Remembering The Sullivan County Catskills

Compiled from the best of John Conway’s popular “Retrospect” column, these articles shine a spotlight on famous faces of the past, from George Suslosky, phenomenal yet feisty diner cook, to “the worst woman on earth,” Lizzie Brown Halliday. Enlightening and entertaining, the remarkable historical vignettes in this volume explore the customs and curiosities of the Sullivan County Catskills. High on a bank in Craig-e-Clare sat the stately Dundas Castle, rumored to house a beautiful woman who lured fishermen from the Beaverkill River into her lair. In the hamlet of De Bruce, every spring a monstrous panther prowled, feasting on trout and tourists. These are no myths from the dark history of foreign lands, but tales from the colorful past of Sullivan County, New York.

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.

Historic St. Augustine Research Institute William L. Proctor Award Henry Flagler's opulent Hotel Ponce de Leon drew worldwide praise from the day its elaborately carved doors opened in 1888. Built in the Spanish Renaissance Revival style, the architectural and engineering marvel featured the talents of a team of renowned artisans, including the designs of architects John Carrère, Thomas Hastings, and Bernard Maybeck, electricity by Thomas Edison, and interior decoration and stained glass windows by Louis Tiffany. Hotel Ponce de Leon is the first work to present the building's complete history and detail its transformation into the heart of Flagler College. Leslee Keys, who assisted in the restoration, recounts the complicated construction of the hotel--the first major structure to be built entirely of poured concrete--and the efforts to preserve it and restore it to its former glory. The methods used at Flagler College have been recognized as best practices in historic preservation and decorative arts conservation, and today the campus is one of Florida's most visited heritage tourism destinations.

Female criminals are often portrayed as caricatures: Black Widows, Queenpins, Mob Molls, or Femme Fatales. But the real stories are much more fascinating and complex.In Pretty Evil New York author Elizabeth Kerri Mahon takes you on a journey through a rogue’s gallery of some of New York’s most notable female criminals. Drawing on newspaper coverage and other primary sources, this collection of historical true crime stories chronicles eleven women who were media sensations in their day, making headlines across the country decades before radio, television, or social media. Roxalana Druse, the last woman to be hanged in New York; Ruth Snyder, immortalized in James M. Cain’s novella Double Indemnity; serial killer Lizzie Halliday, nicknamed the Worst Woman in the World, who became a Hudson Valley legend; Celia Cooney, the Bobbed Hair Bandit; and Stephanie St. Clair, who rose to the top of the numbers game and then made Harlem cheer when she stood up to mobster Dutch Schultz. Alongside them are some forgotten felons, whose stories, though less well-known, are just as fascinating. Spurred by passion, profit, paranoia, or just plain perverse pleasure, these ladies span one hundred years of murder, mayhem, and madness in the Empire State.

Less than a day's drive from New York City, Boston or Philadelphia, the Catskills have long been a popular weekend and summer retreat for city folk. The area offers fine accommodations, top-notch dining and spectacular surroundings. This book profiles hundreds of hotels and restaurants, with an emphasis on the very best places. Daytime activities - shopping, antique-hunting and more - are featured.

With selections from Isaac Bashevis Singer, Allegra Goodman, Moss Hart, TaniaGrossinger, and many others, this volume is a tribute to the legendary Jewishresort area of the Catskills. 40 halftones. 26 figures.

The Woodstock festival of 1969, which featured such groups and artists as the Who, Country Joe and the Fish, Ten Years After, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, is remembered as much for its 'bringing together' of the counter-cultural generation as for the music performed. The event represented a milestone in the use of music as a medium for political expression while simultaneously acting as a springboard for the more expressly commercial of rock and pop events which were to follow. In the thirty years since the festival took place, Woodstock has become the subject of many books, magazine articles and documentaries which have served to mythologise the event in the public imagination. These different aspects of the Woodstock festival will be discussed in this wide ranging book which brings together a number of established and new writers in the fields of sociology, media studies and popular music studies. Each of the five chapters which will focus on a specific aspect of the Woodstock festival and its continuing significance in relation to the music industry, the rock festival 'tradition', sixties nostalgia and the cultural impact of popular music.