Smorgasburg is an open-air food market that originated in Williamsburg, Brooklyn next to the East River. It takes place every Saturday in an empty lot. The name Smorgasburg is a portmanteau of “Smörgåsbord” and “Williamsburg”. Dozens of vendors sell their food and wares. It initially was started in 2011, by Jonathan Butler and Eric Demby as an offshoot of Brooklyn Flea. read more…
Turtle Bay is a neighborhood in New York City, on the east side of Midtown Manhattan. It extends from roughly 43rd Street to 53rd Streets, and eastward from Lexington Avenue to the East River‘s western branch (facing Roosevelt Island). The neighborhood is the site of the headquarters of the United Nations and the Chrysler Building. The Tudor City apartment complex is to the south of Turtle Bay. Turtle Bay is named after a former cove of the East River. The neighborhood was originally settled as a Dutch farm in the 17th century, and was subsequently developed with tenements, power plants, and slaughterhouses in the 19th century. These industrial structures were largely demolished in the 1940s and 1950s to make way for the United Nations headquarters. Today, Turtle Bay contains multiple missions and consulates to the nearby United Nations headquarters. read more…
Borscht Belt, or Jewish Alps, is a colloquial term for the mostly defunct summer resorts of the Catskill Mountains in parts of Sullivan, Orange and Ulster counties in Upstate New York, United States. A source interviewed by Time magazine stated that the visits to the area by Jewish families was already underway “as early as the 1890s … Tannersville … was ‘a great resort of our Israelite brethren’…from the 1920s on [there were] hundreds of hotels”. A 2019 review of the history is more specific: “in its heyday, as many as 500 resorts catered to guests of various incomes”. These resorts, but also the bungalow colonies, were a popular vacation spot for New York CityJews from the 1920s through the 1960s. By the late 1950s, many began closing, with most gone by the 1970s, but some major resorts continued to operate, a few into the 1990s. Grossinger’s Catskill Resort Hotel closed in 1986 and the Concord Resort Hotel struggled to stay open until 1998. read more…
Oheka Castle, also known as the Otto Kahn Estate, is a hotel located on the North Shore of Long Island, in West Hills, New York, also known as the “Gold Coast,” a hamlet in the town of Huntington. It was the country home of investment financier and philanthropist Otto Hermann Kahn and his family. The name “Oheka” is an acronym using the first several letters of each part of its creator’s name, Otto Hermann Kahn, which Kahn also used to name his yacht Oheka II and his ocean-front Villa Oheka in Palm Beach, Florida. The mansion was built by Kahn between 1914 and 1919, and is the second largest private home in the United States, comprising 127 rooms and over 109,000 square feet (10,100 m²), as originally configured. read more…
