A few nice example business plan images I found:
"Lake" Borscht Belt Area - History NY
Image by Forsaken Fotos
"The name comes from borscht (also transliterated as 'borshch' or 'borsch'), a beet-based soup from the areas of the former Russian Empire that was brought by Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants to the United States, where it remains a popular dish.
It is a play-on-words of the term "Bible Belt".
Borscht Belt hotels, bungalow colonies, summer camps, and קאָך-אַליינס kokh-aleyns (a Yiddish name for self-catered boarding houses, literally, "cook-alones") were frequented by middle and working class Jewish New Yorkers, mostly Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants and their children and grandchildren, particularly in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Because of this, the area was also nicknamed the Jewish Alps and "Solomon County" (a modification of Sullivan County), by many people who visited there. Well-known resorts of the area included Brickman's, Brown's Hotel, The Concord, Friar Tuck Inn, Gibber's, Gilbert's, Grossinger's, Granit, the Woodbine Hotel, the Heiden Hotel, Irvington, Kutsher's Hotel and Country Club, Lansman's, the Nevele, The Laurels Hotel and Country Club, The Pines Resort, Raleigh, Stevensville, the Tamarack Lodge, Stiers, and the Windsor.
Two of the larger hotels in High View (just north of Bloomingburg) were Shawanga Lodge and the Overlook. One of the high points of Shawanga Lodge's existence came in 1959, when it was the site of a conference of scientists researching laser beams. The conference marked the start of serious research into lasers. The hotel burned to the ground in 1973. Lasers played no role in the fire.
The Overlook still remains in a different form, no longer functioning as it was in its heyday. The Overlook had entertainment and summer lodging for many years through the late 1960s and was operated by the Schrier family. It included a main building and about 50 other bungalows, plus a five-unit cottage just across the street.
Some of these hotels originated from farms that were established by immigrant Jews in the early part of the 20th century.
Despite the upgrade of old travel routes such as the original New York State Route 17 (superseded by an express highway of the same name, now in the midst of an upgrade to Interstate 86), the area declined as a travel destination. What was left was a veritable museum of abandoned or decaying travel-related businesses from the Borscht Belt's heyday. The post-WWII decline of the area coincided with the increase of air travel. When families could go to more far-off destinations such as Hawaii, the Caribbean, and even Europe for the same cost as going to the Catskills, the new destinations began to win out.
As early as 1965, declines at many Catskills resorts were evident, as the older, smaller Borscht Belt hotels such as Youngs Gap and the Ambassador rapidly lost patronage and closed by the end of the 1960s, and the 1970s took a toll on more sophisticated establishments such as the Flagler and The Laurels. The 1980s onward were no kinder to the area, Grossinger's being the largest casualty; it closed in 1985 or 1986, and the property (except the country club, still active) was abruptly abandoned by new owners midway through a demolition and rebuilding of the old resort. Any benefit gained by Grossinger's largest historic rival (and the largest of all the Borscht Belt resorts), the Concord, would be ephemeral, as the latter filed for bankruptcy in 1997 and closed a year later.
In 1987, New York's mayor Ed Koch proposed buying the Gibber Hotel in Kiamesha Lake to house the homeless. The idea was opposed by local officials. The hotel instead became a religious school, like many old hotels in the Catskills.
Today, the region is a summer home for many Orthodox Jewish families, primarily from the New York metropolitan area. It has many summer homes and bungalow colonies (including many of the historic colonies), as well as year-round dwellers. It even has its own year-round branch of the Orthodox Jewish volunteer emergency medical service Hatzolah. A few resorts remain in the region, though not many associated with the Borscht Belt Prime (including Kutsher's Hotel, Villa Roma, Soyuzivka, a Ukrainian cultural resort, and the Skazka, Xenia, and Hotel Pine resorts, which are Russian cultural resorts.
Plans are now in place by those who purchased former Borscht Belt resorts Concord Resort Hotel and Grossinger's, for example, to work with American Indians in an attempt to bring gambling to the region. Because the Borscht Belt's prime has long passed and many of the resorts are abandoned, developers feel that this is the only way to revitalize the region to the popularity it once had by attracting guests to world-class casinos and resorts such as the ones in New Jersey and Connecticut. However, large-scale casino plans have not come to fruition.
The Heiden Hotel in South Fallsburg, which was the location of the movie Sweet Lorraine starring Maureen Stapleton, was destroyed by fire in May 2008.
The Stevensville Hotel in Swan Lake, which was owned by the family of accused Bernard Madoff accomplice David G. Friehling, has reopened as the Swan Lake Resort Hotel.
The former Homowack Lodge in Phillipsport was converted into a summer camp for Hassidic girls. Officials of the state Department of Health ordered the property evacuated in July 2009, citing health and safety violations.
Kutsher's Hotel and Country Club has hosted the United States edition of the music festival All Tomorrow's Parties in 2008, 2009, and 2010.
The Granite currently operates as the Hudson Valley Resort.
The Tamarack Lodge caught fire in 2012. 30 buildings were partially or completely destroyed. The area has started to go through a revival, interestingly as a destination for Motorsports enthusiasts visiting the well-known Monticello Motor Club, located at the location of the former Monticello Airport. In 2012, the Monticello Motor Club announced expansion plans to attract professional racing, such as American Le Mans, Grand-Am, and IndyCar, to the area."
Taken From en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borscht_Belt
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On May 1, 2013, the resort is For Sale and the care taker lives on the pressies so no scrappers and vandals can enter the property.
Spirella in white
Image by shaggy359
The south side of the Spirella Building in Letchworth Garden City during the first flowering of snow in 2013. Same scene in the evening
The building was built as a factory for the Spirella corset company between 1912 and 1920 to a design by architect Cecil Hignett. It was one of the main sources of employment in the recently built garden city (Letchworth being the first example of this early 20th century approach to new town planning.)
The building started to fall into disrepair during the 1980s, with the Spirella company going out of business in 1989. In the late 1990s it was renovated and now houses offices of a number of companies and a charity (on the way to one of which I took this shot)
De Saussure chest detail, MESDA, Winston-Salem, NC
Image by hdes.copeland
Figure 10 Detail of a canted corner and foot on the chest illustrated in fig. 8.
William Jones is one of the non-German cabinetmakers who clearly was a child of the German conclave yet dipped more than a toe into the waters of Massachusetts style. Based upon a labeled chest of drawers that descended in the DeSaussure family (fig. 8), four case pieces have been attributed to his shop. These objects provide a clear window on the shifting sands of fashion in Charleston’s cabinet trade at the end of the 1780s. Since he was not an orphan, nothing is known of Jones’s apprenticeship, nor do we even know whether he was a South Carolina native. There is no question, however, that he was either an apprentice or journeyman—or both—in one of the more prominent shops of the German school. He first appears in city records in 1787, located at the corner of Church and Tradd Streets. In August 1788, Jones, who described himself as a “Cabinet maker and Undertaker,” placed a notice that he had “Removed from No. 24, corner of Church and Tradd streets, to No. 54, Meeting street.” A similar notice appeared in May 1789, indicating that Jones had moved from Meeting Street to 51 King Street. He was listed there in Milligan’s city directory for 1790. Significantly, this property appears to be the same lot and building—evidently containing both a residence and a shop—that was purchased by Charles Desel in August 1790. At that time, Desel evidently was still in partnership with Henry Gesken on Church Street. Milligan’s directory does not list Desel at 51 Broad until 1794, where he remained until his death in 1807.16
Jones obviously was a successful tradesman. His advertisements were largely placed to inform his patrons of address changes and to seek journeymen. He advertised for a journeyman in the summer of 1790, and the following November he sought “one or two Journeymen Cabinet–Makers.” In both March and April of 1791 he again advertised for journeymen and noted that he had added upholstery to the services of his shop. Another notice in December 1791 announced a move to “No. 40 Tradd Street,” where Jones intended to carry on the “cabinet & upholstery business in a more extensive manner than before.” The same advertisement again sought two journeymen for the cabinet trade “and one to the upholsterers line.” Jones became a member of the South Carolina Society in the spring of 1792 and died the following November. One of the appraisers who signed his inventory of February 1793 was Jacob Sass.17
The inventory, which described Jones as a “Cabinet Maker deceased late of Tradd Street,” is both extensive and revealing. The “Stock in Trade” listed four “Mahogany Bedsteads” valued at £3.10 each, a “Pair Inlaid Tea Tables” valued at £5 apiece, 3 “Setts” of dining tables, an “inlaid Cellerett,” an inlaid “Slabb” table, a “Comode,” a “Beaureau” valued at £5, two easy chairs, an unfinished sofa, two unfinished “Wardrobes” valued at £10, ten pairs of “Mahogany Carved Bed Posts” valued at only 14 shilling a pair, and other unfinished work including a bookcase, desk, commode, tea table, and a “Chest of Drawers,” the latter valued at £5. The shop contained “Sundry Mahogany Table Leggs & Rails . . . Cutt up Chair Stuff . . . 12 Turned Bed Posts,” and other assorted furniture components along with a good deal of lumber, including mahogany, ash, pine, and “Sundry Drying Wood & Stringing.” A “lot of hair,” along with “22M Brass Nails” and “girth Webb,” tacks, “Hair Seating,” and mattress covers attest to the upholstery portion of the business. Besides furniture, coffin hardware, and “Sundry Tools,” the shop contained seven “new & old” workbenches, together worth £3.10. Also on hand were seventeen pieces of finished furniture, but since they are interspersed in the inventory with eight unfinished pieces and parts for fourteen bedsteads, it is unlikely that the finished pieces were imported furniture warehoused by Jones.18
The most significant documentation of Jones’s Charleston career is the fragment of a label pasted over a lock inside one of the drawers of the DeSaussure chest (figs. 8, 9). Most of the label was destroyed when the lock was removed, but it is possible to extrapolate the missing portion. Accompanying illustrations of tasseled drapery, an upholstered armchair, and a shield-back side chair stuffed over the rails was the text: “william jones,/Upholsterer & Cabinet Maker/N... Meeting Street/Charleston.” The competently-engraved label is signed “Abernathie” in the lower right corner. Thomas Abernathie (d. 1796) first advertised his trade to the citizens of Charleston in June 1786. In January 1795, he was located at 42 Queen Street, where he advertised as an “Engraver in General” and offered to carry out “Copper Plate Printing . . . With accuracy and dispatch.” In a notice published late in 1786 he indicated that he also conducted “the business of a Land Surveyor.”19
The “N... Meeting Street” address on Jones’s label suggests that he made the chest between August 1788, when he advertised that he had moved from the corner of Church and Broad to Meeting Street, and May 1789, when he informed his clients that he had “removed” to 51 Broad. When discovered, the chest was almost as shabby as its mutilated label. The rear feet and face veneers of the drawer fronts were missing, and the cockbeading had been cut flush with the altered drawer faces. Typical of Charleston case furniture of the 1780s and early 1790s, the drawers were not veneered on horizontally-laminated cores. To avoid excessive waste from sawing the serpentine facade from single, thick boards, Jones face-glued three pieces of thin, full-height mahogany scantling together, resulting in visible vertical joints inside several drawers. The veneer facings of the foot cants were also missing. They have been replaced with the inclusion of simple outline stringing to match the existing front faces of the feet (fig. 10). The single-line string on the feet suggested a similar treatment for the drawers, which, judging from other work attributed to Jones, probably had book-matched veneers originally. Following the usual treatment of the later phase of the German school, the case cants have horizontally grained panels of mahogany outlined with a single string. The base molding above the foot cants is cut integrally with the wedge-shaped pieces forming the cants themselves.
The case design of Jones’s chest is similar to a pre-Revolutionary Charleston example attributed to Pfeninger and his associates in the German school (see Savage, p. 116, fig. 14). The serpentine front, canted corners, and sharp coves behind the cants are a subdued British response to the French style. Chests of this plan follow the design of a “Commode Cloths Press” that Chippendale illustrated in all three editions of the Director (pl. 130 in the 3d edition). Chests of drawers with the same plan occurred in Philadelphia at about the same time that the Pfeninger example was made, probably during the mid- to late 1770s. Brock Jobe has proposed that this form could have been brought to Charleston from New England; however, few Massachusetts-school examples can be dated before the 1780s. Two canted-corner chests from Salem (in the Diplomatic Reception Rooms, U.S. Department of State) certainly could date early in that decade, but a majority of the early examples appear to be from South Carolina and Pennsylvania shops. In Charleston, the canted-corner plan evidently originated in the German-school shops, since its earliest appearance is the base of the Edwards library bookcase, which probably dates no later than 1770 (see Savage, pp. 106–7, fig. 1). As on the chest attributed to Pfeninger, the case cants of the Jones chest, as well as the coves behind them, are formed from full-height vertical appliqués at the leading edges of the case sides; the joint at the front is covered by the veneer facings of the cants. Unlike the flat cants of the Jones chest, the cants on the Pfeninger piece are “swelld” at the feet, a detail much in tune with the baroque fugues of the German school. The Jones piece is virtually the same size as the Pfeninger example, and both have ungraduated drawers like a chest that descended in the Porcher family of Charleston. The latter chest, illustrated in figures 13 and 14 of E. Milby Burton’s Charleston Furniture, 1700–1825, has veneer-paneled canted corners and replaced feet.
Photo and text posted: 8 March 2011
Revised: 24 March 2011
Copyright reference: Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts, MESDA, Old Salem, NC
Origin of text: www.chipstone.org
1997 - "The material in this article is adapted from a manuscript under preparation by Bradford Rauschenberg and John Bivins for the forthcoming monograph Charleston Furniture 1680–1820, to be published by the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts and distributed by the University of North Carolina Press."
