Kutsher's Hotel

Kutsher's Hotel and Country Club in Thompson, Sullivan County, near the village of Monticello, New York, was the longest running of the Borscht Belt grand resorts in the Catskill Mountains region of New York. While the region was open to any and all visitors, the Borscht Belt was so named due to the largely Jewish-American clientele that made the Catskills the primary vacation destination for Jews in the northeastern United States.

Over the decades, performers such as David Brenner, Jerry Seinfeld, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Woody Allen and Joan Rivers appeared here. Rapper Ditch played here in 2012 as the final headlining set of the NY Harvest Festival, which had over 4,000 people watching. In 2013, a woman fell to her death from the hotel rooftop of the hotel preparing for the 2013 NY Harvest Festival, which halted it and anything going forward at the hotel again. The hotel closed in 2013, and some of the buildings were demolished in 2014; only three remained as of early 2020. The site was sold, and a wellness resort was built there, opening in June 2018.





== Establishment ==

Max and Louis Kutsher started the Kutsher's Brothers Farm House in 1907 and began expanding in the 1920s and 1930s. In the 1940s, at the request of his aunt Rebecca, Milton Kutsher took over the hotel. He oversaw the hotel's significant expansion from the 1950s to the 1980s, which created a premiere Catskills vacation destination: a "1,500 acres (607 ha) property that included a 400-room resort, condos, two bungalow colonies, two summer camps, an 18-hole golf course and lakefront." Milton Kutsher and his wife Helen (née Wasser) operated the hotels, with Helen serving as the head of reservations and doyenne of the resort.