Did Woodstock destroy the place?
Last year I was driving through the Catskills and went through a small village called Nipple. The Catskills are a pretty weird place.
Cheap air fares and air conditioning.
You could travel to someplace exotic or stay in the city and keep cool.
The advancement of air conditioning becoming widely available made staying in the city during summer tolerable.
Many people blame the decline on modern transportation. During the prime years (1920 - 1965), most people didn't have the means to fly off to some exotic city for a long weekend. When they wanted to get out of New York City for a few days or even the summer, Jews, Eastern Euros, Germans, and the Irish choose the Catskills because travel time was relatively short (less than a day) and readily accessible by car, bus, train, and boat.
The decline of the Catskills began in the late 1960s as people realized that in the same time it took to travel to the Catskills, they could fly to Miami, New Orleans, Las Vegas, San Juan, etc. By the end of the 1970s, relatively inexpensive airline travel throughout the Americas and Europe gave more and more travel and vacation choices to people of nearly every economic class, any many of these people were the people who used to go to the Catskills.
The Catskill’s are within easy commuting distance from New York City. Many people wanted to get out of heat (summer time) so drove up, or took the train, less than an hour, to what they thought the temperature was cooler. Also easy commute for celebrities to come and entertain. In the old day’s fantastic hotels were built and was the place to go!
The real Catskill Mountains are beautiful and are about another one hour North.
Great skiing at Windham and Hunter Mountains.