From the American founding into the 20th century, the Catskill mountains have represented an alternative to the rapid industrialization and urbanization of New York City and its environs. An engaging, if sometimes confused, new book recounts the history of the mountain range and its multiple transformations. Jay Weiser writes in his review:
By the 1910s, the railroads, eager to attract traffic, offered fares to suit the pocketbooks of members of the massive East European Jewish immigration. Unlike [Washington] Irving, [James Fenimore] Cooper, and the Hudson River painters, [who romanticized the region in their works], 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 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.
Read more on Weekly Standard: http://www.weeklystandard.com/the-hills-beyond/article/2000792