon Hall Hotel, which was partly owned by the Kutsher family, who owned one of the Catskill\u2019s most renowned resorts. It was not uncommon that proprietors of Catskills hotels would also own properties in Florida, capturing clientele for the summer season as well as the winter.<\/p>\n

The resorts were not just getaways but miniature societies, where people knew lots about each other and created very intimate relationships. This was at least partly because the folks one would run into there were not usually strangers.<\/p>\n

The Seven Gables Hotel, where Brown really learned the hotel industry ropes, was known as a \u201cJackson Heights hotel,\u201d because most of the people who worked and lived there came from the Jackson Heights area of the New York borough of Queens. The owners came from there, they hired staff from there and they recruited guests via the local synagogues and social networks.<\/p>\n

There was a huge diversity in the properties, but, generally, he said, lower-cost bungalow colonies had cabins with their own kitchens, so the food was prepared by the family rather than eating in a restaurant or dining hall. These were often built on a lake or river and so did not have swimming pools. Nor did they provide a wealth of entertainment. The bungalow colonies supplemented the low rent by selling groceries to the guests.<\/p>\n

On the flip side, the higher-end hotels and resorts not only served multi-course meals, they also imported vaudeville acts from Manhattan\u2019s Second Avenue theatres and other comedians, musicians and entertainers, who would work a circuit in the \u201cBorscht Belt,\u201d often making a good living and building a name for themselves.<\/p>\n

By the 1970s, the Catskills were starting to decline as a destination. Some of the old resorts have become yeshivot or Jewish kids camps. Some are being used as boarding houses. Many of the smaller and mid-sized places have been converted into private homes. At least one is now a resort for Korean-Americans and another has been revived by Russian-speaking Jews. But the heyday is well and truly gone, Brown said.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a world mostly lost to us physically,\u201d he said, \u201cyet so powerful in our memories and emotions.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A postcard of the legendary Kutsher\u2019s resort. After the Lower Eastside of Manhattan, there is perhaps no place that holds so enormous a place in the imagination of Jewish life in North America as the Catskills. The Catskill Mountains, really a region of the larger Appalachian Mountain range, is a sprawling section of southeastern New […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":36563,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[784],"tags":[20422,4242,6433,20423,20421],"class_list":["post-36562","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books","tag-catskills","tag-history","tag-jewish-life","tag-nostalgia","tag-phil-brown"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36562","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36562"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36562\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36563"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36562"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36562"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36562"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}