Grossinger's Resort: the Borscht Belt hotel that inspired Dirty Dancing

Grossinger's was not a castle or a mansion, but it was a kind of palace all the same — a resort in the Catskill Mountains of New York that, for much of the twentieth century, was the most famous holiday destination in Jewish America. It is often named as the inspiration for the film Dirty Dancing. It closed in 1986, stood empty for decades, and was demolished in 2018. Its story is the story of an entire world that came and went.

From a boarding house to a legend

The Grossinger family — Asher Selig and Malka Grossinger, immigrants from Galicia in Poland — moved to Ferndale, New York, around 1913 and began renting rooms to visitors from New York City. Their daughter, Jennie Grossinger, acted as hostess, and her warmth and energy became the soul of the place. In 1919 the family bought a larger property of a hundred acres and named it Grossinger's Terrace Hill House.

Under Jennie's management, the resort grew into something extraordinary: more than thirty-five buildings, a dining room that could seat 1,300 guests, a nightclub called the Terrace Room, its own airstrip and its own post office. Boxer Rocky Marciano trained there. It was part of the 'Borscht Belt', the network of Jewish resorts in the Catskills, and Grossinger's was its crown.

The Waldorf of the Catskills

Grossinger's expanded in every style of its age: it began as a Victorian hotel, gained Mission-style and Tudor-style wings, and added Modernist buildings in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1949 the young architect Morris Lapidus, in one of his first hotel commissions, remodelled the Terrace Room. In 1952 Grossinger's became the first resort in the world to use artificial snow for skiing — a small detail that tells you how much it wanted to be first.

Jennie Grossinger died in 1972, and her death coincided with the beginning of the end for the Borscht Belt. Younger travellers had cheap flights and new destinations. The great Catskill hotels, built for a world of trains and long summers, found it harder and harder to fill their rooms.

Closed, empty, demolished

In 1986 the family sold the property and the main hotel closed. That September the singer Eddie Fisher tried to demolish the playhouse with dynamite as a symbolic start to redevelopment; the building needed bulldozers instead. For thirty years the resort sat empty, its rooms and pools slowly failing, becoming one of the most famous abandoned places in the eastern United States.

The golf course stayed open until 2017, but demolition of the remaining buildings began in 2018 and the last structure came down that October. A further building burned in 2022. In 2025 the site was bought by developers with plans to build something new. Grossinger's is gone, but its name survives in books, in documentaries, and in the film it is said to have inspired. It is the clearest example in this archive of a place that was not preserved — and of how much is lost when a whole way of life ends.

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Related places

If this one stayed with you, these entries sit in the same corner of the archive:

• Overlook Mountain House: the hotel that burned three times — United States
• Lake Shawnee: the amusement park that never reopened — United States
• The Ponce Intercontinental: the hotel on the hill — Puerto Rico