Hurleyville Celebrates Anniversary As Original ‘Dirty Dancing’ Hotel In Catskills Gets New Life

The movie Dirty Dancing turns 30 and the town of Hurleyville, New York is celebrating near the Catskills resort that inspired the film.

The Hurleyville Arts Center is having a "Dirty Dancing" themed Saturday. The events include a fashion show set to the 1987 soundtrack, a talk by former resort dance instructor Jackie Horner and a screening of the movie.

Horner taught dance lessons to the guests and entertainers at nearby Grossinger's, now abandoned. The famous Catskills hotel served as the inspiration for Brooklyn native Eleanor Bergsteins screenplay about a Jewish girl nicknamed Baby who spends the summer of 1963 at an upstate resort and falls in love with dance instructor Johnny Castle. The movie was filmed at several southern resorts while being inspired by the original Catskills resort.

[photos from the abandoned resort]

It's really sad if you think about that time that has just seemed to fade away and all of the resorts in the process. You look at the pictures and there is graffiti in the ballrooms where johnny might have taught the cha-cha, the ceiling is falling down in the dining room like the one where Baby was fatefully seated in a corner.

Now a gentleman named Mr. Cappelli, who bought the place in 1999, more than a decade after the Grossinger family had ceased operations, envisions a grand future: a conference center, housing, spa and chalet-style lodging. It is a bet that piggybacks on the crowds that he hopes will come to the Resorts World Casino, a $750 million complex opening next year another former borscht belt destination, the Concord Resort Hotel in nearby Kiamesha Lake.

[nytimes]