The Catskills: Its History and How It Changed America by Silverman Stephen M. & Silver Raphael D

Author:Silverman, Stephen M. & Silver, Raphael D. [Silverman, Stephen M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307272157
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2015-10-26T22:00:00+00:00

Twain was so active at Onteora, with frequent dinner parties alternating between his cottage and Hutton’s, that he “famously did not finish a single story that summer, although he did have his portrait painted by Carroll Beckwith,” according to the Princeton University Library. “There was an orchestra to play during meals and at the dances in the evenings. There were theatrical productions in which everyone took a role, as well as pantomimes, charades, and stories told by firelight.”

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TWILIGHT OPENED FOUR YEARS after Onteora Park, and its founder, Charles F. Wingate, a civil and sanitary engineer from New York City, named the 160-acre cottage community in the hamlet of Haines Falls after his businessmen’s club in town. Twilight Park’s policy clearly stated, “No peddlers, beggars, itinerant musicians, or persons of a similar class will be allowed to pass the gates,” and while it was insisted that these regulations existed only to ensure that those with similar cultural interests would buy property within its boundaries, the limitations effectively encouraged discreet discrimination based on race, ethnicity, and religion. Just like the Jim Crow legislation that arose in the wake of Emancipation, boundaries around Jews started going up the same time as their inflow to Ellis Island.

At hotels and resorts in the northern Catskills, efforts to exclude were discreet at first, until the stifling summer of 1877, when the Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga Springs, a favorite of John Jacob Astor and Andrew Carnegie, denied a room to one of their equals, Joseph Seligman. Although the prominent New York banker and his family had spent the previous summer at the Grand Union without incident, the hotel’s new owner, Judge Henry Hilton (no relation to the later hotelier), instituted a strict rule that “no Israelites should be permitted to stop at this hotel.”

The well-connected New York banker Joseph Seligman reacted strongly when a new manager at the Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga Springs instituted a “no Israelites” policy.

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