The Borscht Belt Hotels and Bungalows were a collection of around 1,000 hotels and resorts, and 50,000 bungalows, and summer camps in the Catskills Region of New York State that catered towards Jewish people seeking a place to vacation away from the city. The region was extremely popular as each place to stay throughout the Borscht Belt were packed with vacationers all summer long throughout the 1920’s and 1960’s, and it was a well accessible area for families to travel to from New York City, as the Catskills are around 100 miles away. By the 1960s, the decline of the Borscht Belt began, and by the 1980’s & 1990’s, the vacation destinations of the Borscht Belt were all struggling financially as there were little to no guests. Air travel became more affordable, air conditioning became more widespread throughout the city, cultural shifts changed the ideals of vacationing, and social integration took place as other locations began accepting Jewish families as guests. This left the Borscht Belt era coming to a close. The famous Grossingers Resort closed in 1986 and was the first major Borscht Belt hotel to close. And the Kutshers Hotel and Country Club closed in 2013, being the last major Borscht Belt hotel to close. Since then, the Catskills Borscht Belt has been a forgotten land with abandoned hotels, resorts, bungalows, and houses littering the region. In many ways, the abandoned remnants of the Borscht Belt was the true genesis of my love for abandoned places, and photography. As a fifteen-year old, I discovered many of the abandoned hotels amongst the Catskills, and this led to me taking many trips with my mother and father to explore these interesting places. While exploring, I made friends who were also traveling around the area exploring and photographing the many abandoned Borscht Belt hotels across the catskills, and this led to the beginning of my true love and interest in exploring abandoned places all over as my new friends had been documenting abandoned places all around the East Coast for quite some time. Since then, I began to learn to do research, and discover places that I could explore, and photograph with my primary focus of documentation becoming former State Psychiatric Institutions, somewhat forgetting about the remaining abandoned hotels of the Borscht Belt. However, I recently set out to revisit many of the abandoned places around the Catskills that I had explored already, only now, I would have a different eye in photography than the fifteen-year old me had. This would completely reshape how I see the places that I would be visiting. Plus, I hadn’t been anywhere near all of the abandoned resorts and bungalows yet, and I knew there would be so many more for me to discover across the Catskill region. Today, the many abandoned resorts and hotels have been burnt, heavily vandalized, or demolished. However, as of 2025 and 2026, I've worked to photograph what remains as these large pieces of history continue fading away.