Borscht Belt Bungalows: Memoirs Of Catskill Summers

14. An Age of Change [Includes Image Plates]

14 An Age ofCliange I n 1961, the Kassacks were very upset because a number oftheir best, longtime tenants had bought summer homes at Emerald Green, at Lake Louise Marie near Wurtsboro. Emerald Green was the first successful post-World War II summer home development in Sullivan County, and it was a portent of doom for major bungalow colonies. Those former tenants who could afford it would now enjoy the communal life ofa colony, completely on their own terms. Many ofthe houses were quite luxurious, by middle-class standards, and at least two ofKassack's tenants opted for Lake Front homes-the development's most expensive units. The site (allegedly once owned and used as a dumping ground by AI Capone) was attractive, very close to the Route 17 Quickway, and "Emerald Green at Lake Louise Marie" didn't smack ofthe "Borscht Belt."l Most of the successful home communities to follow immediately were located at White Lake and Smallwood-both have a certain elite ring. In subsequent years, communities have been built throughout the area, many of them destined ultimately to be retirement homes for a population that has given up metropolitan New York and prefers to winter in Florida. Reflective of a new clientele (the many-childrened New Orthodox), the Regency Country Club in Woodridge, New York, offers seven-bedroom summer homes.2 While summer home developments skimmed the cream of the bungalow BORSCHT BELT BUNGALOWS clientele, the rise of suburbia also greatly reduced the tenant base. One of the principal reasons for going to the countrywas eliminated when New York City's Jews left the crowded Brooklyn and Bronx and the older, cramped, settled areas of Queens for the new open communities on Long Island, Westchester 182 County, and northern New Jersey. Not only did most now have lawns and trees in suburbia, but they also had access to swimming pools, either at their country club or their Jewish community center-or even in their own backyard. Residential air-conditioning was also devastating to the mountains-one ofwhose prime attraction was that it cooled at night. Now with a press of a button you, too, could have it cool at night-reliably.3 The Hitchcock classic Rear Window shows a New York summer in a well-to-do neighborhood ofl954.4 A few years later the story would be impossible to do credibly, because all the action James Stewart's character observed would be carried out behind air-conditioning units and drawn curtains. One unpleasant little secret is that sometimes, when hot humid air blankets the Northeast, even the mountains do not cool off enough at night. The summer of 1993 was so hot and humid that my mother seldom slept upstairs because it never cooled down. Fortunately for tenants, most bungalows are now air-conditioned. Another factor reducing the client base for the Catskills, its hotels and its colonies, was the decline in legal discrimination. In many ways the Catskills flourished because it was one of very few places Jews could comfortably and safely go in the summer. Civil rights legislation in the 1960s and 1970s removed the barriers at many "Christian-only" resorts. The jet age also had its effect and opened up new areas for Jewish vacationers. Trips to Europe and Israel became commonplace. Ethnic chic had not yet become important in the 1960s and early 1970s, and the mountains simply were too Jewish, too immigrant-oriented, for the younger, upward-bound Jews. The rise ofthe women's movement and the frequency oftwo-income families provided the coup degrace to an industry in decline . With both mother and father working, there was no possibility for a bungalow summer. City and suburban day camps boomed, as did sleep-away camps. Family vacations would be compressed to fit mother and father's time off, and the vacation weekend would become popular. It was the young marrieds ofthe late 1950s and early 1960s who were the most likely to suburbanize, and it was this generation that increasingly turned its back on the Catskills and the bungalows.5 Rentals remained decent for many owners through the 1960s, but the bungalow crowd grew older. The immi- grant generation who came to America before 1924 and many of their nativeborn children remained faithful to the Catskills. Those people who began renting bungalows in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s often continued to do so. Their children did not. If...