Sullivan County's tourism legacy hails back the 1880s.
Prior to the tourism industry's arrival, the area thrived following the construction of the D&H Canal in 1828 that brought Pennsylvania coal to the Hudson River.
There were timber industries, bluestone quarrying and leather tanning, thanks to tannic acid from the county's hemlock trees. The leather industry blossomed during the Civil War with a high demand for leather boots, holsters and saddlebags.
But following the war, tourism became the county's economic engine.
Between the 1880s and 1915, New York City tourists came by train to the area, staying in grand Victorian-era hotels.
The tourism industry died down by 1915, when the Catskills' fresh air and hemlock trees began drawing a different kind of visitor -tuberculosis patients visiting sanitariums. The first Jewish tourists came to Sullivan County to get treatment for such illnesses thanks to the poor sanitation standards in new York City.
"New York City was an unbearable place to live at the time," said Sullivan County historian John Conway.
By the 1920s, there were numerous resorts and bungalow colonies in the region.
The Jewish tourists were "tied together ... because there was a lot of anti-Semitism. A lot of hotels wouldn't let them in or if they would let them in, they couldn't eat kosher," said Phil Brown, a sociology professor at Brown University and president of the Catskills Institute, which promotes research on Jewish life in the Catskills.
In the 1930s, Conway said, Catskills hotels in Sullivan County were overrun by Jewish gangsters, who were eventually pushed out by aggressive prosecution.
With kosher food stores and synagogues already in place and organized crime driven out, the "golden age" of the area's tourism industry hit stride by 1940.
By 1953, there were 538 hotels, 50,000 bungalows and 1,000 boarding houses, Conway said.
"You could just drive endless miles and go from bungalow to bungalow," Brown said.
Neighborhoods from New York City would vacation together at the same spot in the Catskills.
To entertain families staying for long stretches at a time, many hotels had indoor and outdoor swimming pools by the 1940s. Hotels offered lectures, bands, golf courses and comics. Guests played cards and organized ballgames, attended movie nights, champagne nights, held dance contests, exhibitions and amateur talent shows, Brown said. There was a basketball league of college players who were bellhops and waiters by day and played games by night. And the Monticello trotter horse track opened in 1957.
By 1965, the golden era of Jewish tourism was over as families became less religious and more nuclear, with the advent of commercial flights to vacation destinations worldwide and the spread of air conditioning that made staying put in the city bearable.
With fewer and fewer guests, hotel business dried up over the decades, and the buildings were "just hanging on spit and polish," Brown said.
Staff writer Amaris Elliott-Engel can be reached at 253-5311 ext. 282 or at amaris.elliot-engel@lee.net
There were timber industries, bluestone quarrying and leather tanning, thanks to tannic acid from the county's hemlock trees. The leather industry blossomed during the Civil War with a high demand for leather boots, holsters and saddlebags.
But following the war, tourism became the county's economic engine.
Between the 1880s and 1915, New York City tourists came by train to the area, staying in grand Victorian-era hotels.
The tourism industry died down by 1915, when the Catskills' fresh air and hemlock trees began drawing a different kind of visitor -tuberculosis patients visiting sanitariums. The first Jewish tourists came to Sullivan County to get treatment for such illnesses thanks to the poor sanitation standards in new York City.
"New York City was an unbearable place to live at the time," said Sullivan County historian John Conway.
By the 1920s, there were numerous resorts and bungalow colonies in the region.
The Jewish tourists were "tied together ... because there was a lot of anti-Semitism. A lot of hotels wouldn't let them in or if they would let them in, they couldn't eat kosher," said Phil Brown, a sociology professor at Brown University and president of the Catskills Institute, which promotes research on Jewish life in the Catskills.
In the 1930s, Conway said, Catskills hotels in Sullivan County were overrun by Jewish gangsters, who were eventually pushed out by aggressive prosecution.
With kosher food stores and synagogues already in place and organized crime driven out, the "golden age" of the area's tourism industry hit stride by 1940.
By 1953, there were 538 hotels, 50,000 bungalows and 1,000 boarding houses, Conway said.
"You could just drive endless miles and go from bungalow to bungalow," Brown said.
Neighborhoods from New York City would vacation together at the same spot in the Catskills.
To entertain families staying for long stretches at a time, many hotels had indoor and outdoor swimming pools by the 1940s. Hotels offered lectures, bands, golf courses and comics. Guests played cards and organized ballgames, attended movie nights, champagne nights, held dance contests, exhibitions and amateur talent shows, Brown said. There was a basketball league of college players who were bellhops and waiters by day and played games by night. And the Monticello trotter horse track opened in 1957.
By 1965, the golden era of Jewish tourism was over as families became less religious and more nuclear, with the advent of commercial flights to vacation destinations worldwide and the spread of air conditioning that made staying put in the city bearable.
With fewer and fewer guests, hotel business dried up over the decades, and the buildings were "just hanging on spit and polish," Brown said.
Staff writer Amaris Elliott-Engel can be reached at 253-5311 ext. 282 or at amaris.elliot-engel@lee.net
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