LAKE HUNTINGTON — Where students now arrive each morning at Sullivan West Secondary School, generations of vacationers once came to spend their summers in the Catskills.

Green Acres Hotel stood on the Lake Huntington property until a fire destroyed it in 1966. Decades later, remnants of the old resort can still be found around the school grounds, including its swimming pool and railings hidden among the trees.

Now another piece of that history stands along the driveway.

The Borscht Belt Historical Marker Project dedicated its 19th historic marker at Sullivan West Central School, commemorating not only Green Acres but a network of hotels, boarding houses and bungalow colonies that once stretched across Western Sullivan County.

“We’re looking at a landscape that holds two very different chapters of the same place,” project director Marisa Scheinfeld told the crowd.

Principal David Eggleton said the marker gives students an opportunity to learn about the history of the property itself.

For Scheinfeld, the marker also broadens the familiar picture of the Borscht Belt.

“The Borscht Belt is often remembered through a lens of its biggest hotels, its most famous, through glitz and glamour and dining rooms that seated thousands,” she said. “But the story is much bigger than the image.”

She added, “There was never one community, one kind of hotel, or one version of the Catskills.”

The marker covers Callicoon, Fosterdale, Kenoza Lake and Lake Huntington, where Jewish, Black, Italian and Polish families established resorts and gathering places.

Among them was Green Acres, which began on the property in 1920 after Elmer Rosenberg purchased the Huntington Lakeside property. Rosenberg, a Hungarian Jewish immigrant and labor leader, developed the resort with his wife, Rose.

Green Acres welcomed working families at a time when Jewish vacationers faced discrimination at many existing establishments.

“People came here for many reasons—to work, to rest, to recover, to gather with family and community,” Scheinfeld said. “They weren’t simply coming here for a summer. They were creating places of their own.”

The marker also highlights Lake Huntington’s Hotel Lorraine, known for Hungarian cuisine; Wiley’s and Villa Theresa, which the marker identifies as Black-owned hotels; Callicoon’s Italian-American Villa Roma; and the Polish-American Valley View House in Kenoza Lake.

In a statement read at the ceremony, Pam Winski Borek, granddaughter of Valley View founder Joe Bekarciak, described the resort as a place where generations worked, vacationed, celebrated and maintained Polish traditions.

“Valley View wasn’t just a hotel,” Borek wrote. “It was a way of life.”

A second statement from Jasmin Joseph, great-niece of David and Theresa Joseph, founders of Villa Theresa in Lake Huntington, said the marker offered a way to preserve a history the family once feared had been lost.

“When the Villa closed, we thought it was lost forever,” Joseph wrote. “It is a gift to our ancestors that the work was not in vain and that it will be remembered in perpetuity.”

The Borscht Belt Historical Marker Project was founded in fall 2022 and installed its first marker in Monticello in May 2023. Sullivan West is the project’s first marker placed at a school.

Scheinfeld said that setting reflects the project’s larger purpose.

“You don’t have to seek it out,” she said. “You simply encounter them in the landscape.”

At Sullivan West, students now pass each day through the remains of a resort era that once defined much of the region.

“Suddenly,” Scheinfeld said, “you find yourself standing in the middle of a story.”