It Happened in the Catskills

It Happened in the Catskills PDF Author: Myrna Katz Frommer
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438427654
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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It Happened in the Catskills

It Happened in the Catskills PDF Author: Myrna Katz Frommer
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438427654
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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The Catskills

The Catskills PDF Author: Stephen M. Silverman
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 1101875887
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 466

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The Catskills (“Cat Creek” in Dutch), America’s original frontier, northwest of New York City, with its seven hundred thousand acres of forest land preserve and its five counties—Delaware, Greene, Sullivan, Ulster, Schoharie; America’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 Hudson’s first spotting the distant blue mountains in 1609; the New York State constitutional convention, resulting in New York’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 “one-hundred percent restricted” accommodations (“Hebrews will knock vainly for admission”), 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 “Legs” 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 Grossinger’s, the original “Disneyland with knishes”—the Concord, Brown’s Hotel, Kutsher’s Hotel, and others—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 Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” and his childhood recollections (set in the Catskills) . . . in James Fenimore Cooper’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 Irving’s and Cooper’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 “creation,” the Catskills’ 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. Here are the Catskills brought fully to life in all of their intensity, beauty, vastness, and lunacy.

Catskill Culture

Catskill Culture PDF Author: Phil Brown
Publisher: Temple University Press
ISBN: 9781439906446
Category : Catskill Mountains Region (N.Y.)
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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The Catskill Fairies

The Catskill Fairies PDF Author: Virginia Wales Johnson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Catskill Mountains (N.Y.)
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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A Summer World

A Summer World PDF Author: Stefan Kanfer
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 9780374271800
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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The story of the attempt to build a Jewish Eden in the Catskills, from the days of the ghetto to the rise and decline of the great resorts.

The Hotel Neversink

The Hotel Neversink PDF Author: Adam O'Fallon Price
Publisher: Tin House Books
ISBN: 1947793357
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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A 2020 Edgar Award Winner! "A gripping, atmospheric, heart-breaking, almost-ghost story. Not since Stephen King's Overlook has a hotel hiding a secret been brought to such vivid life." —Lydia Kiesling, author of The Golden State Thirty-one years after workers first broke ground, the magnificent Hotel Neversink in the Catskills finally opens to the public. Then a young boy disappears. This mysterious vanishing—and the ones that follow—will brand the lives of three generations. At the root of it all is Asher Sikorsky, the ambitious and ruthless patriarch whose purchase of the hotel in 1931 set a haunting legacy into motion. His daughter Jeanie sees the Hotel Neversink into its most lucrative era, but also its darkest. Decades later, Asher's grandchildren grapple with the family’s heritage in their own ways: Len fights to keep the failing, dilapidated hotel alive, and Alice sets out to finally uncover the murderer’s identity. Told by an unforgettable chorus of Sikorsky family members—a matriarch, a hotel maid, a traveling comedian, the hotel detective, and many others—The Hotel Neversink is the gripping portrait of a Jewish family in the Catskills over the course of a century. With an unerring eye and with prose both comic and tragic, Adam O’Fallon-Price details one man’s struggle for greatness, no matter the cost, and a long-held family secret that threatens to undo it all.

Making Mountains

Making Mountains PDF Author: David Stradling
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295989890
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
For over two hundred years, the Catskill Mountains have been repeatedly and dramatically transformed by New York City. In Making Mountains, David Stradling shows the transformation of the Catskills landscape as a collaborative process, one in which local and urban hands, capital, and ideas have come together to reshape the mountains and the communities therein. This collaboration has had environmental, economic, and cultural consequences. Early on, the Catskills were an important source of natural resources. Later, when New York City needed to expand its water supply, engineers helped direct the city toward the Catskills, claiming that the mountains offered the purest and most cost-effective waters. By the 1960s, New York had created the great reservoir and aqueduct system in the mountains that now supplies the city with 90 percent of its water. The Catskills also served as a critical space in which the nation's ideas about nature evolved. Stradling describes the great influence writers and artists had upon urban residents - especially the painters of the Hudson River School, whose ideal landscapes created expectations about how rural America should appear. By the mid-1800s, urban residents had turned the Catskills into an important vacation ground, and by the late 1800s, the Catskills had become one of the premiere resort regions in the nation. In the mid-twentieth century, the older Catskill resort region was in steep decline, but the Jewish "Borscht Belt" in the southern Catskills was thriving. The automobile revitalized mountain tourism and residence, and increased the threat of suburbanization of the historic landscape. Throughout each of these significant incarnations, urban and rural residents worked in a rough collaboration, though not without conflict, to reshape the mountains and American ideas about rural landscapes and nature.

Killing Time in the Catskills

Killing Time in the Catskills PDF Author: Kevin Owen
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781071087497
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
Hot on the heels of the Lizzie Borden case from 1893-1894, newspapers around the world began closely following a new and unusual case in upstate New York. Lizzie Halliday, a seemingly harmless woman, was about to stand trial for a triple homicide in Burlingham, NY. Lizzie Halliday lived in the hamlet of Burlingham and worked as a housekeeper, eventually marrying her employer, Paul Halliday. After Paul went missing, a search of their property revealed the bodies of two unidentified women. The investigation which followed revealed that Lizzie, in her twenties, left behind a trail of failed marriages, bigamy, horse theft, arson, insurance fraud and murder, even having served time in the infamous Eastern State Penitentiary. If found guilty Lizzie Halliday would be the first woman in the world to face the electric chair. After her sensational trial in Sullivan County, NY she was locked away for life but managed to continue her reign of terror even behind bars. This true account of one of America's most dangerous women details Lizzie Halliday's lifestyle of indefensible crimes. The author provides the most complete, factual and thoroughly researched biographical timeline of Lizzie Halliday to date, providing the most accurate account of Lizzie Halliday's disturbing criminal career, while correcting misinformation of the past.

It Happened in Brooklyn

It Happened in Brooklyn PDF Author: Myrna Katz Frommer
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438427662
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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The Quarry Fox

The Quarry Fox PDF Author: Leslie T. Sharpe
Publisher: Abrams
ISBN: 1468315307
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
“A lyrical celebration . . . This engaging portrait of the Catskill wilderness will appeal to nature enthusiasts of all stripes.” —Library Journal (starred review) A red fox stands poised at the edge of a woodchuck den, his ears perked for danger as two pudgy fox cubs frolic nearby. A mother black bear and her cubs hibernate beneath a felled tree. A barred owl snags a hapless cottontail from a meadow with its precise talons. In The Quarry Fox and Other Tales of the Wild Catskills, Leslie T. Sharpe trains her keen eye and narrative gifts on these and other New York wildlife through her tales of close observations as a naturalist living in the Great Western Catskills. The Quarry Fox is the first in-depth study of Catskill wildlife since John Burroughs invented the genre of nature writing, in which Sharpe weaves her experiences of the seasons, plants, and creatures with the natural history of each organism, revealing their sensitivity to and resilience against the splendor and cruelty of Nature. Sharpe's frank, scientific observations join with her deeply felt connection to these creatures to instill an appreciation of the undaunted and variegated beauty of the Catskills and camaraderie with its animals. From contemplating the importance of milkweed for monarchs to lay their eggs to reveling in the first steps of a wobbly fawn, The Quarry Fox is a celebration of the natural world and our place in it. “A poignant and modern reminder of untamed creatures so close to home.” —The New York Times