‘Who can ever forget the ‘Borscht Belt’…?’

As I’ve said before, air conditioning and TV played large roles in its demise, but yes, a bit later…

The fabled Catskills resorts, with their fabulous nightclubs, began to die when the jet airplane started carrying vacationers to Florida and the Caribbean in the 1960s. By the late 1980s, it was on life support and by the mid-1990s in the cemetery. The nightclubs and nearly all of the resorts closed, the doors were locked and weeds started to grow as high as the windows. (…)

The ruins of the Catskills, the entertainment world’s decaying treasure chest, have been brought to life in a lengthy series of poignant pictures by photographer Marisa Scheinfeld, whose grandparents met at a Borscht Belt hotel. She has put together an exhibit of several dozen pictures that are housed at the museum of New York’s Yeshiva University, in the heart of midtown Manhattan at 15 W. 16th Street. A walk through the exhibit, open through April, is a walk through entertainment history. You can almost see the ghosts of Sammy Davis Jr. and others in the pictures of the ruins.