Growing up in the ’70s and ’80s on Long Island as a Jewish kid, I was not alone traveling to Sullivan County (an hour or so northwest of NYC) to vacation at the grand resorts – Kutsher’s Country Club, the Nevelle (Ulster County, I know…), the Concord (if those names don’t ring a bell, do a Google Image search).
Last summer I enjoyed revisiting this long lost era (memorialized in films like Dirty Dancing and television shows like The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel) as part of a project to create a new museum dedicated to preserving the legacy and values of the Catskill resort era for future generations.
Since my grandfather worked at Kutsher’s, I especially enjoyed taking part in returning the famous neon sign that welcomed guests to the region, from a dedicated fan who sought to protect it when the entire resort went out of business and everything was sold at auction.
Here is the sign back in the day:
Here is was in storage, electricity still working, just this summer:
And here is the article in Long Island’s Newsday about its acquisition and return to the region: Kutsher’s neon sign making its way from an LI basement back to the Borscht Belt. Make sure to turn up the volume so you can also listen to the great video the paper produced about it!
On the subject of founding a new museum, I started working this fall with Alex Gomberg, of the Brooklyn Seltzer Boys (who recently reached their 10 year anniversary). If his name sound familiar, it might be because you read about him as the youngest seltzer man in the country in the epilogue to my book Seltzertopia: The Extraordinary Story of an Ordinary Drink. Or perhaps you recognize him from his incomparable egg cream station at my youngest’s B’Nai Mitzvah celebration from earlier in the year.
Sorry, where was I? I got distracted by the egg creams. Oh yeah! We’ve founding a new museum, tentatively called The Brooklyn Seltzer Museum and Factory Tour. Earlier this year Alex moved his seltzer works into a totally new facility in Cypress Hills, Brooklyn. It’s magnificent. And together we are beginning to explore how it can tell the story to visitors about the history of sparkling water, and of his family’s three generations in the business.
Check out this 360 photo I made to get a sense of the Works and watch this video to get a sense of it in action.
To get things started, we are working with graduate students from NYU’s Digital Media Design for Learning Program. I look forward to sharing more about this exciting project as it advances.
