The Nevele Grand Hotel was a weird place to be in 2001. Once numbering among the most iconic “Borscht Belt” resorts in the Catskills, it was about fifty or sixty years past its prime. But the garish ’60s-style carpeting, all-you-can eat buffets, and nightly stand-up performances remained. At eleven years old, I didn’t really care for the comedy. I’d tagged along to the resort with my best friend, whose family were frequent guests, and we kids mostly hung out at the arcade.

The Nevele had been on its last legs for a long time, outliving its summer resort peers by many years, in part by investing heavily in winter activities and amenities, like an enormous ice-skating rink built in 1970. In 2009, it finally declared bankruptcy and closed permanently.

The Borscht Belt’s heyday was the 1930s to the 1960s, when over five hundred hotels and tens of thousands of bungalow colonies dotted the landscape of Sullivan County, New York, in the foothills of the Catskill Mountains. Jews from New York City and across the Northeast patronized these places, often returning every summer with their families to the same place. The Borscht Belt Museum in Ellenville, New York, permanently opening next year, celebrates this “resort era, when millions of urban dwellers sought refuge in the mountains of upstate New York, leaving deep imprints on mainstream American culture, from stand-up comedy and comfort food to mid-century modern design and popular concepts of leisure.”