1675-30 Fontainebleau �.. -
A
CATSKILL
CULTURE
4 Mau#t aiot Ran. /lieman.ies al Me
Q4ea1 RedaVI 4/tea
PHIL BROWN
TEMPLE UNIVERSITY PRESS
PHILADELPHIA
�i Haag
.1/au Ilse /ewisk eatslhttts Staated
endless building and renovating of the resort industry supported many in con-
struction. As contractor Jerome Nosenchuck points out, "Right after the war
there was a big push; everyone had to have a pool. Over a fifteen-year period
• we put in 100 to 150. There were hundreds and hundreds put in throughout
. the county. It became a thing. Pools were what people demanded. I never heard
• of a hotel without a pool."
This was a supernova period—the Catskills grew large and bright, before
• exploding. In the postwar years,the Catskill fame,its fabled entertainment,and
•
• its amazing group of resort facilities became well known to a wider group of
people. Around one million people a year vacationed in the Mountains each
• summer.A shopkeeper who ran a clothing and linen store in Monticello recalls
staying open till midnight on weekends,waiting for movies to let out.The delis
were important hot spots of village life;Kaplan's in Monticello,Singer's in Lib-
. erty, and Frank and Bob's in South Fallsburg might be open till three or four
in the morning on weekends.
From 1957-1967, Ben Kaplan was the executive director of the Sullivan
County Hotel Association (Ellenville was included, even though it was in Ul-
ster County). He recalls how the hotels organized a large party in a New York
City armory during the winter,with hotels putting ads in a specially published
journal,grouped by town. In this era,New York City's newspapers sported end-
less pages of ads for Catskill hotels.
This was also the time when Catskill resort owners expanded into Miami
Beach. Ben Novick of the Laurels built the mammoth Fountainbleu, the epit-
ome of a glitzy Miami Beach modern hotel. The family that ran the White Roe
owned the Plymouth and leased the Adams;and the Kutshers owned the Bea-
con and the Haddon Hall, the latter a well-photographed tropical-deco hotel
where my parents ran a restaurant in 1958. The Grossinger family built the
Grossinger Beach Hotel in 1940,only to have it requisitioned by the Air Force
•
shortly after it opened, since Miami Beach was a major military installation in
World War II. In 1945, they sold it and bought the Pancoast, a previously
restricted-to-gentiles hotel; soon after buying the Pancoast, they sold it to a
group of investors who were putting up the new Seville Hotel. Dave Levinson
of the Tamarack built the Algiers in 1951, and at various times also owned or
managed the Marlin, Sorrento, and Edgewater. The Gibbers' owners ran the
Cadet, the Olympic ran the Avalon, the Evans had the Seagull and the Gover-
nor,the Stevensville operated the Ritz Plaza and Lucerne,and the orthodox Pi-
oneer ran the King David. Charles Yavers left his family hotel, the Loch Shel-
drake Inn, in 1950 to open the Nautilus Hotel in Miami Beach. George and
• [ 43 1
ClCHAPTER 2
4 A Sarah Blum ran Blum's Hotel in Youngsville in the summer and operated the
Lord Balfour in Miami Beach in the winter. As their daughter, Roberta, re-
, counts, "They decided they would like to reside in Miami Beach permanently,
so they put their Catskill Mountain hotel up for sale through an ad in the New
A York Times and were answered by a family so enthusiastically interested in the
eighty-eight acres for operating a dude ranch that they exchanged their hotel
Jewi in Miami Beach [The Viking Hotel] for the Catskill Mountain one, sight un-
Ame seen."
a re: A crucial element of this 1950s and 1960s period is that these Jews were
195( playing and relaxing to escape fresh,piercing memories of the Holocaust.The
colo escape to the Mountains was in part an escape from the horror of having many
Note of their family and friends killed by the Nazis.A bellhop who spent much time
ple< at a resort with many survivors recounted that "for the post—World War II
i refugees, the survivors from the camps, it was almost like heaven. It was free-
Sull
F dom from everything." The resurgence of religiosity or at least Jewish self-
whc awareness led Jews to seek their Jewish cultural roots in the Catskill Yiddishkeit,
even though they sought the modernity of affluence and vacation life at the
losi
oft same time;the miracle of the Catskills was that it could provide both.
Even as the golden age brought growing numbers to the Catskills,the seeds
ron
I of decline were already there. By the mid-1960s, enough hotels were in trou-
er's
ble that the future of the Catskills seemed fragile. But the story of the Catskills'
fat]
decline can wait until after I tell about the rich life of the area.
opE
of
rec
ow
the
an
12
Je
m
in
g]
m la
pl al
kc
ti se
fi • In
44
W++rIrIMr4.r-r r .... t r -..444,41.....4441'
..444,41...1:MA441t:.lr 4