The wind over the escarpment carried the smell of smoke and the cold of a January morning. The building before the work crew had stood on this ledge for 139 years, long enough to have hosted presidents, to have been painted by the founders of an American art movement, to have become the first mountain resort in the United States. Now it was a wooden hulk, empty for decades, and the state of New York had decided the quickest way to be rid of it was fire. There was no ceremony, no crowd invited to watch the end of the first resort America ever built.
A work crew, a match, and a structure no one had run as a hotel in years. By afternoon, nothing remained on the ledge but the ledge itself, bare rock above a Hudson sealed under ice. The distance from that controlled burn to the millions who had once filled these mountains was the story of an American industry built twice in the same range and abandoned twice, a century apart, for two entirely different reasons. It began on a different ledge, more than 2,000 feet above the valley, with a story a young writer had set here in 1819 about a man who fell asleep for twenty years and woke to a world he no longer recognized.
Washington Irving published Rip Van Winkle inside a slim collection called The Sketch Book, and he placed it explicitly in these mountains, a hazy blue range visible from the Hudson River, populated in his telling by the ghosts of Henry Hudson’s Dutch crew rolling ninepins in the thunder while a lazy villager slept the Revolution away. Irving had spent almost no real time in the Catskills before he wrote them into American literature, but what he produced anyway was a founding myth for a mountain range that had, until that point, no myth at all. Within a few years, the Catskills were not simply hills to the west of the river. They were the wilderness, the first landscape in the young Republic famous enough to draw visitors who had never read a page of the book that made it so.
Something had to receive them. In 1824, a stock company of businessmen from the river village of Catskill opened the Catskill Mountain House on an escarpment ledge more than 2,000 feet above the Hudson Valley, the first mountain resort built anywhere in the United States. It was a long white building fronted by a row of tall columns, set directly on the lip of a cliff with nothing beneath its porch but air, and on most summer mornings, cloud. It was not so much a hotel as a viewing platform that happened to serve dinner.
Getting there was its own kind of pilgrimage: a steamboat up the Hudson from New York City, a transfer at the landing to a stagecoach for the climb up the old mountain road, and finally a hotel where the entire point of the visit was to stand on a porch above the clouds at sunrise and watch a valley a half mile below disappear and reappear in the mist. In 1825, a young painter came up the same river. Thomas Cole was an English-born engraver’s son who had crossed the Atlantic with his family as a teenager and worked at ordinary trades in Ohio and Pennsylvania before he picked up a brush with any real ambition behind it. He arrived in New York in the mid-1820s, traveled up the Hudson toward the escarpment, and began painting the mountains in something close to the register Irving had already written them in: vast, mythic, older than the country that had only just discovered them.
The canvases he brought back became the founding documents of the Hudson River School, the first art movement the United States could claim as entirely its own, grown out of a single stretch of river rather than imported from London or Paris. Cole did not stay the only painter on the ledge for long. Frederick Church, his most prominent student, climbed the escarpment in 1849 and painted above the clouds at sunrise from the Mountain House porch itself, the hotel’s columns just visible at the frame’s edge, the valley beneath drowned entirely in white. Neither man simply visited and left.
Both stayed at the hotel for weeks at a stretch, boarding alongside the guests, and sold canvases directly to the same travelers who had climbed the mountain to see the view the paintings now let them carry home. A hotel porch had produced, in the span of thirty years, a founding myth, a resort industry, and a national school of painting. The Catskills were famous. What arrived next would make them fashionable.
By the 1880s, the Catskill Mountain House had become a fixture of American public life in a way no resort before it had managed. Three presidents climbed the escarpment to see the view Cole and Church had put on canvas. Ulysses Grant came, still trailing the fame of the Union command he had held two decades earlier. Chester Arthur came, president through the accident of an assassin’s bullet, traveling in the plain style he preferred, off the record.
Theodore Roosevelt came years before the White House, already collecting the outdoor places his restless constitution required. The ledge was a fixed point on the national map, and it was no longer only the artistic one. Competition arrived in 1881. A wealthy Philadelphia lawyer, the story goes, had quarreled with the Mountain House management over a plate of fried chicken and left to build a rival a short walk down the ridge.
What he built was the Hotel Kaaterskill, a sprawling wooden pile with room for some 1,200 guests, more than the older hotel had ever slept in a single season. The legend of the chicken was almost certainly too tidy to be entirely true; the hotel it produced was not a legend. For a decade, the Kaaterskill outbuilt and outdrew the house that had started the whole business fifty years earlier. In 1892, the Otis Elevating Railway went up the cliff face beside it, a cable-hauled car that carried guests straight up the mountain in minutes, a climb that had once cost a traveler an entire day of steamboat and stagecoach.
The advertisements that filled New York newspapers for these hotels read like the ordinary language of the resort trade: mountain air, private baths, an orchestra on the lawn, with one additional line that ran often enough to be a matter of settled house policy rather than a single owner’s preference. No Hebrews or consumptives. The phrase did identical work on both halves of the sentence. Consumptives, patients with tuberculosis, were refused rooms for fear of contagion.
Hebrews were refused rooms because they were Jewish, a category the management of the northern Catskill hotels found equally undesirable and advertised with the same flat certainty. The grand hotels built around the escarpment, the Mountain House among them, ran that line, or a close variant, as a routine condition of business, printed beside the room rates and the train schedules. New York City in those same decades held one of the largest Jewish populations of any city on earth, and the resort world the escarpment hotels had built was, by their own printed terms, closed to it. Not at the Mountain House, not at the Kaaterskill, not at any hotel that carried the line in its advertisement.
The families the escarpment refused did not stop wanting mountain air. They started looking at land nobody advertising a resort had ever thought worth mentioning: the cheaper, rockier country to the south and west, in Sullivan and Ulster counties, ground too poor for the kind of hotel trade the Hudson side of the range had perfected. By the 1890s, those families were arriving in Sullivan County by an entirely different route, not by steamboat and stagecoach to a hotel already built for them, but on their own initiative, family by family, buying land nobody else particularly wanted. The tenements of the Lower East Side in summer made the case for leaving on their own: rooms stacked high above streets that held the day’s heat long after dark, air that did not move, whole families with nowhere else to go until September.
Sullivan County offered rocky hillsides, poor soil, and distance from all of it. For a family that had spent a decade saving from a pushcart or a sewing machine, rocky hillsides at a low price were still hillsides. The ground did not reward them. Whatever these new owners tried to grow in it, the soil returned less than they had put in, thin, glacially scraped acreage that generations of earlier farmers had already worked out and abandoned before the immigrant families ever arrived to buy it cheap.
A farm that could not feed the family that owned it could not be allowed to stand empty either, so these families did the only thing the land itself permitted. They rented what they had. A bedroom. A porch.
A shelf in the kitchen where a second family could keep its own pots and its own dishes and cook its own dinner under the same roof. The arrangement had a name before long: the kuchalayn, Yiddish for cook it yourself. A boarding house in only the loosest sense of the word. No dining room, no staff, no meals included, just a room to sleep in and a shared kosher kitchen where every family boarding under that roof cooked its own food at its own hour on its own shelf and washed its own dishes after.
It was not the American plan the northern hotels advertised, three included meals served in a columned dining room. It was closer to the tenement itself relocated ninety miles into the hills and given a view. The Ontario and Western Railway carried the borders up from the city, a line that had spent decades hauling coal and milk through Sullivan County and now discovered a different, more reliable freight riding its cars every June: whole families with steamer trunks coming up to occupy a rented shelf and a rented bed for a summer, then riding the same line home in September. By the time the season had repeated itself a few years running, the borders and the farm families hosting them had given the region a name of its own, not one any hotel brochure had chosen.
They called it the Borscht Belt, after the beet soup ladled out at nearly every one of those shared kosher kitchens, a joke the families told about themselves before anyone outside the mountains had ever heard the phrase. None of this had a founder yet, not the way the escarpment hotels could point to the men who had built them. It had only farms and families and a railway and a soup. Somewhere among those same rocky acres, within another generation, a man who had already failed once at running a restaurant in the city was going to buy a farm exactly like these, cheap, rundown, good for nothing a bank would lend against, and rent it out one bed at a time.
Jennie Grossinger was a Galician-born immigrant who had already failed once at running a restaurant in New York City before he arrived in Sullivan County in 1914 and bought a rundown farm near the hamlet of Ferndale, the kind of property no bank in the city would have lent against. He had no partners, no hotel experience, and by most accounts no plan beyond turning one failure into something else before the money ran out entirely. What he bought was not a resort. It was dirt with a farmhouse standing on it, in a county already filling with families doing the same arithmetic on land nobody in the northern Catskills had ever thought worth a brochure.
Grossinger did not build a hotel that year. He rented rooms in the house he already had to borders who arrived expecting nothing grander than a bed and a kitchen shelf. The first borders reportedly paid $9 a week: a bed, three meals, and whatever the mountain air was worth to a family that had spent July sweating through a Lower East Side walk-up. His daughter Jennie kept the books before she ever kept the guests, and within a few years she had made herself the hostess of a farm her father still ran like a ledger, one column of borders against one column of expenses.
She would spend the next four decades becoming the face of the entire region, a name recognized well beyond Sullivan County. In 1914, she was simply the daughter working the front desk while her father counted $9 borders one at a time and worried about the mortgage. In 1931, the George Washington Bridge opened across the Hudson, and the state widened and paved old Route 17 alongside it. Together, the two projects did to the drive from Manhattan what the Otis Elevating Railway had once done to a single cliff face: they collapsed it.
A trip that had taken the better part of a day now took a few hours behind the wheel of a Ford. Hotels rose to meet the shortened trip, dozens then hundreds. Brown’s rose in Loch Sheldrake. The Nevele rose in Ellenville.
Tamarack Lodge rose in Greenfield Park. Brickman’s rose in South Fallsburg. Shawanga Lodge rose in Bloomingburg. None of them needed a rail timetable anymore.
They needed a paved road and a full tank of gas, and Route 17 supplied both. The hotels kept rising even after 1929, when businesses everywhere else were failing and credit was disappearing from the rest of the American economy. The reason had nothing to do with prosperity. A week at a kuchalayn on rocky ground with a shared kitchen still cost less than a week sweating through August in a tenement, and that math held even as wages collapsed across the country.
The Depression did not close the Borscht Belt down. It sent the Belt more customers, families for whom the mountains were still cheaper than staying home. Arthur Winarick was a Russian-born barber who had built a personal fortune inventing and selling a scalp tonic called Jeris Hair Tonic, a business with nothing to do with hospitality or with these particular mountains. In 1935, that fortune put a hotel in his hands anyway.
A debtor at Kiamesha Lake signed over the Ideal Plaza in settlement of what he owed Winarick, and the barber found himself the reluctant owner of a resort he had never asked to run. He did not sell it. In 1937, he rebuilt it as the Concord Plaza, and then he kept building, year after year for the next thirty years, driven by an ambition that had nothing to do with barbering at all: to own the largest resort on the face of the earth. Grossinger’s farm, Winarick’s hotel, and the hundreds of small houses rising between them were no longer simply a shelter from exclusion.
They were becoming an industry, one farm and one debt settlement at a time. By the 1950s, more than a million guests filled Sullivan and Ulster counties every summer, and they did not arrive as strangers scattered across a season. They arrived as neighborhoods. Whole blocks moved together.
Whole buildings emptied together. Whole synagogue congregations relocated to the same corner of the mountains for eight weeks running, so that a family renting a bungalow in July found half its own apartment building from the city renting the bungalows on either side. This was not tourism in the ordinary sense. It was closer to a seasonal migration, the same neighborhoods reassembling themselves ninety miles from home year after year until the mountains had their own version of the streets the guests had left behind.
The city did not send visitors to the Catskills. It sent itself, one summer at a time. The father stayed behind Monday through Thursday working the jobs that paid for all of it, and then on Friday evening they got in the car. Route 17 filled every week with men who had spent five days alone in a hot apartment, driving north in the last daylight to rejoin a family that had already been in the mountains since June.
The traffic itself became the clock the whole region set its week by, thin on Tuesday, solid by Friday at six. The locals had a name for the men behind the wheel, not unkind, just accurate: bungalow bachelors, husbands living a work week of bachelorhood in the city so their wives and children could have a summer in the hills. What waited for them at the larger hotels ran on a single arrangement: the American plan. Three meals a day, kosher, enormous, included in the price of the room.
Not the kuchalayn shelf, the arrangement a poorer generation had made with rocky soil forty years earlier, one family cooking after another on a schedule chalked above a shared stove. The American plan was that same instinct turned inside out and sold as the whole point of the visit. Nobody cooked, nobody shared a shelf, nobody rationed a burner between four families waiting their turn. Abundance was not a feature of the stay.
Abundance was the entire sale. No hotel sold that abundance at a larger scale than Grossinger’s. At its peak, the resort covered thirty-five buildings across 1,200 acres and served some 150,000 guests a year. It had its own post office.
It had its own airstrip. Its main dining room alone seated 1,300 people eating at once, waiters moving down the aisles in a single choreographed shift, three times a day, all summer. In 1952, Grossinger’s became the first resort anywhere in the world to cover a ski slope with artificial snow, manufacturing in February the one commodity these mountains had never needed help producing in July. Picture the grounds at Ferndale on a Friday evening in July of 1952.
Route 17 carries a line of sedans that does not thin until well after dark. Each one turns up the drive past a post office already closed for the day and an airstrip lit only by the last of the sun. The dining-room windows go bright in blocks as the staff sets 1,300 places. Somewhere behind the kitchen, the smell of a Friday brisket moves out across the lawn on the evening air.
Car doors, a hundred at a time. Children’s voices still awake past their bedtime, running the paths between buildings. A porter’s radio playing faintly from an open window. A farm no bank in the city would have lent against forty years earlier is now a small city of its own with its own mail, its own runway, and 1,300 places set for dinner before the first guest has even parked the car.
Jennie Grossinger had inherited a boarding house built on $9 borders and a ledger her father kept by hand. What she built from it through the 1940s and into the 1950s was something closer to a court, and she was its permanent hostess. Champions trained on her grounds. Singers were discovered on her stages.
Reporters filed stories from her dining room as if it were a beat of its own, and the wire services ran them nationally. Rocky Marciano prepared for his championship fights at Grossinger’s, running the mountain roads before dawn and sparring in a ring the hotel had built for exactly this purpose, until the resort’s name became shorthand in the boxing press for a training camp of real consequence. A teenage singer named Eddie Fisher performed for the guests one summer and was heard, by one account, by someone who mattered, the kind of discovery Catskill hotels claimed for a dozen other careers over the following decade with varying degrees of accuracy. Grossinger’s had stopped being a place people escaped to.
It had become a place careers passed through. A few miles down the same roads at Kiamesha Lake, Arthur Winarick was solving every problem the only way he knew how. The Russian-born barber who had taken the Ideal Plaza in payment of a debt had already rebuilt it once in 1937, and rebuilding for Winarick had never been a project with an end date. By the 1950s, the Concord covered some 2,000 acres and offered 1,500 guest rooms, and its main dining room could seat 3,000 people at a single service, a number that made even Grossinger’s 1,300 places look almost modest by comparison.
Winarick cut a golf course into the hillside and named it the Monster, and the name held. Golfers who played it ranked it among the hardest courses in the country, a deliberate, engineered cruelty laid into a resort otherwise built entirely on comfort and abundance. Every time the Concord ran short of rooms or beds or stage time, Winarick’s answer was the same one it had always been. Another wing went up.
Another floor went on top of it. Another act got booked into the showroom. The Concord did not grow by plan. It grew by reflex, one addition answering one shortage, year after year for thirty straight years.
Not every hotel chased that kind of scale. In Thompson, the Kutscher family ran their hotel and country club as a single household business, passed down inside the family from one generation to the next without ever once changing hands, three generations working the same grounds long after Grossinger’s had grown into something closer to a corporation with a hostess at its head. It was at Kutscher’s in the early 1950s that a lanky Philadelphia teenager named Wilt Chamberlain spent his summers carrying suitcases for tips, a bellhop who happened, in the hours he was not working, to be unbeatable on the hotel’s outdoor basketball court. Kutscher’s summer games became known for it well beyond the hotel’s own guests: staff against staff, hotel against hotel, Chamberlain in the middle of nearly all of them, years before his name meant anything outside Sullivan County.
By the middle of the decade, the mountains held a bellhop who would become the tallest name in American sports, a golf course built to punish the men who dared finish it, and a hostess whose dining room had turned into a stage for the famous and the soon-to-be-famous in equal measure. The rooms were full, the dining halls were full, and after the last plate of the American plan was cleared each night, the real business of the Borscht Belt was only just beginning. The dining rooms had fed a million guests a summer. The nightclubs built out behind them fed something else: an entire generation’s sense of what was funny, rehearsed nightly in front of an audience that had already eaten, had nowhere left to go, and expected, as a matter of the American plan itself, to be entertained until the small hours.
Every hotel of any size employed a figure the region called the tumler, a word borrowed from the Yiddish for commotion, whose only job was to keep the guests laughing from the pool deck at ten in the morning to the nightclub floor past midnight. Grossinger’s ran the trade at its most refined. Lou Goldstein, hired originally as a golf instructor and kept on for decades as the resort’s full-time tumler, turned a children’s schoolyard game into a poolside institution, standing at the shallow end each afternoon calling Simon Says to grown men in swim trunks who obeyed him without embarrassment, because that, too, was part of what a week at Grossinger’s had always been sold as buying. The stage work paid less than the tumler’s tips, and it asked for more.
Sid Caesar was still a teenager when he picked up a saxophone in a Catskill hotel band, working the dance sets years before he had a single line of comic material to his name. Jerry Lewis worked the same circuit as a busboy, clearing plates from tables where his own parents were performing that same evening, a teenager stacking dishes in front of an audience that had no idea the kid clearing their table would end up owning half of it. Neither man was unusual in this. The mountains did not so much discover comedians as manufacture them on a nightly schedule, in rooms too small and too close to hide a bad set.
Mel Brooks worked the circuit. Joan Rivers worked the circuit. Don Rickles, Henny Youngman, and Rodney Dangerfield worked it, too, each one sharpening an act in front of the same unforgiving audience of garment workers and their wives, an audience that had paid for comfort and would not sit quietly through a joke that failed to land. The business ran on a fixed architecture repeated with only minor variation from Grossinger’s to the Concord to Kutscher’s and every hotel with a nightclub wing between them: a comedian first, a singer second, then an hour of dancing, then a midnight buffet laid out for guests who had already eaten dinner at seven and would eat again before bed.
Two shows a night, every night, all season. Not a special booking, simply the ordinary business of running a hotel in these mountains. The circuit supplying all of it was dense enough that a working comedian could play a different hotel every single night of a Catskill summer, ten weeks running, without ever repeating a room or a stage. Bookers moved acts between properties on a schedule as fixed as a factory line, one hotel handing a comedian off to the next before the ink on his last contract had dried.
By the middle of the 1950s, the mountains held their own comedy circuit, their own stage comedians, and their own audience large enough to launch a career before it ever reached a television camera in New York. The midnight buffet went out every night that summer, the tables reset before the last dancer had left the floor, the kitchen already setting up breakfast service before the band packed its instruments. Two shows a night, every night, all season. The lights over Kiamesha Lake did not go dark before four in the morning.
And then, very quietly, the reasons the Borscht Belt existed at all began to dissolve one by one. No hotel closed to mark the moment. No headline announced it. The Sullivan County historian John Conway later reduced the whole unraveling to three words: the three A’s.
Air conditioning, assimilation, and airfare. Each of the three worked on its own schedule in its own decade, and not one of them needed a single hotel in Sullivan County to fail a single booking before it started doing its damage. Air conditioning arrived first, bolted into the windows of city apartments and offices through the 1950s and into the 1960s, and it did its work plainly. For two generations, escaping the summer heat of a Lower East Side walk-up had been the entire premise of the trip north, the reason a family paid for a bed at a kuchalayn, the reason the fathers drove up Route 17 every Friday evening, the reason the migration existed at all.
Once a compressor and a window unit could do the same job for the price of a monthly bill, escaping the heat stopped being a necessity that required a mountain at all. Airfare did the second piece of the work, and it did it to the same families the mountains had always depended on. Cheap jet service put Miami Beach a few hours from the city, put the Caribbean within the same afternoon, put Europe within reach of a two-week vacation for people who had never before been able to afford the distance. A week in the mountains now had to compete with a week anywhere on Earth, and the mountains, whatever else they offered, could not manufacture an ocean to answer that competition.
Assimilation finished what the thermostat and the jet engine had started. The same prejudice that had once printed no Hebrews or consumptives beside a hotel’s room rates receded through the middle of the century, and the resorts that had built that policy into their advertising began one by one to welcome the guests they had once turned away. The Borscht Belt had existed because Jewish families were shut out of every other resort in the country. When the doors elsewhere opened, the reason for a resort world of its own went with them.
The children who had grown up on the American plan, now doctors, now lawyers, now professors, took their own vacations at hotels that had refused their parents a room. The old rhythm of the season collapsed from the inside as well. A summer-long family stay had always depended on a mother who did not otherwise work, and through the 1960s and 1970s, in Sullivan County kitchens no less than everywhere else, that stopped being the arrangement. The season-long stay had needed the stay-at-home summer to make sense of it.
Once that assumption gave way, the arrangement had nowhere left to stand. Now go back to the ledge. On the morning of January 25, 1963, the state of New York, which had acquired the derelict Catskill Mountain House some years earlier, set the empty building on fire and let it burn to the ground above the frozen valley. There was no ceremony, no crowd invited to watch.
There was a work crew, a match, and a wooden hulk nobody had run as a hotel in decades, standing where Cole and Church had once painted, above a Hudson sealed under ice. The first resort built in America ended as a controlled fire on a winter morning, and by afternoon, there was nothing on the escarpment but the ledge itself. Six years later, the mountains drew the largest crowd they had ever drawn, and it had nothing to do with a kosher dining room. In August of 1969, half a million young people arrived at Max Yasgur’s dairy farm in Bethel, Sullivan County, for a festival that borrowed its name from a town forty miles away.
The dying Borscht Belt, dissolving through that same summer, could not have booked most of them a room if it had tried. They had not come for the American plan, or a tumler at the pool, or a comedian working a midnight set. They had come looking for an escape their parents’ hotels had never learned how to sell, and they found it on a dairy farm down the road. The hotels themselves were still standing.
What no longer stood was any reason for them to. They came first for the twenty-room operations, the kuchalayns that had never installed air conditioning because air conditioning had never been the point of a kuchalayn, the family-run houses that ran on a crew of neighbors instead of a staff. They came next for the midsized hotels, the Brown’s and Tamarack tier that had filled a hundred rooms in 1955 and could not fill forty by 1970. They came last, but they came for the famous names, too.
The closures ran through the 1960s and into the 1970s in the hundreds, in exactly that order. Small first, then large. Jennie Grossinger died in 1972, on the grounds of the resort her father had opened as a $9-a-week boarding house fifty-eight years earlier. She did not live to see it close.
Fourteen years later, in 1986, the Grossinger family sold the hotel for $9 million, and the dining room that had once set 1,300 places for a single dinner shut for good. $9 a week in 1914, $9 million in 1986. The distance between those two figures is not simply inflation. Inflation alone does not turn a boarding house into thirty-five buildings across 1,200 acres.
It is the entire arc of this story compressed into a coincidence of digits that nobody arranged and that the record simply happens to contain. One year later, in 1987, a film called Dirty Dancing turned a fictional version of the hotel Kellerman’s into a permanent fixture of American nostalgia, playing forever on a screen, a resort that had already closed its doors before a single frame of it was shot. The Concord held out longest among the giants. Arthur Winarick’s answer to every problem had always been another wing, another floor, another act, and the hotel he built that way ran until 1998, outlasting Grossinger’s by twelve years on the strength of scale alone.
It sold at auction in 1999 for roughly $10 million, a fraction by any measure of what Winarick had poured into 2,000 acres and 1,500 rooms across three decades of continuous construction. The hotel stood empty for nearly another decade before it was demolished in 2008. Kutscher’s outlasted them both. It closed in 2013, the last operating grand resort of the Borscht Belt, run by the same family for more than a century, and the buildings came down the year after.
Grossinger’s itself stood empty for three decades, and in that time it became one of the most photographed ruins in the United States, not despite the decay but because of it. Urban explorers documented the indoor pool with birch trees growing through the shattered skylight, the ballrooms carpeted floor to cornice in moss. The $9 farmhouse’s descendants returned in the end to forest. Demolition crews leveled the last standing building on October 19, 2018.
The same year, a casino called Resorts World Catskills opened on the old Concord grounds at Kiamesha Lake, built at a reported cost of $1. 2 billion, a bet that gambling could revive what vacationing had built and television, air conditioning, and a jet engine had unbuilt. A luxury wellness center rose on the site where Kutscher’s bellhop once beat the whole staff at basketball. In Ellenville, a museum opened to hold what the bulldozers had missed, cataloging tumlers and kuchalayns and the Monster golf course behind glass.
The bungalow colonies fill again every July. The families are Hasidic and Orthodox now, in South Fallsburg, in Kiamesha Lake, in Monticello, keeping in the same mountains roughly the schedule of summer migration a different set of Jewish families kept a century earlier. The hotels that once printed no Hebrews beside their room rates are gone. The land they stood on now belongs every summer to the people it was built to keep out.
High above the Hudson, the ledge where the Catskill Mountain House stood for 139 years is bare rock now inside a state campground. The wind still moves across it the way it moved across the porch columns in 1849. The valley below still disappears into cloud on a summer morning and reappears by noon, exactly as it did for Cole, for Church, for Grant and Arthur and Roosevelt. Every hotel this story has named is gone now, or a casino, or a museum, or a name in a nostalgia film.
The view Cole painted charges nothing and answers to no one. It is still there exactly as it was. It is the only thing in this story that never closed.
