The Catskills area of New York, once mockingly called the “Borscht Belt” because it was so popular among Jewish families and comics in the last century, is undergoing a renaissance of sorts that is highlighted by the first anniversary of the $1.2 billion Resorts World Catskills and the $200 million Kartrite Resort and Indoor Waterpark, which opened in April. This revival was reported in a feature that appeared in CDC Gaming Reports.
Both are in Sullivan County, the center of the Borscht Belt, where many comics arguably created modern American comedy. It rose to prominence in the 1920s, reached its peak in the 1950s and declined thereafter.
In recent years the region has been economically depressed since the 1970s. Now it seems to be getting a nostalgic revival, in part fueled by the very popular Amazon TV series The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, starring Rachel Brosnahan, which in its second season was set largely in the area during a summer vacation to the mountains to experience “bungalow life.”
In the series Mrs. Maisel stars as an aspiring comedian in the late 1950s who gets a big break at the Catskills’ then biggest hotel, The Concord. That hotel, and many of the regions other great hotels, closed during the 1970s and 80s.
But the Catskills have been on the comeback trail for several years. The travel website Lonely Planet named the region among the “Best in Travel 2019 Top Regions,” listing it ahead of Piedmont, Italy, northern Peru and the Scottish Highlands. It’s also where the Woodstock Festival occurred 50 years ago.
Another book that fueled the revival was photographer Marisa Scheinfeld’s 2016 book The Borscht Belt: Revisiting the Remains of America’s Jewish Vacationland.
Despite the decline of the “Borscht Belt,” the region itself remains a steady tourist attraction and accounts for 16 percent of the region’s employment. Whatever tourists the $1.2 billion Resorts World Catskills have attracted isn’t included in that estimate, so the percentage devoted to tourism has to be even larger now.
The 18-story casino sits on the same site once occupied by the Concord, which closed in 1998. That hotel had 1,500 rooms and a dining room that could accommodate 3,000.
The casino doesn’t have nearly that: 332 suites. But it has 100,000 square feet of gaming, a spa, a “lifestyle hotel,” Topgolf and eventually the Concord’s old golf course will be brought back from the dead by designer Rees Jones.
The “Borscht Belt” is not returning as a comedy mecca, but movie theaters are springing up, as are farm-to-table restaurants, distilleries and breweries. So are boutique hotels.
Scheinfeld observes, “It’s turning into ‘Let’s go up to the Catskills and we’ll go to the distilleries and we’ll go to the great restaurants and the farm-to-table kind of thing.’ That’s a whole other segment that I think is going to help revitalize the area.”
