In the Catskills: A Century of Jewish Experience in "The Mountains" (6 page)

In 1999 I found The Cherry Hill in Greenfield Park, which I couldn’t locate originally because the road from Route 52 was closed years ago due to a bridge collapse. I located the road at the Briggs Highway end and found the old place. This hotel, where I first bused tables in 1962, the year of my bar mitzvah, is now Or Shraga, an orthodox camp. It is in incredibly great shape, as if it were still back in the early 1960s. Unlike the typical ultraorthodox places that are so run down, Or Shraga is clean and well maintained. Unlike at the many orthodox places where I have been chased away as I took photos, the campers and staff of Or Shraga were incredibly welcoming. Boys gathered around me, eager to hear my story about the history of their place. As a knot of eight or so boys would drift away, more would join me, escorting me proudly all around the grounds as I repeated my story. “Was the gazebo here then?” they asked. It certainly was, and how amazing that this little thing still stood. “Was it kosher? Did they have a
mashgiach
[resident kosher inspector] in the hotel?” Virtually every hotel was kosher, I told them, but probably not up the standards they were used to, and few had a
mashgiach
, certainly not The Cherry Hill. We walked to the building that held the casino, some staff rooms, and some cheaper guest rooms. The casino itself had been turned into a
shul
(synagogue), though recently replaced by a newer building. The boys had trouble understanding what I meant by a casino, and were most curious about the kinds of shows they had there. The room where my parents and I slept the year my mother was chef was a small study lined with books, and I told the boys and the rabbi who was sitting there that I had lived in that very room. The room in back of ours was the girl counselors’ bunk, and my recollection of this really made the boys jump, surprised to imagine me living all summer next to such a room, full of young women. The boys eagerly prodded me, “Come see the new
shul
,” and they showed me this brand-new, modern building. Quite a difference from the usual house of prayer in the typical orthodox camp up here!

These old hotels, continuing into new lives, are living reminders of the way the area used to look, when you could drive forever and see nothing but hotel after hotel, punctuated by bungalow colony after bungalow colony.

Miracles! The Catskills are full of miracles. Turning little boarding houses into hotels and bungalow colonies is a miracle. Making a place for the Jewish working class to get some fresh air is a miracle. Building a summer Eden that stretched for two counties’ worth of eternity is a miracle. Think of the pleasure experienced by any one of New York’s millions who first stepped onto the grounds of the kuchalayn, bungalow colony, or hotel and saw the cannas in the garden, smelled the fresh-mown grass, heard the gurgle of the stream, smelled the brisket in the oven and the rugelach on the table. Think of the pride of ownership among hotel and bungalow colony proprietors who tended their family-style summer havens. Think of the waiters, busboys, counselors, and musicians who were so pleased to support themselves through college, and the fun they had while doing it.

It is a world mostly lost to us physically, yet so powerful in our memories and emotions. I hope this collection of writings will return you to the places and times where this all happened. Welcome back to the Mountains.

Jewish Farmers of the Catskills

Abraham Lavender and Clarence Steinberg

I
t was not until the late 1800s and early 1900s, when Sullivan County in the lower Catskills developed an important summer resort trade, that it was accepted as part of the legendary resort Catskills, and it was in the mountains of Sullivan County and the southern part of Ulster County that the largest and most successful Jewish farm settlements developed. The lower Catskills were relatively close to New York City, an important factor in the survival of the Jewish farmers. Orange County to the south, Greene County to the north, and Delaware County to the west also had a smaller number of Jewish farmers. But Sullivan and Ulster counties comprised the area that later would be referred to by some as “the Jewish Catskills.” In fact by the 1920s Jewish resort owners in Green County were accusing Sullivan County of having stolen “the Catskill Mountains” trademark.
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It was mostly in southern Ulster and Sullivan counties that “Jewish shop workers and small store keepers from the city wended their way for a whiff of fresh air, and in the meantime began transforming a poor, run-down agricultural area into flourishing, prosperous Jewish resort and farming communities.”
²

When they started coming, the Catskill area already had many Christian farmers, and the upper Catskills had a number of resorts. Farming had been a major activity from the earliest days of settlement by the Dutch, expanding on a base developed by local Native Americans. Christian summer resorts in the upper Catskills had begun in the early 1800s, when the first major resort hotel was built in 1823 in Haines Falls.
³
Greene County, the northern part of Ulster County, and a northeastern tip of Delaware County had developed fame as the Catskill resort area by the 1840s. These resorts served New York City Christians who came up by boat to Kingston and then went by stagecoach to their destinations, mostly in Ulster County. The more prestigious older resorts in Greene and northern Ulster counties catered primarily to the Protestant aristocracy, and immigrants—mostly German or Irish in the earlier years—were unwelcome.

Both farming and operating resorts profited from and expanded with the building of railroads in the upper and lower Catskills in the robber baron era.
⁴
In the lower Catskills, the railroad began as the Midland, planned five years after the Civil War to compete with the New York Central’s New York to Chicago line. By 1870, the Midland ran its track from downtown New York City to the Catskill foothills, in Summitville, near a juncture of Sullivan and Ulster counties. It then branched into two lines, one from Summitville to Ellenville, paralleling the old and then-functioning Delaware and Hudson Canal. The other line, opening a little later, snaked through Sullivan County’s high passes and ravines—what really amounted to a wilderness, a kind of frontier—breaking out into New York’s central plateau and the Finger Lakes. This line was planned by its promoters to terminate in Chicago.
⁵

Although the Midland never got out of New York State and never rivaled the New York Central, it was significant both as the world’s first milk line and as a developer and mainstay of summer resorts. It opened a frontier that, after less than a quarter of a century of development, would become the most populous and the most successful of the Jewish farming efforts in the country. With an eye on the benefits to its future fares and freight revenues, the Midland offered almost from its beginning free freight for building materials from the city to any station on its line where one wished to build a summer resort or a farm.
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The Ellenville branch went through an area long built up because of its proximity to the old colonial highway (now U.S. Highway 209) and the canal and thus had less need for promotional offers.
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Some resorts, several quite posh and frequented by New York society, had operated in the Ellenville area before the railroad, but none served Jews. Wood was the predominant building material, and nearly all at one time or another were damaged by fire before being rebuilt and later bought by Jews.

The branch of the train route through Sullivan County led through rural areas that until then had been populated thinly by tanners who were stripping hemlock for the only known source of tannin and were building a leather trade connected by stagecoach and a turnpike to the outer world.
⁸
Centreville (later renamed Woodridge), Sandburg (later renamed Mountaindale), Liberty, Liberty Falls (later renamed Ferndale), Luzon Station (later renamed Hurleyville), Pleasant Lake (later renamed Kiamesha Lake), Loch Sheldrake, Livingston Manor, and Parksville were the Midland Railroad’s principal Sullivan County stops, and near them the presence of the railroad led to growth in these locations.

Those farmhouses benefited that offered summer board for New York City guests arriving and departing by Midland (and subsequently by Midland’s successor, the Ontario and Western). The development of the summer boarding business on a large scale would not have been possible without the railroad. Farmers and boardinghouse keepers encouraged the railroad to provide even more transportation. Speaking of Woodridge, for example, Erna Elliott noted that “the railroad was cooperative. It offered weekend round-trip specials. Often the service was inadequate and the village board repeatedly petitioned for additional trains.”
⁹

The fully fledged resort hotel, offering board and some entertainment, also benefited. Fishing and hunting were major features at the farmhouses, and parasoled lawn parties were held at the best of the hotels. Wakefield’s old photographs tell their stories in the splendid ladies and gentlemen pictured on a Centreville train platform. Those catered to at these resort hotels were largely Wall Street’s and Tammany Hall’s most powerful men, and at the farmhouses those operatives’ subordinates.
¹⁰
The latter must have fished for pleasure, because the period’s boardinghouse advertisements feature fishing for recreation. As early as the 1830s, Sullivan County was famous for the fishing in its streams and lakes, and fishing would remain its major attraction for decades.
¹¹

New York’s Christian (primarily Protestant) semiaristocracy, which had vacationed in the Catskills for decades before the advent of railroads, engaged in recreations other than fishing. They watered at the great resorts of the period such as Lackawack House, Yama Farms Inn, and Mt. Meenahga, all near Ellenville, and all of which could be traced to the stagecoach and Delaware and Hudson Canal eras. These remained Christian resorts well into the twentieth century but, like Bloomingburg’s Sha-Wanga Lodge which came with the Midland, they were sold to Jews and became Jewish resorts in the 1920s. It was poetic justice that the Dan family, Jewish purchasers of the Sha-Wanga, had brochures printed that were identical to those their Christian predecessors had used except that they replaced “No Hebrews Accommodated” with “Kosher Cuisine Featured.”
¹²
Victorian elegance characterized hotel pleasures: cigars, bustles, parasols, oysters, and, of course, the ubiquitous local staples feeding both social classes: dairy products, produce, and, in some cases, game. In addition to fishing, hayrides entertained the boarders. And, to the extent that the Midland’s and the Ontario and Western’s “Summer Homes” listings of churches actually represent that their boarders participated in religious events, some went by buggy to Sunday church services in a nearby town.
¹³
Midland’s publication, “Summer Homes,” appeared first in 1878 as part of its effort to promote the resort business it subsidized through free transport of building material and free stocking of trout streams. Photos and snippets from local newspapers, added to extracts from “Summer Homes,” chronicle customs and dimensions of that Catskill resort business.

Jews entered this Christian world of farms and summer resorts as early as 1892 in the person of Yana “John” Gerson, recognized by the society as the first Jewish farmer in the area.
¹⁴
He was born in a village near Vilna, Lithuania (then Russia), in 1854. In 1873, he married Annie Griff. He migrated to the United States in 1888 when he was thirty-four years old, leaving behind his wife, their two sons, Elias, about thirteen, and Benjamin, nine, and their two daughters, Esther, four, and Rebecca, one. Two years later, in 1890, the two sons joined their father. Annie and the two daughters migrated a year later. According to the family’s oral history, the Gerson family lived on Ludlow Street on the Lower East Side and for a while had a farm on Pitkin Avenue in Brooklyn. In the United States, Yana became “John” and Elias became “Alex.”
¹⁵