Free Republic

A fire over the weekend swept through a condominium complex in the Catskills that was once the Brown’s Hotel, where Jerry Lewis and other comedians entertained crowds of vacationing New Yorkers. The fire began around 6 p.m. Saturday and moved quickly through the complex, destroying seven of nine buildings, Steven Vegliante, the town supervisor of Fallsburg, N.Y., said in an interview on Sunday. About 100 people were in the buildings and were evacuated, he said, noting that many were staying at a makeshift shelter at Sullivan County Community College. “We’re just pleased that no one died and no one was...

CALLICOON, New York (AFP) – After a lifetime struggling to make money from the land, New York farmer Bill Graby has discovered he's sitting on treasure -- possibly the biggest natural gas deposit in America. "It's like winning the lottery," says the 6.6-foot (two-meter) dairy farmer from the picturesque town of Callicoon in the Catskills hills. The deposit, called the Marcellus shale, stretches all the way from New York to Tennessee, containing 168 to 500 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, according to New York State's Department of Environmental Conservation. That dwarfs the previous big daddy, the Barnett shale in...

Several businesses in Monticello were hit with gang graffiti overnight, including on the sign outside the Jewish War Veterans of the United States memorial on Liberty Street. The graffiti covers the sign, including scrawled words like “Power,” "Money” and “Loyalty.” There is also a trident symbol painted in blue. Chief Doug Solomon says these are symbols commonly used by street gangs. He doesn't believe the vandalism was racially motivated. The window and door of Vino on Broadway was also marked with the letters "BK" and "BX." Solomon said other businesses were vandalized overnight. Robert Blank, the commandeer of the Jesse...

ANN ARBOR, Mich.—A cat can recognize a face faster and more efficiently than a supercomputer. That's one reason a feline brain is the model for a biologically-inspired computer project involving the University of Michigan. U-M computer engineer Wei Lu has taken a step toward developing this revolutionary type of machine that could be capable of learning and recognizing, as well as making more complex decisions and performing more tasks simultaneously than conventional computers can. Lu previously built a "memristor," a device that replaces a traditional transistor and acts like a biological synapse, remembering past voltages it was subjected to. Now,...

SAUGERTIES, N.Y. (AP) -- Harvey Fite spent 37 years turning an abandoned bluestone quarry in the Catskill Mountains into a strange and striking landscape sculpture. Visitors to Opus 40 walk through rock-wall mazes that swirl around a 9-ton monolith looming in the center like a Stone Age exclamation mark. Fite was still working on his multi-acre artwork when he died in 1976 at age 72. His family has kept the Woodstock-area attraction open to seasonal visitors and the occasional concert, but now they're trying to sell the land, and local officials are working with them to keep this novel Hudson...

You could take the borscht out of the Catskills, but you'll never get "the borscht belt" out of a lead of a New York Times story about the Catskills. Mark my words. After you read theirs. No matter what the story is about, where it gets placed in the paper or when it gets published, the Old Gray Lady will forever bleed beet red when telling a tale about Sullivan County. They can't help it. Such was the case last week, when the metro desk of the newspaper decided to remind its baby boomer readers that the one-time vacation destination...

From the North Lake Beach parking area in the Catskill Forest Preserve, a narrow foot trail climbs a rocky incline. After following the trail for about 20 minutes, hikers reach Artists Rock, which gives a sweeping view of the Hudson Valley, the river a sliver of silver in the distance. The trail then leaves the ledge and in less than a half mile it meets a junction with a side trail toward Sunset Rock, the prized view from atop North Mountain that by the late 19th century had become an iconic view of the northern Catskills, celebrated in the work...

LOS ANGELES - Jan Murray, one of the fabled generation of comics who rose from the Catskills to prime time TV, tickling fans of the 1950s game show "Treasure Hunt," has died. He was 89. Murray, who appeared in dozens of movies and TV shows, died Sunday at his home in Beverly Hills, son Howard Murray said in a telephone interview Monday. "Treasure Hunt" ran from 1956 to 1959 in both daytime and prime time versions, first on ABC and later on NBC. The contestant who won a quiz got to pick among treasure chests, which contained anything "from a...

Election: It's the Cat People vs. the Dog Lovers Written by Burt Prelutsky Sunday, August 15, 2004 All the pundits who are forecasting the November election, busily analyzing blue states, red states, and those all-important purple swing states, are spinning their wheels. At the risk of sounding even more presumptuous than usual, I contend that they are wasting their time and yours. If you want to know who's going to emerge victorious, all you really need to do is find out how many people have cats living with them and how many have dogs. The cat people, I have decided,...

Fox News is reporting that a five month old infant was snatched from a stroller and killed in New York state.