Why Nobody Wants to Visit the Catskills Anymore

At its peak in the 1950s, the Catskills held over 500 resort hotels and drew half a million visitors every summer — the largest vacation empire in America. The grand hotels of Sullivan County rivaled anything in Las Vegas or Miami Beach. The Concord alone had 1,500 rooms and the biggest nightclub in the country. Grossinger's had its own airstrip and post office. These weren't modest retreats. They were monuments to ambition, built by immigrant families on rocky farmland that couldn't grow crops, in mountains that only became available to them because every other resort in the Northeast had shut them out. The story of the Borscht Belt is the story of what happens when an entire industry — the hotels, the entertainment, the jobs, the towns that depended on all of it — is built on a wound that eventually heals. From the first boarding house in 1914 to the last resort closing in 2013, this is the rise and fall of America's forgotten vacation empire. Sources: Smithsonian Magazine, "The Woman Who Built the Waldorf of the Catskills" (2015) The Catskills Institute, Northeastern University — Hotels and Bungalows archive (catskillsinstitute.northeastern.edu) Catskills Borscht Belt Museum, Ellenville, NY — History collection (borschtbeltmuseum.org) Marisa Scheinfeld, The Borscht Belt: Revisiting the Remains of America's Jewish Vacationland (Cornell University Press, 2016) PBS, Make 'Em Laugh — "History: Clubs, Camps, and Catskills" New York Almanack, "Catskills Resort History: The Beginning of the End" (2014)