waterfall picture in resort world catskills casino

Whatever the reasons, as Sims Foster, a native Catskills resident and co-owner of four (and soon to be more) small Catskills hotels, says: “There is promise and energy and momentum, and we feel really good about it.” The golden and silver age of the Catskills It could be the rise of telecommuting, allowing New Yorkers, who make up the bulk of tourists, to venture upstate midweek.

It could be a function of the improving economy, the increasing cost of air travel, or the pure hell of New York City airports. Tourist spending rose to $1.23 million in 2016 from $1.12 million in 2014. Each of the major Catskills counties-Ulster, Delaware, Sullivan, and Greene-has noted increases in tourism. “The Catskills are experiencing an incredible renaissance in the travel and tourism market,” says Roberta Byron-Lockwood, president of the Sullivan Catskills Visitors Association. Amid the Catskills’ 35 high peaks and nearly 6,000 square miles-which include waterfalls, ice caves, rocky cliffs, and fly-fishing spots-several of those downtrodden resorts have been reborn or revamped, and shuttered or ailing smaller motels, hotels, guesthouses, and inns-not to mention a major casino complex-have recently opened, or are just about to. Once-glorious resorts that populated the mountainous region north and west of New York City in the middle of the last century-the Catskills’ golden age-were now decayed carcasses littering the landscape, with lonely lounge chairs abandoned next to parched Olympic-sized pools.īut a funny thing has happened on the way to the Catskills: Hoteliers started to take notice of the area again.

In 2016, photographer Marisa Scheinfeld released The Borscht Belt: Revisiting the Remains of America’s Jewish Vacationland, a collection of ghostly photos of the western Catskills that seemed to capture the area’s fate.

Waterfall picture in resort world catskills casino