The Catskills are legendary: home to poets, artists, hucksters and gangsters, idealists and tycoons, prize-fighters, politicians, preachers and outlaws, musicians, spiritualists, outcasts, and rebels, yet their centrality to the American experience has largely gone undiscovered.
For the last two centuries, against a backdrop of rolling blue hills that reverberate with superstitions and magical incantations, the Catskill Mountains witnessed the introduction of steamboat travel on the Hudson River, the opening of the Erie Canal and the rise of New York as the fastest growing city on earth. A go to place for many New Yorkers looking for an idyllic setting to escape the summer heat it’s also been a training ground for some of the biggest names in show business.