Kutsher's Hotel
Coordinates: 41°42′07″N 74°41′28″W / 41.702°N 74.691°W
Kutsher's Hotel and Country Club in Thompson, Sullivan County, near Monticello, New York, was the longest running of the Borscht Belt grand resorts in the Catskill Mountains region of New York State. 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.
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 in the 1950s-1980s that 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, a 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. The two ran the hotel until Milton's death in 1998, at which point, his son Mark took over management of the hotel.
Milton Kutsher was active in sports circles, making the hotel the Catskills home of legendary Celtics coach Red Auerbach and Hall of Famer Wilt Chamberlain, who worked as a bellhop there. There was the Maurice Stokes Benefit All-Star Game, a charity basketball game that once attracted the top pro players. Muhammad Ali trained at Kutsher's, as did other world boxing champions, such as Floyd Patterson and Leon Spinks. He was an avid sports fan, and also saw sports as a way to bring young people to the resort. The Maurice Stokes Game, which raised funds for the injured professional basketball player Maurice Stokes and raised funds for needy former players from the game's earlier days, was sponsored in part, by Kutsher's and played at either the hotel or the Kutsher's Sports Academy. The game is said to have "rivaled the NBA All-Star game in talent." In the 1990s, the basketball exhibition spawned the Maurice Stokes/Wilt Chamberlain Celebrity Pro-Am Golf Tournament.
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