Borscht Belt Historical Marker Project

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Borscht Belt Historical Marker Project

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MOUNTAIN DALE

Marker Location: Mountaindale Community Board (across from Post Office at 12 Post Hill Rd, Mountain Dale, NY 12763

HISTORIC MARKER TEXT:


Marker Text

The arrival of the New York & Oswego Midland Railroad in 1871 opened Mountain Dale to tourism and an influx of Jewish immigrants. This transformed the rural farming hamlet, originally known as Sandburgh, into a vacation destination. In 1880, the hamlet officially changed its name to Mountain Dale and the railroad became known as the O&W Railway. At its peak during the 1920s through the 1960s, Mountain Dale was host to about 34 hotels and 75 bungalow colonies. Passenger travel on the railroad ended in 1953, however visitors still arrived by car and bus via Route 17 to destinations such as The Evergreen Hotel and Rashkin’s Little Falls Hotel, which billed its waterfall as the “Niagara of Sullivan County.” Bungalow colonies such as Regal Wankref Country Colonies, Paradise Cottages, Crystal Lake Bungalows, Hymie Gordon’s, and Camp Eva hosted summer visitors of all ages. 



DEDICATION SPEAKERS: 

  • Sean Wall-Carty, Deputy Supervisor, Town of Fallsburg 
  • Leni Binder, Resident of Town of Fallsburg for 81 years, former Sullivan County Legislator, Current Deputy Mayor and Trustee of the Village of Woodridge.
  • Isaac Jeffreys, Marker Project
  • Marisa Scheinfeld, Marker Project

Mountain Dale Marker Dedication


      Mountain Dale Extended Stories

      Mountain Dale was established in the 1790s as a farming community called Sandburg. In 1868 the arrival of the New York Ontario & Western Railroad provided a prosperous agricultural industry through agriculture. In 1880, the hamlet officially changed its name to Mountain Dale. The railroad also gave a rise to influx of Jewish immigrants to the area to support the farming community. 

      Early Jewish History

      Archie Kinberg and his family were one of the first Jewish farmers in Ellenville at the turn of the 19th century. He recounted that during the first ten years after he was born in 1900, the only Jews in the area lived fifteen miles from his family farm in Mountain Dale. He remembers driving to Mountain Dale once a month to purchase Jewish provisions (Catskill Culture, Phil Brown).

      Hotels

      One of the first farms that began taking in summer boarders and transitioning into a hotel was Forman’s Manor, which was owned by Harry and Ida Forman and opened in 1920 and closed around 1955. The operational years of Forman’s Manor highlight the peak years of operation for about 34 other hotels and 75 bungalow colonies that existed in the hamlet.  

      Some of the notable hotels were The Evergreen Hotel and Rashkin’s Little Falls Hotel, which billed its waterfall as the “Niagara of Sullivan County.” Other notable hotels were located on Park Hill Road which included the Park House Hotel, Maple Shade, New Prospect Hotel, Nasso Hotel, and Star Pleasure Hotel. 

      Bungalow Colonies & Camps

      In addition to the hotels, bungalow colonies such as Camp Eva, Crystal Lake Bungalows, Hammer’s Bungalow Colony, Hemlock Grove Bungalow Colony, Hymie Gordon’s, Mirth Bungalow Colony, Paradise Cottages, Regal Wankref Country Colonies, and many others hosted summer visitors of all ages.  

      One of the unique bungalow colonies in Mountain dale was Mother’s Camp Eva. The camp was founded by Eva Levi who was a social worker in New York City and taught English to immigrant women who were attending night school. Other women began helping Eva with her efforts of teaching English to foreigners and established five clubs across the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens. Sometime in the 1930s, Eva Levi and the organizers of the clubs decided to establish a camp and bungalow colony in the Catskills and established Camp Eva in Mountain Dale. Notable songwriters Laura Nyro and Alan Merrill attended Camp Eva in 1963 and 1964.

      Notable Visitors

      Notable actor and comedian Alan King worked as an MC at the New Prospect during his high school summers.  

      Isaac Bashevis Singer had his first American vacation after recently emigrating from Poland to Mountain Dale in 1937. The vacation played a major role in his transition to becoming a major American writer as it inspired his short story “The Yearning Heifer” which immortalizes the traditional small farmer putting up New York City boarders.

      Bach to Rock Festival

      Mountain Dale also gained notoriety in 1970 for the failed attempt of creating another large-scale music festival following Woodstock: Bach to Rock Festival. The festival was supposed to include a combination of classical performances with notable opera stars such as Jan Peerce and Roberta Peters as well as headline rock acts such as the Grateful Dead and Ritchie Havens. Despite the support of the Town of Fallsburg and the Catskill Mountain Resort Association, the festival was struck down in court for fears of the influx of drugs and immorality that occurred at the Woodstock festival.  

      Decline & Rebirth

      Despite The NYO&W Railroad ending service in 1956, visitors continued to visit the region by car and bus via the newly constructed Route 17. However, likewise to many other smaller Borscht Belt communities, tourism to the area began to decline in the late 1960s and 1970s as vacationers began to flock to year-round resorts in other areas.  

      Mountain Dale has seen a great rebirth in recent years as the downtown has been revitalized with new restaurants, shops, and art galleries.  


      Do you have more information on Mountaindale?

      The Borscht Belt Historical Marker Project aims to present these extended stories as the most accurate and inclusive as possible. If you have more information or a memory about the town or a particular hotel, bungalow colony, or camp that we may have missed, please drop us a line!


      Contact Us

      The Borscht Belt's culinary thrill ride

      By Janet Forman. Special for The Globe and Mail, March 15, 2008

      My first experience with gastronomic pairing was matzo ball soup and Dr. Brown's Cel-Ray soda in the sprawling kitchen of my grandparents' Catskill Mountains hotel. While

      this cacophonous staging area for a 140-seat dining room may not seem conducive to a

      contemplative tasting experience, every flavour and aroma I experienced during those

      years is etched into my memory. As in many cultures, food was the emotional linchpin of

      the "Jewish Alps", and a hunk of sweet-noodle pudding or raisin-crammed rugelach was

      the currency with which to express love.

      The commanding presence of my grandmother, Ida Forman, was synonymous with that

      legendary Borscht Belt cuisine, for me as well as for three generations of guests at Harry

      Forman's Manor. In her paprika-smeared chef's apron, straps gathered with an enormous

      safety pin to accommodate her 4-foot-9, 80-pound frame, Ida ran her kitchen with the

      panache of a Barnum & Bailey ringmaster. But even while folding dough for blintzes and

      barking at some hapless waiter to pick up another plate of lox, she could always find a

      moment to dispatch an extra pile of lukshen - Yiddish for noodles - for my soup or send

      over a chewy Toll House cookie studded with hunks of chocolate.

      In fact, my grandparents were renowned in the Catskills for setting a bountiful table. Ida's

      opulent spin on Eastern European dishes plumped up by America's abundant agriculture -

      roast chicken shimmering with paprika gravy, or the cold sorrel-scented potato soup

      known as shav - kept Forman's Manor packed for almost 40 years.

      We were a family of pioneers, I'd always been told, as my grandparents were among the

      first Jewish immigrants to open a hotel in the Catskills. Arriving in America at the dawn

      of the 20th century, they were hungry to own land, a privilege that had been denied to

      Jews in Russia. So around 1920, with a little cash and even less experience, but possessed

      of a fearsome will to succeed in this new world, they bought a chicken farm 160

      kilometres north of New York City's Lower East Side.

      A few years later, they snatched a better opportunity: hosting the rush of city dwellers

      who came to Sullivan County seeking a breath of country air. While other farmers ran

      kuchalayns - sparse rooms with kitchen privileges - my grandmother knew her way

      around a boiled brisket and was one of the first to offer three copious feeds a day - dishes

      like hefty mounds of roughly cut chicken liver studded with globules of schmaltz

      (rendered chicken fat) and the rosy beet soup that gave the Borscht Belt its name. So even

      as their guests demanded American-style amenities such as tennis courts and a swimming

      pool, it was food like Ida's tzimmes - an almost medieval-style sweet beef stew that might

      include sweet potatoes, prunes, carrots and cinnamon - that provided the sentimental

      touchstone they craved.

      The 1950s was the Borscht Belt's heyday, a time when the immigrants who fled the

      Russian pogroms as children finally secured a toehold in America's middle class. And it

      was my grandmother's culinary largesse - the way she blanketed plump chunks of pickled

      herring with cupfuls of silken cream and crowded soup plates with so many meat-filled

      kreplach it was hard to find the liquid - that was a symbol of just how far they had come.

      To me Ida's hotel kitchen was a thrill ride, a place where silverware thundered from sink

      to drying bin; where the mixer churned a mountain of strudel dough; and where waiters

      hoisted trays heavily laden with delicacies like gefilte fish, jelly omelettes or the

      unexpectedly flavourful boiled meat known as flanken precariously over the cooks'

      heads. With my privileged status as the owners' granddaughter, I roamed this hectic

      workplace as self-importantly as if I'd been granted an all-access pass to a Rolling Stones

      concert.

      While the service at Forman's Manor was swift and accommodating, a room full of self-

      made businessmen - who had scrapped their way to a comfortable clearing in the garment

      business or the pickle trade or to a rarefied oasis peddling furs - was a demanding crowd.

      Every rag-trade entrepreneur considered himself a chicken-soup sommelier. Still, my

      grandparents managed to create an atmosphere that was part extended family table, part

      boot camp - with a return rate any Four Seasons would envy.

      Still, even the most trying guests agreed that my grandmother was the keystone of the

      hotel's delicate chemistry. With the stamina of an Olympian, she rose at 3 a.m. to stoke

      the ovens and pack coffee into the industrial-size percolator - along with a few raw eggs

      to clarify the brew. And by the time I would arrive at breakfast, she was already behind

      the long metal work counter basting a battalion of chickens for dinner and reminding

      every perspiring waiter and butterfingered busboy that while they might be esteemed

      scholars for nine months of the year, right now they'd better focus on the pickled herring.

      By the mid-1950s, however, the vicious pace had taken its toll on my grandfather's health

      and Ida and Harry retired.

      On the surface, they accomplished everything they had set out to do: My father's dental

      practice was flourishing and he was a founding father of the split-level suburbs.

      But Ida never could find her place in this new order. The concept of gardening or leafing

      through a magazine or taking in a movie for pleasure alone seemed quite mad to someone

      who had run a good-sized business all her life. Ida never understood how to cook for a

      family of four, only for a dining room of more than a hundred. So perhaps we shouldn't

      have been surprised when in her later years Ida's mind bobbed back to the time she

      inspired awe by turning out a thousand plates of food a day. For years after my

      grandfather died and the grandchildren went off to college, Ida could still be found in

      front of her stove churning out stuffed chickens, boiling cauldrons of soup and filling

      blintzes for the ghostly cadres still hungry for a piece of the shtetl.

      A Life in the Catskills By Janet Forman

      Hotels & Bungalow Colonies

      Hotels, Resorts, & Boarding Houses

      Hotels, Resorts, & Boarding Houses

      Hotels, Resorts, & Boarding Houses

      Chester Hill House
      Cold Spring House
      Dubitsky's and Rosenblatt's Rooming House (formerly Coloniel House)
      Empire Mountain House
      Evergreen Hotel
      Forman's Manor
      Grand Central Hotel
      Green Kretchma
      Greenfield House
      High Cliff House
      Hilltop Lodge
      Karpf's Hotel
      Linden Lawn Hotel
      Little Falls Hotel
      Lockers Mansion
      Kirshman House
      Mountain Peak Lodge
      Mountaindale Lodge
      Nasso Hotel
      New Prospect Hotel
      Palace Resort
      Paramount Hotel
      Park Hotel
      Park House Hotel
      Perlin's Star House
      Rausch's Overbrook House
      Royal Mountain Hotel
      Sam Slobodow's Hotel
      Sperling Farm
      Springwood House
      St. Moritz House
      Star Pleasure Hotel
      Sun Ray House
      Wilsonia Hotel

      Courtesy of Phil Brown and the Catskills Institute

      Bungalow Colonies

      Hotels, Resorts, & Boarding Houses

      Hotels, Resorts, & Boarding Houses

      Barbara Villa
      Ansel Berkowitz
      Bertuch
      Blumberg's Beechwood Colony
      Braver's
      Breezy Corners
      Claudio's Village
      Colonial House (later Dubitsky's & Rosenblatt's)
      Colonial Corners
      Country Park
      Crystal
      William Desapio
      Deerhill Cottages
      Doctor Locker's Bungalows
      Edelweiss Cottages
      Eichenholtz
      Empire Mountain House
      Engelman's
      Fawn Lake Colony
      Florida
      Four Gables
      Friedlanders
      Friedlander House
      Friendly Cottages
      G&S Bungalows
      George Kwoka
      Glenwood
      Gordon's
      Green's
      Halpern's
      Hammerman's Modern Rooms & Bungalows
      Hemlock Grove
      Herskovitz Molvina
      High Cliff
      High Mountain House
      Locker's Bungalows
      Lorraine House (aka Rubinson's Bungalows)
      Majestic House
      Maliga's (later Chesler's)
      Maple Shade
      Melock Grove Estates
      Middle Earth
      Minzer's Hollywood Bungalows
      Mirth Colony
      Monte Valle
      Mount Brook Bungalows
      Nasso Country Club
      Ostrow's (later Colony Park)
      Palace Farm
      Paradise Cottages
      Paramount
      Pleasure Hill House
      Quiat Villa
      Rausch's Overlook House
      Red Barn Resort
      Regal Wankref Country Colonies
      Rotenbergs
      Roth's
      Segermeister's
      Selsky's
      Shady Vista
      Sherman's
      Slovak Sky
      Star Pleasure
      Stein's
      Steiner's
      Sugar Hill
      Sunnybrook
      Sunny Janne
      Sun Ray Bungalows
      Teicher's
      Tanskeys
      Wenetick's
      Wolf's
      Zivitz Hollywood Bungalows
      Zalowitz's

      Courtesy of Phil Brown and the Catskills Institute

      On View August 12 - 20 at the Grocery Store Gallery, Mt. Dale, NY

      Day & Night: Return to the Borscht Belt presents the work of photographers Marisa Scheinfeld & Isaac Jeffreys alongside archival material from the famed era. The juxtaposition of Scheinfeld's naturally lit style versus Jeffreys theatrical, staged approach offers a manifold celebration of the Borscht Belt in its most contemporary state. Coupled with their work, a curated selection of rare objects and ephemera provides a glimpse into the era in its heyday. 



      This project is made possible with funding from a Sullivan County Arts & Heritage Grant, funded by the Sullivan County Legislature and administered by Delaware Valley Arts Alliance. 


      Special thanks to Raymon Elozua and the Grocery Store Gallery. 

      Links to more information

      Vist Mountain DaleOral History of Camp EvaMountain Dale Living History ProjectBach to Rock Music Festival History

      Copyright © 2025 Borscht Belt Historical Marker Project - All Rights Reserved.

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