2. Tamarack Lodge

Tamarack Lodge in the Borscht Belt
Guest room, Tamarack Lodge. Photo by Marisa Scheinfeld from The Borscht Belt: Revisiting the Remains of America’s Jewish Vacationland

The Tamarack Lodge is Greenfield Park, New York was constructed as a small, six-room boarding house in 1903. The lodge was redone and expanded across its 400 acre property in the late 1920s, where guests could enjoy its swimming pool or golf course in the daytime, and head to its “Playtorium” in the evenings for entertainment, with performances by comedians such as Jerry Lewis and musical guests The Who. The Tamarack Lodge was plagued by two fires, one in 1994 which destroyed the majority of its rooms, and fell victim to a second in 2012 in a fire that burned down 50 structures in the area.