The Catskills: Its History and How It Changed America

The Catskills: Its History and How It Changed America

The Catskills (â€œCat Creekâ€ in Dutch), Americaâ€™s original frontier, northwest of New York City, with its seven hundred thousand acres of forest land preserve and its five countiesâ€”Delaware, Greene, Sullivan, Ulster, Schoharie; Americaâ€™s first great vacationland; the subject of the nineteenth-century Hudson River School paintings that captured the almost godlike majesty of the mountains and landscapes, the skies, waterfalls, pastures, cliffs . . . refuge and home to poets and gangsters, tycoons and politicians, preachers and outlaws, musicians and spiritualists, outcasts and rebels . . .

Stephen Silverman and Raphael Silver tell of the turning points that made the Catskills so vital to the development of America: Henry Hudsonâ€™s first spotting the distant blue mountains in 1609; the New York State constitutional convention, resulting in New Yorkâ€™s own Declaration of Independence from Great Britain and its own constitution, causing the ire of the invading British army . . . the Catskills as a popular attraction in the 1800s, with the construction of the Catskill Mountain House and its rugged imitators that offered WASP guests â€œone-hundred percent restrictedâ€ accommodations (â€œHebrews will knock vainly for admissionâ€), a policy that remained until the Catskills became the curative for tubercular patients, sending real-estate prices plummeting and the WASP enclave on to richer pastures . . .

Here are the gangsters (Jack â€œLegsâ€ Diamond and Dutch Schultz, among them) who sought refuge in the Catskill Mountains, and the resorts that after World War II catered to upwardly mobile Jewish families, giving rise to hundreds of hotels inspired by Grossingerâ€™s, the original â€œDisneyland with knishesâ€â€”the Concord, Brownâ€™s Hotel, Kutsherâ€™s Hotel, and othersâ€”in what became known as the Borscht Belt and Sour Cream Alps, with their headliners from movies and radio (Phil Silvers, Eddie Cantor, Milton Berle, et al.), and others who learned their trade there, among them Moss Hart (who got his start organizing summer theatricals), Sid Caesar, Lenny Bruce, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, and Joan Rivers.

Here is a nineteenth-century America turning away from England for its literary and artistic inspiration, finding it instead in Washington Irvingâ€™s â€œRip Van Winkleâ€ and his childhood recollections (set in the Catskills) . . . in James Fenimore Cooperâ€™s adventure-romances, which provided a pastoral history, describing the shift from a colonial to a nationalist mentality . . . and in the canvases of Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, Frederick Church, and others that caught the grandeur of the wilderness and that gave texture, color, and form to Irvingâ€™s and Cooperâ€™s imaginings.

Here are the entrepreneurs and financiers who saw the Catskills as a way to strike it rich, plundering the resources that had been likened to â€œcreation,â€ the Catskillsâ€™ tanneries that supplied the boots and saddles for Union troops in the Civil War . . . and the bluestone quarries whose excavated rock became the curbs and streets of the fast-growing Eastern Seaboard.Â

Here are the Catskills brought fully to life in all of their intensity, beauty, vastness, and lunacy.

From the Hardcover edition.
Country USA
Manufacturer Knopf
Binding Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate 2015-10-27
Format Kindle eBook

Country	USA
Manufacturer	Knopf
Binding	Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate	2015-10-27
Format	Kindle eBook

The Catskills: Its History and How It Changed America

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