Letter from Annice Jacoby to the New York Times, after the appearance of the Escapes article, August 22, 2003. It is my grandfather's house that illustrates your article on the Catskills' former bungalow colonies. I caught it yesterday as I was building a fire on a San Francisco summer morning, the ESCAPES section nearly sacrificed without reading. Glimpsing the words "Havens" and "Catskill", I then read my way up the unpaved road in Woodbourne. As you described the spectacular view and the circular drive, I immediately entered an unexpected mourning for the extraordinary history perhaps invisible to the current dwellers. 'Jacoby's' flourished in the aftermath of WWII as the meaning of "camp" was liberated from the phrase "extermination camp" into a symbol of the good life in holiday summer camps. Unlike the religious colony you describe near the Aladdin Hotel (which was of the next generation to enjoy the Catskills) our colony, in the flush of the fifties and sixties, had a loyal following of the newly successful, eager to enjoy costume balls in the casino, long-running mah-jong and card games on shady lawns, baseball teams' rivalries and camaraderie, fields of blueberries, and Steinways of various condition for anyone to play. Several things distinguished Jacoby's within the Catskill community. Most of all it was beautiful, at the end of a dirt road, on the top of the mountain. It attracted a creative, lively crowd. In the early forties Nathan Jacoby milled the lumber to build the place, having moved the barns prior to the flooding of farms to create the Grahamsville Reservoir. He conducted ceramic classes, tending kilns with the same ingenuity he used to maintain washing machines in the laundry shack. In the meadows, Arline Jacoby set up painting easels and Harry Jacoby was the blue-eyed crooner to a generation of families who returned each summer. My mourning is for a sense of place. Our lake was built by my grandfather, through a public land grant, and named for me, his first grandchild. Nostalgia for irretrievable histories is found in a Jewish girl, her childhood spent in that spectacular view. That vision lives as my dreamlife. Like the Native Americans and immigrant farmers who helped shape the Catskills (Pierce Gillette, a Grahamsville farmer, had been born in the large white farmhouse in 1888 and helped Nathan build the colony), we share a cry or wry chuckle at the lands' renaming Buffalo Colony. When I was seven I loved to poke around the many abandoned farmsteads, filled with old sleighs and sewing machines, tin pans and papers. I found a tiny child's bank, shaped like a house, rusted shut. A coin rattled inside. This toy sits on my kitchen windowsill, the coin still trapped. My guess is that it's a buffalo nickel. The treasure has become an instrument. We may not inhabit the place but the place inhabits our spirits interminably. Annice Jacoby
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