Download or read book The Catskills written by Stephen M. Silverman and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2015-10-27 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Best Hikes with Children in the Catskills and Hudson River Valley written by Cynthia Copeland Lewis and published by The Mountaineers Books. This book was released on 2002 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: * Guidebook to short, easy hikes and trails your children will be comfortable on* Includes ideas for keeping the kids engaged and having funNew York's Catskills have long been an outdoor playground for families escaping from the city. Here's a guidebook that shows you hikes that the whole family can do. Best Hikes with Children in the Catskills and Hudson River Valley, 2nd Ed. includes games that will keep the kids engaged and enjoying the trails. From Catskills State Park, Bear-Mountain-Harriman State Park, Hudson Highlands, Shawangunk Mountains, Southern Taconics, the Long Path, and the Appalachian Trail, there's something for everyone in this all-inclusive guidebook.Hikes detailed include shorter two- and four-mile hikes to six-plus miles and overnighters. Practical information on hiking with children - setting a realistic pace, playing games, and encouraging personal and environmental responsibility - make this a guidebook to recommend.
Download or read book Making Mountains written by David Stradling and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2009-11-23 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Trout Fishing in the Catskills written by Ed Van Put and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-11-04 with total page 438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ed Van Put begins this important book with the history of native brook trout and offers little-known details about their sizes, range, and demise from over-fishing, the growth of streamside industries, and the introduction of competitive species. Sweeping in its scope, Trout Fishing in the Catskills tells a thorough tale of the often tumultuous history of fishing in the Catskills. With a scope of over a century, Van Put tells of the Catskill’s frontier fishing beginnings and tracks the rise, fall, and eventual revival of the fisheries. Throughout, this is a history of people and methods as well as rivers, and there are profiles of Theodore Gordon, Art Flick, Harry and Elsie Darbee, Sparse Grey Hackle, and more. No serious trout fisherman, in any part of the country, will want to miss this pioneering portrait of a seminal region in American angling history. Skyhorse Publishing is proud to publish a broad range of books for fishermen. Our books for anglers include titles that focus on fly fishing, bait fishing, fly-casting, spin casting, deep sea fishing, and surf fishing. Our books offer both practical advice on tackle, techniques, knots, and more, as well as lyrical prose on fishing for bass, trout, salmon, crappie, baitfish, catfish, and more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to publishing books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked by other publishers and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.
Download or read book The Hotel Neversink written by Adam O'Fallon Price and published by Tin House Books. This book was released on 2019-08-06 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Remember the Catskills written by Esterita Blumberg and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Catskill Culture written by Phil Brown and published by Temple University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Woodstock written by Alf Evers and published by Harry N. Abrams. This book was released on 2017-11-07 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few small towns in America have as colorful a history as that of Woodstock in Ulster County, New York. Set in a countryside of exceptional natural beauty, Woodstock from the first embodied the most enduring characteristics of the Catskills and the Hudson Valley. From the early days of Indians, trappers, farmers, and land barons, to the present day of rock musicians, craftspeople, and refugees from the urban scene, Alf Evers's extraordinary history tells the tale of a very special American place.Long before the Woodstock Festival put the name of Woodstock Village on the map and drew young people from all over the world, Woodstock had an earlier incarnation in which free-thinking ideas held sway. In 1902, inspired by the social philosophy of John Ruskin and William Morris, three men--Hervey White, Ralph Whitehead, and Bolton Coit Brown-- brought their Utopian vision to the Catskills, looking for a place to settle. With a number of requirements in mind, they came upon this small hamlet set in the mountains on a tract of land given to Robert Livingston. They decided unanimously that it was here that "man's mightiest creative energies might be released," and they would feel free to pursue their talents while living in a self-sufficient community. The "earthly paradise" they discovered was, of course, the cheerful, industrious, and well-kept town of Woodstock, and in it they built their historic new society.From the 1920s on, the town was known as a familiar art and cultural center, with two competing communities--Byrdcliffe and Maverick--working to develop a style of life that would integrate arts and crafts with advanced social ideas. Following these early American bohemians came the Yippies and Beat artists of the Fifties and the "Woodstock Generation" of the Sixties. The conflict between the more traditional town, the conservative agricultural community, and the exiles from Greenwich Village, the artisans of the craft colony, waxed and waned with each new generation, each side vigorously defending a way of life and inevitably benefitting from the continuing existence of the other.Woodstock: History of an American Town is the result of fifteen years of research by the distinguished local historian Alf Evers. His previous work, The Catskills, prepared the groundwork for the present and more detailed study of a village which became one of the most famous towns in America. It is, in many ways, the story of the birth, growth, and coming of age of the American way in its evocation of the early pioneer values of individualism and self-sufficiency with those of the community and commonweal. It is a captivating tale.
Download or read book The Catskill Forest written by Michael Kudish and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Memories of The Catskills written by Alvin L Lesser and published by Gsl Galactic Publishing. This book was released on 2013-01-01 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Memories of the Catskills: The Making of a Hotel, by Alvin L. Lesser, with a foreword by John Conway, Sullivan County Historian, takes the reader back to a time and place that was like no other. Families wishing to get out of the stifling heat of a New York City summer and other nearby crowded areas, found the perfect escape in "the Catskills." By sharing an insider's view of one person's life in this magical arena, Lesser lets readers experience the fun and the work that went into creating a place that people came back to year after year. Memories of the Catskills is a candid and charming memoir about the rise and fall of the "Borscht Belt." Lesser Lodge, a small hotel where the author spent the better part of his childhood, lies at the center of the heartfelt tale. Famous stars of yesteryear came to entertain in the Borscht Belt at Lesser Lodge. The Lodge survived the depression era and then flourished during the years of economic recovery and growth. Not just the story of the Lesser family, but the warmth of people who made others welcome by providing a respite which made them all family-- entertainers and guests alike.
Download or read book Murder Mayhem in the Catskills written by Caroline Crane and published by Murder & Mayhem. This book was released on 2008 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stylish resorts, breathtaking vistas and glittering lakes are hallmarks of the Catskills region. But since the pre- Revolutionary era, this seemingly idyllic vacationland has been a theater for some of mankind's darkest deeds and evildoers, including the notorious Murder, Inc. Caroline Crane explores the stories behind the bodies and bones that turn up here, from the bizarre hex murder at Stone Arch Bridge to the murderous escapades of Lethal Lizzie. Meet Claudius Smith, the hotheaded Tory outlaw who terrorized local colonists, and Dutch Schultz, the mobster whose fortune still lies buried in the mountains. Murder & Mayhem in the Catskills provides a fascinating glimpse into the shadowy heart of the mountains and reveals the area s surprising connections to some of America's most infamous criminals.
Download or read book Summer Haven written by Holli Levitsky and published by Jews of Poland. This book was released on 2016-03-30 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume provides for the first time a collection of writing that investigates the stories and struggles of survivors in the context of the Jewish resort culture of the Catskills, through new and existing works of fiction and memoir by writers who spent their youths there. It explores how vacationers, resort owners, and workers dealt with a horrific contradiction--the pleasure of their summer haven against the mass extermination of Jews throughout Europe. It also examines the character of Holocaust survivors in the Catskills: in what ways did they people find connection, resolution to conflict, and avenues to come together despite the experiences that set them apart? The book will be useful to those studying Jewish, American, or New York history, the Holocaust and Catskills legacy, United States immigration, American literature, and American culture. The focus on themes of nostalgia, humor, loss, and sexuality will draw general readers as well.
Download or read book The Catskills in Vintage Postcards written by Irwin Richman and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 1999 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the 1890s through the 1920s, the postcard was an extraordinarily popular means of communication. Many of the postcards produced during this "golden age," and even some from later years, can today be considered works of art. Postcard photographers traveled the length and breadth of the nation snapping photographs of busy street scenes, documenting local landmarks, and assembling crowds of local children only too happy to pose for a picture. These images, printed as postcards and sold in general stores and five and dimes across the country, survive as telling reminders of an important era in America's history. This fascinating new history of the Catskills of New York showcases more than two hundred of the best, most evocative vintage postcards available.
Download or read book It Happened in the Catskills written by Myrna Katz Frommer and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Catskills written by Kenneth Myers and published by Hudson River Museum. This book was released on 1987 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Folk Songs of the Catskills written by Norman Cazden and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1982-01-01 with total page 672 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traditional songs from the Catskill area of New York State are accompanied by detailed discusssions of their roots, development, musical structure, and subject matter
Download or read book The Catskills written by Stephen M. Silverman and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2015-10-27 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
