This is a 4-minute video promoting The Pines Resort in upstate New York's Catskill Mountain region.
At 400 rooms the Pines Resort wasn't the Borscht Belt's biggest, but it was always booked. And big stars such as Buddy Hackett, Robert Goulet and Tito Puente routinely played its nightclubs.
The Pines boasted both indoor and outdoor pools, tennis courts, baseball fields, ice-skating rinks, movie theaters, a golf course, even a ski hill -- plus card rooms that were legendary with guests and locals alike.
The Borscht Belt hit it's stride in the post World War 2 boom. More than a million people traveled to the Catskills in the Summer of 1952.
But cultural changes in the 1960s and 1970s brought on the downfall of The Pines and the other Borscht Belt resorts.
As air travel became more affordable, families started flying to the Caribbean and Europe for the same amount of money in equal or less time. Women also began entering the work force, which made it impossible for them to spend entire summers at the resorts. Anti-semitism also lessoned, so many Jews started feeling comfortable traveling to other places.
By the 1990s only a few large hotels remained. The Pines was one of the last to go, finally closing it's doors in 1998. Poor roof maintenance has created a lot of water damage, and today much of the place is falling apart. Moss and mold grow thick on the ceilings, walls and floors. Shredded insulation hangs from the rafters of the Persian Room, the former nightclub where Joan Rivers once cracked jokes and Tony Bennett crooned for summer guests not so very long ago.
Today, a few small resorts remain in the region, though not many dating back to the Borscht Belt prime. Some of the old resorts were sold as meditation centers, ashrams, and drug rehabilitations centers. The region now has many summer homes and bungalow colonies, and some developers are working with Native American tribes to bring gambling to the area.
The Pines Resort and the land surrounding it have been split apart and sold to separate owners. The new owner of the 364-acres grounds wants to build some 350 single-family homes. The ownership of the resort itself was thrown in flux in the Spring of 2009, when they declared bankruptcy.