One night in January, an Orthodox Jewish real estate developer brought a handgun to a planning board meeting in a small upstate New York town. The gun was on the waist of one of the two uniformed security guards accompanying Shalom Lamm, who may be the most hated man in the town of Mamakating. The…
In the mid-1980s, Eleanor Bergstein returned to Grossinger’s Resort in the Catskills, where she had vacationed as a child during its heyday, to research her screenplay for “Dirty Dancing.” One night, she got a call from Hollywood. “While I was on the phone,” she told the Forward, “the operator broke in and said: ‘You better…
Photographer Marisa Scheinfeld pointed to a pile of rubble at what’s left of the famous Catskills resort hotel the Concord — once a glamorous beast of luxury with 1,200 rooms, three golf courses and a 3,000-seat dining room. “Over here was the outdoor pool, which was a tremendous, Olympic-sized swimming pool that I worked at…
When I set out to write a story on the Catskills — its famed legacy, its tremendous decline and what the future holds — I knew I wanted to spend a couple of days upstate, talking with locals who witnessed the area in its heyday and seeing what’s left of it for myself. Photographer Marisa…
Helen Kutsher, the face of her family-owned resort in the Catskill Mountains for decades, has died. Kutsher, who came to be known as the matriach of what was called the Borscht Belt, died Saturday in Philadelphia. She was 89 and spent much of her life in Monticello, N.Y., in a house on the grounds of…
When it comes to Catskills tourism, it seems that everything old is news again. The mountainous region of upstate New York is trying to unbuckle itself from its “borscht belt” pigeonhole as a destination for Jewish city families by girding itself with new amenities to attract a hip and with-it tourist of today. The story’s…
Old Borscht Belt hotels never die…they just get boarded up until a new buyer comes along to save them. At least that’s the story when it comes to the Nevele, which closed its doors in the Catskills back in 2009. The Nevele may indeed have a new lease on life if a sale to the…
The film “Welcome to Kutsher’s: The Last Catskills Resort,” which will have its world premiere as the closing event of the New York Jewish Film Festival, lovingly lays out the history of the Borscht Belt vacation with a grand smorgasbord of history, photos and film footage, and an appropriate dollop of nostalgic schmaltz. The Borscht…
