I initially wasn't thinking of posting this one as compared to other places I've seen it is utterly, utterly ruined and has been shot by pretty much every explorer in the north-eastern USA (think the Denbigh of New York State kind of!) but it holds a very special place in my heart and my memories.
This was the location that kickstarted my dream of exploring the USA. It was the catalyst for all the initial plans and investments and hassle and strife and everything that has happened since. I had seen photos of the iconic indoor swimming pool online for a while and it was a location I just knew I needed to see - something in me gave me the urge to find out more, find out everything I could about it and try my darnedest to make it happen. As such in September 2014, almost a full year after I began planning my first ever trip to the USA I touched down on the other side of the Atlantic. However I'd have to wait almost a month and a half to be able to see the location that had originally begun it all, as it was planned in right at the very end of the adventure. It was totally worth the wait.
Grossinger's Resort located deep in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York was the grandest, most well-known and most famous of all the hundreds of Resorts and Hotels in the Catskills. During the early to mid 20th Century the Catskills region was the only place to go if you were a Jewish holidaymaker, with resorts and hotels run by Jewish families for Jews to escape the persecution that could be suffered at other holiday destinations. As the 20th Century progressed, resorts grew larger and larger and boomed massively until cheaper air travel and changing attitudes towards holidays by the young pretty much wiped them all out from the beginning of the 1980s. The last of the grand resorts to close, Kutscher's Hotel, managed to hang on until 2013 and was completely demolished in 2015. Nowadays many of the old resorts and hotels have either been flattened, converted into apartments, or have been repurposed as Jewish summer camps or youth camps for children, with one notable exception, Grossinger's.
Grossinger's was owned by the family of the same name from it's humble beginnings as a small hotel in the early 1900s right through it's boom and eventual bust before relinquishing ownership shortly before it closed. The hotel was expanded massively in the 1950s and it hosted countless famous names as it's reputation grew among the holidaymakers and the media in the area. It featured it's own airstrip, a ski slope which was the first place anywhere in the world to use artificial snow, huge ballroom, an Olympic-sized outdoor pool and huge indoor pool as well as pretty much anything else you can think of including a full 18-hole golf course still in use to this day. In the early 1980s the decline of the resorts set in, and by 1986 had reached crisis point. The Grossinger family sold the resort to Servico who closed it down in order to carry out a further expansion and renovation, but after they had demolished around a third of the old buildings the project was stalled by the enormous costs associated with it, and the resort never reopened.
I visited the resort in 2014, 28 years after it closed it's doors, and it still survives on in a derelict state to this day. The current owner had hoped to build a new casino on the land but lost out to another casino in another larger city nearby. However the end may be nigh fairly soon as the owners of the golf club want everything cleared, and to be honest it's in such a ruinous state now that I can see their point. A lot of the floors that haven't already collapsed are impassable and it's just a sad, hollow shell of what could have been.
Thanks for looking
This was the location that kickstarted my dream of exploring the USA. It was the catalyst for all the initial plans and investments and hassle and strife and everything that has happened since. I had seen photos of the iconic indoor swimming pool online for a while and it was a location I just knew I needed to see - something in me gave me the urge to find out more, find out everything I could about it and try my darnedest to make it happen. As such in September 2014, almost a full year after I began planning my first ever trip to the USA I touched down on the other side of the Atlantic. However I'd have to wait almost a month and a half to be able to see the location that had originally begun it all, as it was planned in right at the very end of the adventure. It was totally worth the wait.
Grossinger's Resort located deep in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York was the grandest, most well-known and most famous of all the hundreds of Resorts and Hotels in the Catskills. During the early to mid 20th Century the Catskills region was the only place to go if you were a Jewish holidaymaker, with resorts and hotels run by Jewish families for Jews to escape the persecution that could be suffered at other holiday destinations. As the 20th Century progressed, resorts grew larger and larger and boomed massively until cheaper air travel and changing attitudes towards holidays by the young pretty much wiped them all out from the beginning of the 1980s. The last of the grand resorts to close, Kutscher's Hotel, managed to hang on until 2013 and was completely demolished in 2015. Nowadays many of the old resorts and hotels have either been flattened, converted into apartments, or have been repurposed as Jewish summer camps or youth camps for children, with one notable exception, Grossinger's.
Grossinger's was owned by the family of the same name from it's humble beginnings as a small hotel in the early 1900s right through it's boom and eventual bust before relinquishing ownership shortly before it closed. The hotel was expanded massively in the 1950s and it hosted countless famous names as it's reputation grew among the holidaymakers and the media in the area. It featured it's own airstrip, a ski slope which was the first place anywhere in the world to use artificial snow, huge ballroom, an Olympic-sized outdoor pool and huge indoor pool as well as pretty much anything else you can think of including a full 18-hole golf course still in use to this day. In the early 1980s the decline of the resorts set in, and by 1986 had reached crisis point. The Grossinger family sold the resort to Servico who closed it down in order to carry out a further expansion and renovation, but after they had demolished around a third of the old buildings the project was stalled by the enormous costs associated with it, and the resort never reopened.
I visited the resort in 2014, 28 years after it closed it's doors, and it still survives on in a derelict state to this day. The current owner had hoped to build a new casino on the land but lost out to another casino in another larger city nearby. However the end may be nigh fairly soon as the owners of the golf club want everything cleared, and to be honest it's in such a ruinous state now that I can see their point. A lot of the floors that haven't already collapsed are impassable and it's just a sad, hollow shell of what could have been.
Thanks for looking
