Above: A Brooklyn family headed to Sullivan County last week. Photo by Eli, posted on the Voz Iz Neias website.
The annual Jewish migration to the Catskills began last weekend, with thousands of families packing up their homes in Brooklyn and heading to bungalow communities in Liberty and South Fallsburg for the summer.
Voz Iz Neis, a Jewish news website, commemorated the yearly emptying-out of Brooklyn with an article accompanied by photos of families packing up moving vans:
Finding a parking place in Brooklyn is becoming considerably less daunting than usual as thousands of Jewish residents head up today to the mountains to spend their summer in the scenic Catskill mountains.
The VIN story focused on the impact this summertime demographic shift has on retailers in Brooklyn and in the Catskills. Some stores, like the gourmet food store Pomegranate, get flooded with out-of-town orders:
“So many people either fax, email or call in their orders, some of which are quite large,” explained [Pomegranate] store manager Gabe Boxer. “We have wives placing orders from their upstate bungalows and husbands drive up to the store on Thursday night. We bring the order out to their car in an ice box along with a bowl of cholent.” In fact, Pomegranate filled so many orders for people going to the mountains that Boxer estimates that the store went through 20,000 ice boxes last summer.
Other stores, VIN reports, find it easier just to pack up and follow their customers upstate.
One such store is CH Cycles, a Brooklyn bicycle store that celebrated the grand opening of its summer location in South Fallsburg last Sunday, according to an article on Chabad.info.
Got a favorite summer season Catskills business? Tell us in the comments section of this post.
Below: CH Cycles' brand-new Catskills location. Photo via the CH Cycles Facebook page.
