The Hills Beyond How an Appalachian range became the Catskills. | By Jay Weiser
http://www.weeklystandard.com/the-hills-beyond/article/2000792
Stephen Silverman and Raphael Silver offer a boisterous, colorful history of New York’s Catskill Mountains, but like the tummlers of yesteryear, once they depart, it’s hard to remember what the noise was about. The Catskills have always been at the edge of the American experience—a hinterland of New York City. Unlike William Cronon’s classic Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, which examined how 19th-century Chicago transformed the Midwest’s ecology and economy, The Catskills offers loosely linked stories where the Big Apple is forever popping up to take over the narrative.
As the authors note, only in the last two centuries have people even called the Catskills a single mountain range. Despite heroic efforts to unify the story, the book is really about three regions: the Hudson Valley, at the center of American history and culture from 1750-1850; the remote, central Catskills, forever wild by statute and the primary source of New York City’s water supply; and the southern Catskills, famed for their 20th-century Jewish resorts.
The problems with the Catskills-as-autonomous-region start at the beginning. The Hudson River was a water highway in both the French and Indian War and the American Revolution, but the theater’s key events took place far south, in Manhattan, and far north, in the region’s Lake George-Lake Champlain extension. The authors somehow discern George Washington’s tactical genius from his string of New York military disasters in 1776, but it hardly matters: Washington never fought in the Catskills.
They turn to Washington Irving’s short stories, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle,” which satirize the vanishing Dutch world of the Hudson Valley and the disconcerting changes in postrevolutionary society. Irving was actually a New York City and Europe-based writer—though like his antihero Ichabod Crane, he later resided in the Hudson Valley on the opposite bank from the Catskills. Fortunately, two of James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, which similarly contrast the vanishing Native American culture with that of the European-descended frontiersmen, are actually set in the Catskills.
The Hudson River School painters also contrasted the vanishing rural world with the booming 19th-century economy. Even as the Hudson Valley bustled with tanneries, factories, and bluestone quarries providing the paving for New York City’s sidewalks, painter Thomas Cole and his fellow Romantics found the sublime in Katterskill Falls, setting nature’s untamed magnificence against civilization’s distant encroachments. Lacking an eye for art—or, perhaps, adequate search skills in Google Images—Silverman and Silver contrast the Hudson River School painters with the allegedly “cold” landscapes of England’s J. M. W. Turner, which were far more melodramatic exemplars of Romanticism.
While the authors commendably provide copious citations (in contrast to many popular histories that expect readers to take it on faith), their long quotations from antiquarian sources add charm at the price of clarity. More recent histories are neglected: The discussion of Catskills native Sojourner Truth and New York slavery omits her pre-abolitionist membership in the radical Kingdom of Matthias sect. The book’s organization is neither fully chronological nor topical, making it hard to follow the thread.
The Catskills becomes more coherent with the rise and fall of Catskills resorts during 1850-1975. Here many of the long quotes come from interviews with the Grossinger’s resort family. The real story is the creation of a resort hinterland for New York City parallel to Chicago’s creation of a Wisconsin resort region. Steamboats created a market for Hudson Valley luxury resorts (restricted to Christians in most of the 19th
century), and rail later opened up the southern Catskills.
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By the 1910s, the railroads, eager to attract traffic, offered fares to suit the pocketbooks of members of the massive Eastern European Jewish immigration. Unlike Irving, Cooper, and the Hudson River painters, the Jewish immigrants lacked nostalgia for a past that their forebears were not part of. Nor, coming from industrial New York City and its giant garment industry, did they share the upscale 19th-century quest for the unspoiled sublime. And so the previously remote (and therefore less expensive) southern Catskills became the scenic-yet-raucous Borscht Belt, with a range of accommodations from humble bungalow colonies to the 1,200-room Concord Hotel, where ladies were expected to change their finery three times a day.
The Borscht Belt also served as a training ground for entertainers: Milton Berle, Buddy Hackett, and Joan Rivers strutted their stuff at the Concord’s Imperial Room. The same rising incomes and affordable train fares (as the authors fail to note) created the heavily Jewish Miami Beach winter resort starting about a decade later. The Borscht Belt resorts’ colorful family owners (and colorful gangsters) and their increasingly lavish facilities (often designed by the pop-modernist master architect Morris Lapidus, best known for his Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach) make for the most vivid episodes here.
By the 1960s, home air conditioners made Catskills summers less essential for sweaty New Yorkers, passenger railroads gave way to inexpensive highway and air travel, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 made it illegal for resorts to bar Jews. Europe and the American West became more enticing destinations. The famous Woodstock concert of 1969 was a premonition of decline: Hippies wanted free love and free tickets, not costly resort vacations. Starting in the 1970s, the Borscht Belt eroded. Attempts to revive the region with casino gambling were blocked for 40 years; but now that the gambling boom has turned to bust, New York’s license raj has at last permitted a casino on the site of the old Concord. Today, the Catskills are an attraction for Hasidic Jews (who like the low costs and close-in living afforded by former bungalow colonies) and yuppies priced out of weekend homes in the Hudson Valley proper. Kutsher’s Hotel and Country Club was the last resort to close, in 2013. It was demolished to make way for a new hotel offering today’s vacationers “yoga sciences” and “ayurvedic medical treatment.”
Forever a hinterland, but now for a new generation.
Jay Weiser is associate professor of law at Baruch College.
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