By Riley Schwengel
 |
| The Catskill Mountain House in 1892 Credit: hudsonvalleyruins.org |
Today not many people outside of New
York State will have any reaction to the mention of the Catskills, but a little
less than two centuries ago the sound of the anglicized Dutch name for the
mid-New York mountain range would have brought up feelings of excitement,
national pride, and tranquility. Nestled
100 miles north of New York City, the Catskills existed in quiet obscurity up
until the 19th century when their natural splendor was discovered by
a number of artists and writers, who quickly publicized their majestic scenery
and seemingly pristine landscapes to the American people. Soon, tourists began to flock to the
mountains to get a glimpse for themselves, thus beginning a novel vacation
movement that focused on nature. This
movement culminated in the building of the grand Catskill mountain hotels,
which sought to offer elegance, comfort, and refinement while also allowing
their guests to enjoy the breathtaking views that the Catskills contained. This interest in environmental tourism and
the subsequent effort to accommodate tourists drawn in by it was a precursor to
the American conservation movement.
However this earlier movement centered in the Catskills was different
than modern environmentalism, because capitalism was a driving force in all of the
minds of those involved, whether they be hotel owners or visitors. The Catskill mountain hotels had an
interesting duality with respect to early conservation movements as their
popularity brought environmental concerns and a respect for wilderness to the
forefront of American conscience but at the same time diminished the natural
beauty of the region due to the commercialization and modernization that followed
the throng of tourists up the mountainside.
Before the 1800s, the Catskills were
valued due to their natural resources and the ample space they provided for the
development of industry. The Dutch
settlers, who were the first Europeans to call the area their home, found
evidence of gold and silver deposits but were soon bought out or forced out by the
English colonists and large-scale mining operations in the mountains never
began[i]. The English were more interested in potential
resources above the ground and the Catskills became a major source of grain and
were also pivotal for the international tanning business due to its large
expanses of forests and undeveloped streams that could power the tanneries [ii] [iii]. These tanneries were by far the Catskills’
most influential of early industries, something exemplified by the fact that
the Palen family, who owned the largest tannery in the region, had the entire
town of Palenville named after them[iv].
By the turn of the 19th century, it seemed that the Catskills were
destined to be a hotbed of industry and production, but something changed in
the mindset of Americans that ceased the progression of tanneries and farms and
created an entirely new enterprise of environmental tourism.
While taking a trip to a national
park or forest preserve seems commonplace today, back in the early 19th
century the mountains were a place of untamed wilderness and danger. As Kenneth Myers puts it, “although many
twentieth-century Americans will fly or drive hundreds or even thousands of
miles in order to spend their vacations in the mountains, few of our
seventeenth- or eighteenth-century ancestors had the opportunity, the leisure,
or, most importantly, the desire to visit the mountains”[v]. In the case of the Catskills, it was not until
Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper used the mountain range as a
setting for their books that Americans began to have any interest in traveling
there[vi]. Interestingly, these writers portrayed the
Catskills as a much more pristine and wild place than it actually was. For example, Washington Irving describes the
Catskills in an excerpt, “Here are rocky precipices mantled with primeval
forests, deep gorges walled in by beetling cliffs, with torrents tumbling as if
it were from the sky, and savage glens rarely trodden except by the hunter”[vii]. Though this description is quite inspiring
and visual, it seems to leave out the fact that the Catskills were somewhat
developed due to the industries described earlier. Regardless, thanks to the success of the
books, especially Irving’s Rip Van Winkle,
and their romantic and awe-inspiring descriptions of the scenery in the
Catskills, Americans commenced to clamber at the chance to travel to the region
and see the fabled views featured in their favorite fiction. It did not take long for someone to realize
that the influx of tourists was a business opportunity in the making. In 1822, a group of businessmen, led by James
Powers from the Village of Catskill, bought a parcel of land up in the
mountains called the Pine Orchard that included a magnificent view of the
Hudson Valley[viii]. There they built the first, and perhaps the
most famous, of the grand Catskill hotels, the aptly named Catskill Mountain
House. The hotel soon became immensely
popular with the nation’s elite and offered a luxurious accommodation in a
rustic and natural setting. The hotel
also attracted another breed of artist to the area, who would popularize the
Catskills even more than the writers: the landscape painter.
Utilizing the hospitality that the
Catskill Mountain House provided, many painters, the most popular and
influential being Thomas Cole, traveled up the mountain paths to capture
America’s natural beauty and “untouched” forests, which Cole believed was the
last bastion of untamed wilderness[ix]. Most of these painters, Cole included, had a
spiritual connection with the scenes they painted, believing them to be proof
of God’s grandeur[x]. Thanks to the Mountain House, the artists had
a base of operation and soon their works flooded into the art galleries and
drawing rooms of America, bringing even more and more people up to the
Catskills due to the demand for natural landscapes that the paintings created. As Kenneth Myers explains perfectly, “The
popularization of landscape taste led to the growth of landscape tourism and
made possible the production of more landscape art and literature; the growth
of landscape tourism and the production of steadily increasing amounts of
landscape art and literature led to the creation of steadily increasing numbers
of landscape consumers”[xi]. While the Catskill Mountain House had
benefited from a rise in interest in nature that stemmed from the words of
authors, soon it itself was fostering a new and growing appreciation of the
natural environment.
Perhaps the Catskill Hotels’
greatest legacy were their ability to make environmental tourism fashionable
and thus help begin a movement of environmental consciousness and
appreciation. While the landscape
painters and fiction writers had made the scenery popular with the people, it
was not until the accessibility of the hotels that actually traveling to the
Catskills became stylish. The Catskill
Mountain House had its greatest effect upon the populace between 1850 and 1900,
considered by many to be its heyday after George Beach bought the hotel and
redesigned it to be larger and even more elegant. The hotel even had three presidents stay
under its roof. During this time, other
grand hotels sprung up, including the Hotel Kaaterskill and the Laurel House, and
the Catskills soon became the premier vacation spot in the entire United
States.
The hotels kept in business by playing off the newly popular interest in
wilderness and landscapes through clever advertising and manipulation of social
patterns. For example, one of the
earliest ways that the hotels influenced the public into visiting the Catskills
was by utilizing the widespread fear of the disease Cholera. The disease, which hit in epidemic
proportions in cities like New York in 1832 and then again in the 1850s, never
reached the Catskills, which prompted the hotel owners to claim that the clean
mountain air was therapeutic and could remedy ailments[xii]. This was often the main selling point in
guidebooks to the Catskills, as one describes, “The Mountains are not only a
source of pleasure to the city inhabitants, but of something far more valuable,
which money cannot buy, and that is a sound and healthy condition of mind and
body”[xiii]. While merely trying to drum up customers with
unfounded claims, the hotel owners and those that bought into their advertising
campaigns were further popularizing the idea of the curative and restorative
values of nature, an idea that still holds firm today.
Due to the extravagance of the
hotels, the ability to afford to take a trip to the mountains soon became
something of a status symbol, similar to the wealthy of today owning yachts or
traveling to Europe for the weekend in order to prove their affluence. Thus an appreciation of nature became
something it had never been before: cultured.
Thomas Chambers puts it well by stating, “Riding a carriage up the steep
path from the river to the Catskill Mountain House- a hotel perched on a cliff
overlooking the river with little to recommend it beyond salubrious fresh air,
an inspiring view, and mountain hikes- became a rite of passage for
mid-nineteenth century Americans who aspired to cultural sophistication”[xiv]. Later, patrons of the Catskill Hotels would
make the appeal of natural scenes even greater by attributing spiritual characteristics
to the mountains and the hotels became cathedrals of sorts from where one could
best achieve nirvana. Washington
Irving’s description of the Catskill Mountain House’s view makes this
abundantly clear, “No one mounts a towering eminence but feels his soul
elevated; the whole frame acquires unwonted elasticity, and the spirits flow as
it were in one aspiring stream of satisfaction and delight; for what can be
more animating than from one spot to behold the pomp of man and pride of nature
lying at our feet”[xv]. By promoting the social and religious aspect
of an appreciation of nature, the hotels again unwittingly helped create a
cultural environment that would later spawn the modern conservation and
environmentalism movements, all while only trying to maximize their
profits. It can safely be assumed that
many of the early ideas that would later become these influential movements
began as evening discussions in the parlor of these wilderness hotels[xvi].
While the changing of a population’s
attitude towards nature was beneficial in the long run, the hotels also had an
immediate positive effect upon the Catskill landscape. The hotel owners, like George Beach, soon
realized that their coffers would only continue to fill if the landscape their
patrons came to admire remained in its pristine and beautiful state. With the encroaching tanning industry
threatening to pull down trees, George Beach bought acres and acres of land
around his hotel in order to maintain the scenic views and to build trails and
roads for the visitors with which they could better regard the scenery. While not a true preserved wilderness, the
land was safe from the tanners and appeased the crowds of tourists; Harvey Flad
describes the effect, “The landscape surrounding the mountain house was liminal
space, continually redefined according to the interests of the hotelier and the
perceptions of the guests. Visitors
entered this culturally constructed ‘natural’ landscape by footpaths, trails,
and carriage roads, always keeping a visual and structural anchor to the hotel
itself”[xvii]. The tourists hugely appreciated the
preservation efforts on the lands adjacent to a hotel and the natural
attractions and trails worked to add value to the lodges themselves. Soon reviews of the hotels, in addition to
rating their facilities and service, also took into account what was nearby, as
one 19th century guidebook exemplifies, “the surrounding area (of
the Catskill Mountain House) is very charming; it abounds in pathways, leading
in every direction. Especially are the
well-known waterfalls in this vicinity a source of pleasure and attraction”[xviii]. Some articles written to draw in visitors
fail to even mention the hotels but in passing.
For example an article that described a rigorous nature hike, called
“Climbing the Catskills” and written in 1875, only references the Mountain
House once despite the entire hike taking place on the hotel’s grounds[xix]. While the decision to conserve these areas as
they were was purely economic in motive, the result was vast swaths of land
being protected from clear-cutting and the industrialization that was otherwise
running rampant across the Hudson River Valley.
Considering the rate of urbanization and modernization in the 19th
century, this conservation can be seen as a huge accomplishment and the
Catskills managed to maintain an natural aura throughout the next century,
leading Thomas Longstreth to dryly comment in 1918 that “consequently the
tourist today finds great woods remaining and does not find the cliffs made interesting
with advertisement”[xx].
While the hotels did promote an
early form of environmentalism in order to increase revenue, the philosophy
that they perpetuated was nothing like the environmentalism of today as
economic priorities still reigned over environmental ones. Thus I would argue that the hotels practiced
capitalistic environmentalism and that this bastard child of ecological concern
actually caused as much harm as it did good.
Before the hotels arrived and while the public was first learning about
the region from Irving and Cooper, what drew the first visitors was the
beautiful landscapes and supposedly pristine wilderness. While these features of the Catskills
remained a selling point, once the grand and majestic hotels were built they
became the prominent attractions in the region over the breathtaking views and
dashing waterfalls. This can be gleamed
from the many guidebooks that were written during the 19th
century. For example one guidebook
describes the past state of the location of the Hotel Kaaterskill, “In
September, 1880, the site, now occupied by this largest and most perfect
mountain house in the world, was an unbroken wilderness of underbrush,
overgrowing a chaotic mass of rocks”[xxi]. While previously the pristine nature of the
Catskills was praised, in the 1880s the building of a massive hotel was seen as
a great improvement. This pattern
continues into numerous other guidebooks and travel brochures, which focused
upon the great hotels and barely touch upon sites like the Kaaterskill Falls,
which have been compared in beauty to the more famous Niagra Falls [xxii]. In one extreme case, when the Catskills were
greatly threatened by a score of forest fires in the 1880s, newspaper articles
that wrote about the events barely touched upon the vast amount of ecological
damage that was sure to have been wrought and instead only reassured the
worried public that the Catskill hotels were indeed still standing[xxiii]. This focus on the artificial in an area of
such natural beauty created the wrong priorities in the early environmental
movement. While the enjoyment of nature
was something Americans desperately needed during this time, the hotels also
created the wrong impression that, in order to achieve this ideal, one needed a
fine leather chair in a luxurious parlor next to a window. As the old adage says, “one step forward, two
steps back”.
A good amount of harm that the
Catskills suffered at the hands of the hotel owners and tourists was in the
name of accessibility. The reason that
the Catskills remained so isolated prior to the 1820s was that it was difficult
to travel there, but, once the tourism industry began to blossom, numerous
railroads and carriage roads were quickly put in so that more and more people
could find their way up the mountainsides.
Railroads are extremely ecologically harmful to create, due to their
high resource demand and their encouragement of the damaging edge effect, but
soon dozens were etching their way through the Catskills, depositing tourists
where they wished at the cost of dividing forests and destroying habitats. One railroad, the Otis Elevated Railroad,
even went straight to the Catskill Mountain House from the riverboat landing in
the village of Catskill[xxiv]. This did not sit well with Thomas Cole, who
hated railroads, as evidenced in an excerpt from a poem he wrote, “Iron roads
and huge canals/ that with unseemly scars deform the land/ whose use is not
t’exalt the mind…but to pour streams of riches down the deep/ unfathomable maw
of avarice”[xxv]. Cole believed one of the reasons that the
Catskills were so special was that it was difficult to reach them, and that the
accessibility that the railroads promised would actually spell defilement of
the region[xxvi]. The vast number of tourists that visited the
Catskills upset Cole as well as the other painters and soon their painting
began to reflect this as their landscapes began focusing on more remote
locations and completely excluded artificial creations. Later in his life, Cole greatly regretted the
modernization that had befallen his beloved Catskills and that was brought by
the hated railroads, and he wrote, “The skies are darkened by ascending smoke;
each hill and every valley is become an alter unto Mammon and the gods of man’s
idolatry- the victims we. Missouri’s
floods are ruffled by storm and Hudson’s rugged hills at midnight glow by light
of man-projected meteors”[xxvii].
Perhaps the most egregious slight to
the natural landscape of the Catskills was the commodization of its natural
views and landmarks. The Catskill
hoteliers were nothing if not innovative and soon they ingeniously transformed
the landmarks of the Catskills into products.
The most prominent landmark that became commercialized were the
Kaaterskill Falls, an awe-inspiring waterfall that was the subject of many of
the landscape painters’ works. Once the
tourists began to undertake pilgrimages to the falls, an industrious local
bought the land that the falls occupied and began to build platforms, viewing
stations, and refreshment stands right next to the Kaaterskill[xxviii]. Even the waters themselves soon fell under
the power of capitalism as the owner of the land figured out how to dam the
falls and would only release them when paid, as one visitor describes, “They
save up the waterfalls by doing without them at night and at other times when
they are not of much use, and are thus able to provide a life-size cataract at
certain hours when somebody happens along who can afford one”[xxix]. This commercialization continued to other
parts of the Catskills. Scenic outlooks
were put on postcards and sold, areas were off limits unless a fee was paid,
and hotels offered expensive tours[xxx]. These practices cemented in the minds of
Americans the idea that natural beauty was a commodity, something that could be
bought, sold, and manipulated however man saw fit. This type of thinking would prove a major
roadblock to environmental movements in the 20th century but the
hotels did not mind as long as the money continued to pour in.
In their heyday around the 1880s,
the Catskill hotels enjoyed a flow of 70,000 tourists every summer and the
hotels managed to change the attitude that these people had for nature, for
better or for worse. While the hotels
promoted a respect for nature that was novel and endearing in the 19th
century, they also prioritized profits above all else and caused just as much
ecological damage as they did good. This
caused the Catskills region to become a weird combination of pristine
wilderness and industrial haven, perhaps best described by Alf Evers: “Pilgrims
en route to the Mountain House might hold their noses as tanners’ wagons passed
by or rub their eyes when the smoke of forest fires made the mountain air thick
and biting, yet they could console themselves by reflecting that they were in
the midst of what the best authorities certified to be a wilderness Garden of
Eden into which only the famous Mountain House intruded”[xxxi]. The grand hotels proved to be less timeless
than the landmarks they profited off of, as a combination of financial
difficulties and backlash from rampant anti-semiticism caused the hotels to
slowly die away in the early 20th century. Now they only exist as rusted ruins or as
site markers telling hikers what once stood on a plot of land. However their legacy lives on in the modern
environmental movement, which the hotels unwittingly helped start with their
wanton manipulation of a newfound American respect for nature.
[i] Washington Irving, “The Catskill Mountains” In The Catskill Mountains and the Region Around.(New
York: Taintor Brothers & Co, 1867), 170
[ii] Charles Rockwell, The Catskill Mountains and the Region
Around, (New York: Taintor Brothers & Co, 1867), 30
[iii] Kenneth Myers, The Catskills: Painters, Writers, and Tourists in the
Mountains
(Yonkers, New York: Hudson River Museum of
Westchester 1987), 28
[iv] Rockwell, The Catskill Mountains and the Region Around, 30
[v] Myers, The
Catskills: Painters, Writers, and Tourists in the Mountains, 18
[vi] Alf Evers, The Catskills: from Wilderness to Woodstock, (Garden City, NY: Doubleday,
1972), 352
[vii] Irving, “The Catskills”, 162
[viii] Evers, The Catskills: from Wilderness to Woodstock, 354
[ix] Thomas Cole, “The Lament of the
Forest” (1841), In A Documentary History
of Conservation in America (New York: Praeger, 1972), 276
[x] Thomas Chambers, “The Rise of
Environmental Tourism”, Pennsylvania
History (79) 2012, 1
[xi] Myers, The
Catskills: Painters, Writers, and Tourists in the Mountains, 40
[xii] Evers, The Catskills: from Wilderness to Woodstock, 382
[xiii] H. Shile, Catskill Mountains. (New
York, H. Shile, 1887), 3
[xiv] Chambers, “The Rise of Environmental
Tourism”, 6
[xv] Washington Irving, “The Catskill
Mountains”, 174
[xvi] Harvey Flad, “The Parlor in the
Wilderness: Domesticating an Iconic American Landscape”, Geographic Review (99), 18
[xvii] Ibid, 7
[xviii] H. Shile, Catskill Mountains, 66
[xix] “Climbing the Catskills” New York Times September 2, 1875
[xx] Thomas Longstreth, The Catskills (New York, The Century
Co., 1918), 131.
[xxi] Kirk Munroe, Summer in the Catskill Mountains (New York: New York, West Shore,
and Buffalo Railroad Railway Company, 1883), 25
[xxii] Rockwell, The Catskill Mountains and the Region Around, 328
[xxiii] “Catskill Mountain Fires”, New York Times, 6 May 1887
[xxiv] Kenneth Johnson, “Origins of Tourism
in the Catskill Mountains” Journal of
Cultural Geography 11, 6
[xxv] Thomas Cole, Quoted in Kenneth
Maddox, “Thomas Cole and the Railroad: Gentle Maledictions” Archives of American Art Journal 26, 4
[xxvi] Ibid, 4
[xxvii] Ibid, 177
[xxviii] Myers, The
Catskills: Painters, Writers, and Tourists in the Mountains, 57
[xxix] Longstreth, The Catskills, 87
[xxx] Flad, “The Parlor in the Wilderness:
Domesticating an Iconic American Landscape”, 8
[xxxi] Evers, The Catskills: From Wilderness to Woodstock, 379
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