From 1881 to 1924, three grand hotels stood on this mountaintop at the same time. People traveled from across the country, and from overseas, to stay in them. None of the three is still standing. The view they were built for still is.
The Catskill Mountain House
The oldest of the three, by a long way. Built in 1823 and opened in 1824, it had been taking guests for more than 25 years before the Laurel House opened, and for nearly 60 before the Hotel Kaaterskill. It sat right on the edge of the escarpment, with a porch view out over the whole Hudson Valley.
In the fall of 1825, a young painter named Thomas Cole came up to sketch the Catskills. Cole is credited with starting the Hudson River School, the group of painters who made America's wild landscape the main subject of their work. He saw places like this as natural beauty to be treasured, not used up, and his paintings helped the rest of the country see them that way too.
Cole came back to the Mountain House many times over the years, and his journals suggest he stayed there on a few occasions. He wasn't always charmed by the company. After one visit in 1835, he grumbled that the other guests were bowling and dancing instead of looking at the view.
Painters followed him here for decades, including Frederic Church, who studied under him. For many of them, a trip to the Mountain House and Kaaterskill Falls became something close to a pilgrimage, and their paintings helped bring more visitors up the mountain.
The hotel's last season was 1941. It sat empty for about twenty years. New York State bought the property in 1962, and on January 25, 1963, the state Conservation Department burned the building down on purpose, to return the site to wild forest.
Today the site is a flat clearing you pass on the way to Boulder Rock. The porch is gone. The view it was built for is exactly the same.
The Hotel Kaaterskill
This one started with an argument over fried chicken. In 1880, a Philadelphia lawyer named George Harding was staying at the Mountain House and asked for chicken for his daughter instead of the roast beef on the menu. The owner, Charles Beach, said no and told him to go build his own hotel. Harding did. The Hotel Kaaterskill opened the next summer, in 1881, less than a mile away.
It opened with about 600 rooms and later grew to 1,200. In its day it was called the largest mountain hotel in the world.
It burned on the evening of September 8, 1924. The season had ended on Labor Day, so no guests were inside. The fire started in the kitchen, where workers were making soap, and the wooden building went up fast. It was never rebuilt.
The ruins sit on the Escarpment Trail, between Boulder Rock and Inspiration Point. Not much is left but a low stone foundation, so it's easy to walk past without knowing what you're looking at.
The Laurel House
The smallest of the three. The Schutt family built it around 1850 as a boarding house for about 50 guests. It cost roughly half what the big hotels charged, and it drew a middle-class crowd.
By 1871 it belonged to Jacob Fromer, who rebuilt it bigger in the early 1880s until it could sleep about 300 guests. It stood right at the head of Kaaterskill Falls, with a viewing platform beside the top of the falls.
The hotel also ran the falls as a show. It dammed the creek above the drop, and for a fee (a quarter, by one account) it would let the water go and send a rush over the falls for whoever was watching.
The Laurel House stayed open into the 1960s. The state bought the property and burned it on March 1, 1967.
What's actually left
Three hotels, three different endings, all on the same mountain. What's left is the ground they stood on and the view they were built around.
The Catskill Mountain House site is a stop on the walk out to Boulder Rock. Sunset Rock is a short walk north along the same escarpment. The Hotel Kaaterskill ruins sit on the Escarpment Trail nearby. And the view the Laurel House charged people to watch is still right there above Kaaterskill Falls, free, any day you want it.
Plan your North-South Lake day →
Want to take a piece of it home? Our North-South Lake hoodie, t-shirt, magnet and sticker are all designed by us in Tannersville.
If you want help figuring out which of these to walk to, stop in. We're a few miles down the road in Tannersville.
Get Directions to Camp Catskill
Photo: the Catskill Mountain House, Detroit Publishing Co., about 1900-1910. Library of Congress, public domain.
-- Ryan Penny, Camp Catskill
