New York Folklore Society Newsletter

Holocaust survivors seeking the curative properties of the waters revitalized Sharon Springs in the years following World War II. A long-time Jewish resident, Andy Schoenfeld, says of the Holocaust survivors: "They would come up here. This was a place where they could remain unassaulted. It was their town."

"History is the way people organize reality to investigate truth to survive in their own terms."—Henry Glassie, Passing the Time in Ballymenone

Memories of Sharon Springs
Andy Schoenfeld

I’m not old enough to remember this but old enough to listen to the stories.

So this old couple parks at the church to go to services, and I guess they got back in after church was over, and the brakes failed or something. So the car plummets down Washington Street (You didn’t hear this story? This is one of the great Sharon Springs stories.) Goes right through the Union Hotel, which was still standing, and had guests. Right through. Picks up the settee on the hood.

But the best part of the story is, they had a guest who didn’t want to park his car on the street because it may get scratched. So he brought his car around to the back of the hotel to park it. And this thing goes right through with the settee on it, lands smack on top of this car that was parked in back.

You know, everybody rushes, and they find the couple in there, you know. And they are so shook up that they take them out of the car and sit them on the settee. It’s a great story. Actually happened.

NOTE: The New York Folklore Society Newsletter and New York Folklore Journal were replaced by Voices: The Journal of New York Folklore which debuted December, 2000.

New York Folklore Society
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Spring/Summer 1999

SPRING/SUMMER 1999 NEWSLETTER MAIN PAGE

Sharon Springs Spa: Landscape of Memory
Ellen McHale

In 1996, the Schoharie County Arts Council began a documentation project on Sharon Springs, New York, a spa town south of the Thruway that has attracted a largely Jewish clientele for over a hundred years. The project team was motivated by the absence of information in the official record regarding Sharon Springs as a Jewish resort. Folklorist Ellen McHale conducted extensive oral history interviews; Pamela Brown, a Yiddish speaker, provided additional fieldwork documentation; and archivist Susan Malbin surveyed the records of businesses related to the spa. Funding for the project came from the New York State Archives and Records Administration Documentary Heritage Program, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the New York Council for the Humanities.

The village of Sharon Springs lies in the Mohawk Valley, west of Albany. Lying on a limestone karst, which stretches to the Great White Sulfur Springs of West Virginia, Sharon Springs is the home for a number of small mineral springs, primarily magnesium, iron, and sulfur. Reportedly known by the region’s native peoples, the site began to be visited by Europeans as early as the eighteenth century. By the early years of the nineteenth century, the village had become a destination for those seeking its healing waters. Its first boarding house opened in 1825.

This resort changed over the ensuing two centuries. In the nineteenth century, Sharon Springs was a destination for the elite of the United States, with personages such as President Grover Cleveland visiting the site to take the cure. Those seeking its sulfur, magnesia, or iron cures could do so while surrounded by genteel amusements and polite society. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the spa fell out of favor with New York’s upper crust. Sharon Springs faced competition from the more fashionable Saratoga Springs, which not only had springs but also had thoroughbred racing. By the late nineteenth century, boarding houses and hotels began to actively pursue patronage by wealthy German Jews, who were excluded from Saratoga Springs. Boarding house proprietors placed advertisements in New York City newspapers, which declared that Jews were welcome.

The Jewish summer population reached sufficient size in the early years of the twentieth century that a synagogue was built to provide services throughout the summer season. Boarding house owners formed their own association, the Board of Trade, to place advertisements and to provide a unified group to address issues between themselves and the permanent rural, Gentile population of the Town of Sharon.

Increasingly in the twentieth century, patronage by German and other more assimilated Jewish groups fell off. They were replaced by newly immigrated eastern European Jews who were seeking relief from New York City’s summer heat and who were familiar with eastern European spas. More orthodox in their religious convictions and less affluent, they sought a spa environment that offered kitchens in which they could prepare kosher meals. To accommodate them, resort owners built mikvahs (ritual baths), obtained a resident physician for the summer, and established a seasonal kosher grocery.

Holocaust survivors seeking the curative properties of the waters revitalized Sharon Springs in the years following World War II. A long-time Jewish resident, Andy Schoenfeld, says of the Holocaust survivors: "They would come up here. This was a place where they could remain unassaulted. It was their town."

With the coming of the Satmar Rebbes in the 1950s, the numbers of Hassidim exploded. Residents recall the resort population of the late 1940s and 1950s as being in the thousands throughout the summer, so much so that sidewalks were impassable. The village became an ethnic enclave within conservative upstate New York.

The postwar influx of Hassidim and Holocaust survivors was but a remission in the village’s slow decline. At that time the hotels were already aged. Currently, many resort structures are well beyond their heyday, and many are deteriorating. Yet the spa still draws new visitors. Russian immigrants—secular Jews and Gentiles from Brooklyn as well as artists from Manhattan have lately discovered the town.

Abe Garcherth and Russian American guests at boarding house

Abe Garcherth and Russian American guests at his Sharon Springs boarding house. Photograph by Pamela Brown.

I first visited Sharon Springs in 1985, in the dead of winter. The owners of the boarding houses live in New York City and do not open up until May. Every property in sight was boarded up except for a few run-down frame buildings. Several of the few year-round residents eyed my car suspiciously as it went up and down the empty streets. In recent years, artists from New York City have settled into a third community distinct from both the resort-goers and the long-time villagers. They are drawn not by the spa but by the charm of Sharon Springs’ old houses. Andy Schoenfeld, the grandson of a Sharon Springs boarding house owner and the town’s unofficial oral historian, characterizes the run-down Greek Revival and Victorian architecture as "bait" to lure in Gentiles and then "trap them" in its tumble-down web of collapsed porches and leaking roofs. Sharon Springs, he states, is a magnet for "cheap people. They bought in. It was a cheap buy. Not realizing that it was a spa. None of these people realized."

Ambivalence marks the relationships between the three communities that live in or near Sharon Springs. Yet, despite their differences, the three groups coexist, share political power in the village government, and work together on issues of mutual interest. The arts people view the old spa community with some amusement, and, in turn, are regarded with a raised eyebrow by members of the other two groups. The long-time residents and surrounding farm community have historically lacked appreciation of the spa. Zoning decisions by the village board have penalized boarding house owners, and overtones of anti-Semitism marked town-resort owner relations in the past. Ironically, the year-round residents have long depended on the spa for economic survival, working as carpenters, plumbers, and wait staff, and supplying fresh produce to the hotels and boarding houses. To the older Jewish community, a handful of whom live year-round in Sharon Springs, the arts and the Gentile communities alike are ignorant of the town’s rich history and the significance of the mineral springs.

The Jews of Sharon Springs reveal the abiding truth of the village—its history, which is their history—in the stories they tell. Intertwined within the accounts of Sharon Springs that we recorded are memories of sociability and linkages between people. They are intensely personal narratives caught up in a sense of place, with memories of "home" being brought to Sharon Springs to be enacted there. Outside connections and personalities from other places affect this twelve-block landscape of Sharon Springs. As one resident remarked, "The world weaves itself."

Through interviews and research we found that Sharon Springs in the twentieth century was a vibrant location with banks, department stores, taxi services, theater, and its focal point, the spa. Most importantly, thousands of people came there.

Many visitors stayed in boarding houses such as the Brustman House. Richard Brustman, chronicler of the house, recalled,

I first went up there right at the end of World War II. I was a baby, I was just two years old. My grandmother and aunts ran it. They had a clientele. The house used to be full most of the time. They were making a living out of it. The clientele were mostly conservative to Orthodox Jews, not Hassidim. Although some of the Orthodox came awfully close. There are varying degrees of piety.

Throughout the early part of the twentieth century Sharon Springs capitalized on its chief asset, the spa, to appeal to its European-born patrons. According to Brustman:

What I remember mostly were couples. Couples in their fifties and sixties. Now, occasionally they dragged up young kids who were self-conscious. But basically, they just seemed like old people to me. They were probably like my age now. They were almost universally European born, because they believed in the efficacy of baths, which is a European phenomenon.

The baths always thrived. People came up for the treatments. We used to have this clientele—they came year after year after year. And they loved the baths. They swore by the baths. The baths made them feel better.

Geographer David Sopher, speaking of the built environment, describes how the landscape stands for a sense of place in which "memories of home are carried." In the minds of these long-time summer residents the landscape of Sharon Springs carries memories of family connections, eastern European villages, and the types of activities that occurred in those places. It is no mistake that the principal resort activities besides taking the baths are strolling throughout the village blocks, conversing on porches, and playing mahjong. Brustman remembered,

Now the season in those days was much longer than it is now. The season got started early, sometimes in April really, and it ran at least until Rosh Hashanah.

When I was a kid—this is my memory from when I was ten to about fifteen years old 'I used to walk up and down. You—d get a cool evening, and you’d walk up and down, and every porch was just jammed with people and lights on. The porches were all lit, and they would be listening to music. There would be music coming out of places. Just animated conversation all over. People strolling up and down the street. It looked like these 1930s views of European towns where people stroll on Sundays except they’d stroll every day. Old people. They’d walk up and down the streets and stroll and window shop.

This landscape in which the past is enacted is seen, for many, as the salvation of Sharon Springs. Andy Schoenfeld, who now lives there year-round, remarks on the short-sightedness of many of Sharon Springs’ new and old permanent residents who ignore the town’s European connections and who chuckle at the interest in the mineral springs. The geography is attractive to look at; situated as it is on the limestone karst it provides a flow of waters regarded by people around the world to be restorative. The future of the Sharon Springs, he believes, is the baths. The town (meaning its government) "needs to pay attention to what the landscape demands."

For the resort owners, their future is assured in the coming of the post-Soviet secular Russians who have discovered Sharon Springs’ baths. This new group, like their predecessors, has experienced eastern European spas and believes in the efficacy of its waters. They will provide yet another point of view to the multivocality that is Sharon Springs.

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