In Swan Lake, he stopped by Paul’s, once one of the county’s premier resorts, “which last year advertised ‘An Unforgettable Family Vacation,’ (and) is now Daytop Village, a private institution for the rehabilitation of narcotics addicts.” He visited the Loch Sheldrake Inn, Goldberg’s, and the Overlook, each of which had recently closed. He quoted an unnamed South Fallsburg banker and lawyer who pointed out that “many of the smaller hotels are in trouble because they are obsolete,” and could not afford to modernize to “meet today’s more luxurious standards, like baths in every room.” Also, he said, the lure of more glamorous places like Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and Europe, were attracting more and more of the traditional Sullivan County vacationer.īigart also reported that in Loch Sheldrake, where there had been 42 hotels “ten years ago,” there were now only 12. “Trying to keep up with the prosperous giants like Grossinger’s and the Concord, they have gone heavily into debt for Olympic swimming pools, indoors and outdoors, ornate lobbies and glittering nightclubs,” Bigart wrote. At the time of the sale, the Fleischers were in debt to their laundry for $28,000, their butcher for $26,000, and their grocer for $11,000. The Fleischers, the hotel’s owners, had borrowed over $700,000 in an effort to successfully draw vacationers to their resort. The end had actually come the previous year when the hotel’s owners were forced to sell to a group of orthodox Jews who changed the entire complexion of the place. The New Roxy had closed in mid-August that summer, “the latest in a long list of casualties among the medium-sized hotels in the Catskills, hotels accommodating 200 to 700 guests,” Bigart noted.

An eerie silence ruled the lobby, mocking a notice forbidding card-playing and another that urged, ‘Sign Up Now for Talent Night.’” A rancid smell of decaying food filtered down the carpeted corridors from the kitchen. “Gone were the glamorous, fun-loving vacationing crowds of former seasons. “A singular hush, betrayed only by the occasional romping of crickets or the stomping of a stray hen on the greensward, fell this Labor Day weekend on the rococo precincts of the New Roxy Hotel,” Bigart wrote. Reporter Homer Bigart outlined the phenomenon in a Septemarticle with a Loch Sheldrake dateline, entitled “Keeping Up With the Grossingers Strains Many Catskills Hotels,” using the occasion of the Labor Day weekend – traditionally one of the busiest of the year for Sullivan County resorts – to visit a number that had closed down or seemed on the verge of doing so. In fact, by 1966, this disturbing trend had become so obvious that it caught the attention of the New York Times. Many establishments had already invested capital they didn’t have in trying to keep up with the larger hotels in the increasingly competitive Catskills tourism market. Those that could make the necessary upgrades found themselves hopelessly in debt.

Smaller resorts – the bulk of Sullivan County’s 538 hotels during that golden era – began to close down. Many cite the existence of dozens of hotels in the 1970s as proof that it couldn’t possibly be so.Īnd yet these days most historians agree that the Golden Age of Sullivan County’s tourism industry, which began around 1940, came to an end around 1965, and they cite a number of reasons for choosing that particular year.įor one thing, a fire at the Prospect Inn in Parksville on Augresulted in the death of five people, and caused a clamor to tighten up fire codes for resorts, many of which could not afford to make the necessary improvements.

Most newcomers – and even some old timers who should know better – find it hard to believe that the county’s heyday was over by the mid-1960s. Many of the 75 or so people at a recent Catskills History and Preservation Conference were shocked to hear that the Catskills’ heralded resort industry has been in decline since 1965.

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