Resort was Jennie’s answer to the Grossinger family financial crisis

It began with a rocky and infertile farm in the Catskills. It ended with the Catskill’s premier resort empire – 600 rooms, three swimming pools, a ski slope, a 1,700-seat dining room, a post office and an estimated income of $7 million a year. Who else could this phenomenal success story belong to but Jennie Grossinger?

Her commitment to solving her family’s financial crises began when she abandoned school at age 13 to sew buttonholes; then, she married her cousin Harry Grossinger in 1912. In 1914, Jennie convinced her mother and father to take summer boarders into their rundown, failing farm in the Catskills.

That first summer, the boarders added $81 to the family’s income. That winter, the house was spruced up and six rooms were added. Summer business picked up. The family members worked 18 hours a day. Grossinger’s took on its first hired hand, a chambermaid. Harry did not move to the Catskills to become business manager until success was assured, but he did his share from the beginning by recruiting guests from New York.

In 1919 Jennie negotiated the purchase of a neighboring hotel, a lake and 63 wooded acres. To generate business, Jennie employed masterful publicity gimmicks that included the gift of a free honeymoon to any couple who met at Grossinger’s and the training of professional boxers on the complex. She plied her guests with vast quantities of kosher food, and she “created an atmosphere that combined urgent family solicitude for guests with an elegance that gave to many an opulent feeling they never enjoyed at home,” according to Richard F. Shepard.

As Shepard noted, “For all that Mrs. Grossinger was the heart and soul of Grossinger’s, she was not considered to be a great business operator. She had the sagacity to choose perceptive associates, and she was naturally effective in human relations. An old employee recalled that she treated the workers as members of the family.

In the early days, when the family was pinched for ready cash, some of the help would not take their salaries from her but insisted on getting by on their tips. ‘Use it, Jennie,’ they would say.”

TOBY ROSSNER (tobyross@cox.net) was the director of media services at the Bureau of Jewish Education from 1978 to 2002.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the sixth in a series on the history of Jewish women entrepreneurs. The Richard F. Shepard quotes are from “Jennie Grossinger Dies at Resort Home,” obituary, in “The American Jewish Woman: A Documentary History,” compiled by Jacob Radar Marcus.