Dirty Dancing: Behind the Borscht Belt

Summer’s finally come to its unofficial end, the exact time setting for Dirty Dancing at Kellerman’s Hotel and Resort. By now we all know Kellerman’s was never real, but the Sullivan County Borscht Belt it portrayed was.

These days the area is a ghost land, haunted by its once thriving past.

The bungalows are still there but the hotels mostly are gone, as are the jobs they provided the local economy. Now everything looks broke down and neglected and what’s left of the population is mostly poor white, black and Latino people and lots and lots of Hasidic and Orthodox Jews.

I knew nothing about the area growing up except that my dad used to work in the hotels during summers of his youth.

There’s been so many books written on the area from the point of view of the Hausman family, but my people are working class… so I dragged my dad back up into the mountains to tell me about working in the hotels.

‘I transferred from Onondaga Community College to Sullivan County Community College in ’66 for their art program, the hotels were where everybody like me worked.’

He spent summers waiting tables at establishments like, Kutchers (no relation to Ashton and still in business) The Brinkmann (closed and now lost to time) The Flagler and eventually the Concord (now mostly abandoned and partially torn down – although there’s talk of redevelopment but the best laid plans in Sullivan County always seem to go shit-house).

Apparently The Concord was hard to get into because, as my dad says, they were reluctant at best to hire black people. This was 1966. In fact, he says some of the hotels didn’t hire blacks at all unless you were washing dishes and never came into contact with the guests. Come to think of it, there were one or two black extras in Dirty Dancing who also didn’t speak… historical accuracy!

While he wouldn’t get into the details of exactly what went down, due to middle-age memory loss or fatherly modesty, he did say waiting at the hotel parties was the first time he’d ever seen white people that “partied like black people.” And no, the bumpin’ and grindin’ was not the Hassidic and Orthodox population that inhabit the Borscht Belt now, those were reformed and liberal Jews shakin’ they ass in the street.

At the time, Sullivan County was not the wasteland that it looks like today.

In the summers the area was teeming with tourists, their children and grandchildren whose spending money supported, shops, restaurants, café’s who in turn supported local farms, factories and other year round business. Basically if you lived in Liberty full time, you had an income to not only own and maintain your home, you could also afford patronize local business in the off-season.

That’s not the case anymore. Broadway in Monticello, which my dad says, was the place to hang out, is now mostly empty or boarded up storefronts.

To make movie magic, you have to take a few facts and twist them. While Kellerman’s looked like the posh Mohonk Mountain House, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. A lot of the hotels were much more cheaply built because the state never really made the county enforce building codes.

Another exaggeration, the staff housing. Bungalows were for guests and even an earnest but down on his luck white boy like Johnny (swoon) would not have had an entire bungalow to himself. Staff stayed in dormitories with cots or bunk beds.

Bungalow living was more for those who wanted or could only afford a more rugged experience.

The colonies can still be seen all over the mountains. Each bungalow is a one or two bedroom structure. The kitchen and dining area were in the main house or schlock house.

So this also means the Penny incident would also have gone down in a dorm. I’m not saying she couldn’t have gotten knocked-up, but I went to college, I lived in a dorm, to have an abortion in one is just wrong. But again this was the ‘60’s.

Oddly enough, the Penny incident was what sealed Dirty Dancing’s iconic status in my mind. As kids none of us ever made the connection between Penny and the abortion. Mostly we were just jazzed that our little boring Hudson Valley town, New Paltz, was mentioned in the flick. Even though it was the town that the quack who almost killed Penny was ‘passing through.’

And lastly, Baby and Johnny could not have covered for Penny at ‘The Sheldrake Hotel’ because it never existed. It’s not a complete fabrication; there is a nearby hamlet and lake called Loch Sheldrake in Fallsburgh. As legend has it, Jewish mobsters used to dump bodies in the lake so you couldn’t fish or drink the water in it… so my dad says;)

It’s kinda sad now driving through the Borscht Belt, my dad keeps sighing as we twist along old country roads.

“These places aren’t even a shadow of what they used to be.”

There’s a smattering of traffic on the roads today, but at its height the ‘in season’ traffic on Rt. 52 & Rt. 17 (aka the Quickway) was bumper to bumper.

In between bungalow communities we occasionally see trailer parks, ‘that’s where the goyam live,” and walking on the shoulders of sidewalk less roads are Jewish men and women in full dress with their children.

Guess there won’t be any dancing in the streets any time soon again.