Nobody puts Kutsher’s in a corner. After closing in 2013, the former Borscht Belt hotel — famed as the inspiration for the fictional “Dirty Dancing” resort — is to be reincarnated as a $250-million yoga center. Indian billionaire Subhash Chandra plans to turn the defunct resort into a yoga and wellness center. His vision edged…
Oxford, England When my youngest daughter began working on a master’s degree at Oxford University last fall, she became the seventh generation of women in my family to live for an extended period in England. So my husband and I will take a long weekend in June and make a pilgrimage of sorts, back to…
Born and raised in New York, my mother, Rani Stevens Goodman, grew up going to the Catskill Mountains every weekend from the time she was still in the womb until her mid-twenties. For the uninitiated, The Catskills, which include Sullivan, Orange, and Ulster Counties in upstate New York, was once known as The Borscht Belt,…
I first met Mario Cuomo, the former New York State governor who died at 82 on Thursday, at Grossinger’s in the Catskills in 1982. He and Ed Koch were debaters before the New York State Broadcasters Association Annual Conference. Hearing of my Forward connection, Koch told me outright “tell your readers to rush to the…
For the last five years, Austrian artist Yvonne Oswald has been attempting to recreate a world where Alma Mahler, Franz Werfel and Gerhart Hauptmann shared conversations over dinner, while nearby, Arthur Schnitzler wrote in his diary. In this fantastical universe, visitors stood on hotel terraces that looked out toward golf courses and ski jumps, while…
As summer nears, many Hasidic communities in Brooklyn are beginning to prepare for holidays in New York’s Catskill Mountains, long the preferred destination for religious families looking for a reprieve from urban life. Yet amid the rolling green hills and low-slung bungalows, live ticks — tiny creatures that have infected many vacationers with Lyme disease,…
From the 1970s to my [last] stay at Kutsher’s in 1997, I remember it as a heymish Shangri-La — starting with the check-in welcome by owner Helen Kutsher. A post-breakfast line-dance workout, then – trying to avoid the droppings of the resident Canadian geese on the lawn — a solo rowing session in a boat…
Kutsher’s, the fabled Catskills resort hotel, is set to be demolished later this month. The 1,300-acre property near Monticello, N.Y., was sold last year for $8.18 million to Veria Lifestyle Inc., which plans to turn it into a health and wellness resort. Pre-demolition work already has begun with the clearing of trees and brush, and…
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