Long before talk of blackjack and slots, New Yorkers looking to escape the sticky summers downstate sought refuge in hundreds of boarding houses, bungalow colonies and hotels - big and small - in the Catskills.

Like most New York City Jews, my family referred to the area as "the mountains." My mother knew Lillian Brown, owner of Brown's Hotel in Loch Sheldrake. Hers was one of the bigger resorts; it opened in 1944 and kept growing, appealing to young Jewish families. At one point, it had five pools and engulfed a smaller hotel that sat adjacent to it.

We spent part of every summer at Browns from the mid-1960s until the late 1970s, when I started college. The hotel closed in the mid-1980s and was reinvented as Grandview Palace, a condominium community, in the 1990s.

"Dirty Dancing, " the 1987 movie that was supposed to capture the essence of the Catskill resorts in their heyday, did not do justice to Browns.

For a child, day camp - swimming, sports, arts and crafts and theater (we did a vanilla version of "Hair" in 1969) - took up a lot of the time. My parents played cards, golfed, took to the shuffleboard courts and also engaged in lively discussions with lecturers the hotel would sponsor on topics from Zionism to retirement investing.

The nights were the best. There was always dancing after dinner, both at a teen club (rock 'n roll) and on the main stage (ballroom). Everybody got dressed up. I remember lots of silk, satin and sequins and bouffant hairdos, especially on Friday and Saturdays, when the elegant Jerry Lewis Theatre Club would feature some big-name acts.

I saw Carol Burnett, Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme, Don Rickles, Sammy Davis Jr., Red Buttons and even Jerry Lewis himself a number of times. He got his start at Browns, where he was a bellhop who was occasionally allowed a few minutes on stage for his stand-up act.

And from the time I was about 8, I've been in love with Tony Bennett. I was in the hotel lobby when Tony went by, patted me on the head and called me darling. It was common to see the celebrities mingling with guests, sitting at the bar or coffee shop, or relaxing by the huge kidney-shaped outdoor pool on orange-cushioned white wooden chaise lounges.

The Browns had its share of famous athletes. In the dining room, I remember meeting Mets pitcher Tom Seaver and Ed Kranepool, who played first base. I'm pretty sure it was in 1969, the year the Mets won the World Series.

My grandmother, who had been coming to the mountains since the 30s when there were many more smaller, family-owned hotels, loved the veranda near Brown's main entrance. She would sit and watch people checking in and converse, in Yiddish, with other old ladies up from the Bronx, or Brooklyn.

But for her, by the middle 1970s, the mountain culture had already taken a downward turn. It began dying out in earnest a few years later, as vacations to Disneyland, Europe and Miami became popular. Small hotels closed and big ones, like Browns, struggled.

It was about that time that round button-type signs that read "casinos mean jobs" started appearing on hotel billboards on Route 17.

Back then, the idea was that each large hotel would have its own small casino, turning the area into a miniature Las Vegas or Atlantic City. The casinos would keep the Borsht Belt viable, giving city people a reason to keep coming to the resorts.

There was no mention of Native American partnerships, land claims, settlement agreements and millions of dollars in municipal casino fees.

Those things weren't even part of the vocabulary at the time.

The thought of the state trading away the culture of the mountains to end Indian tribes' claim to land in other areas, to Lillian Brown, would have been abhorrent as non-kosher food in the dining room.

I used to be sad that Browns Hotel had morphed into condos. But given what happened to most of the big resorts - Grossingers demolished, the Concord closed, Shenks and the Pines in ruins - Browns fared better than most. Although it looks slightly different, at least it's still there.

To a great degree, the company that bought the hotel understood its cultural and historical significance and successfully incorporated much of its old grandeur into its new life. The tree-lined semicircular drive I remember filled with fancy cars, luggage and bellhops is still there, as is the hotel's elegant porte cochere.

And, most important, Grandview Palace has done justice to Browns and found a way to exist without being dependent on casino gaming and the politics of everything connected to it.

Staff writer Louise Hoffman Broach can be reached at 253-5311 ext. 238 or louise.hoffman@lee.net