The Catskills: Its History and How It Changed America

"The Catskills ("Cat Creek" in Dutch), America's original frontier, northwest of New York City, with its seven hundred thousand acres of forest 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 ... 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... Here 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". ... 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." -- Publisher's description