“Camp Nitgedaiget: A Vanished Utopia” on Display at Beacon Historical Socity

At the Beacon Historical Society this month, a radical summer flickers back to life. “Beacon’s Camp Nitgedaiget: A Vanished Utopia,” curated by local historian Diane Lapis, resurrects a 225-acre experiment in collective escape, worker solidarity, and unapologetic idealism that thrived on the slopes of Mount Beacon a century ago—and then vanished almost without a trace.

Camp Nitgedaiget (pronounced Nish-guh-die-get, Yiddish for “no worries”) began in 1922, born from the United Workers Cooperative Association, a mutual-aid collective of Jewish garment workers on the Lower East Side. “Their goal was to provide services to immigrants working in terrible conditions,” Lapis explains. “They weren’t unionized. They lived in tenements. They wanted to create something better—at work, but also in life.” The solution was audacious: pool resources, buy land, and build a rural refuge where workers could breathe pine instead of factory air.

Funded in part by the Communist Party USA, the camp was explicitly political. The aim, Lapis says, was to cultivate “strong and healthy mind-and-body workers that would unite to put down management.” In its earliest years, thousands arrived—first sleeping in platform tents, then filling a 200-room hotel, dining hall, and bungalows that bloomed along both sides of Route 9D. Within three years, the collective purchased land in the Bronx and built the famous “coops”—a worker-owned housing complex that became culturally and logistically intertwined with the camp. “The housing became integral to the camp, and the camp integral to the housing,” Lapis says.

Daily life at Nitgedaiget was equal parts summer idyll and political incubator. Mornings brought megaphone calls to communal meals in a dining hall that seated 900. Days alternated between wrestling, baseball, handball, swimming, boating, and socialist pedagogy in the form of lectures, street-theater, choir, and Marxist dramaturgy. “They’d sing ‘The Internationale,’ stage plays about workers exploited while the wealthy got wealthier, and devour newspapers like The Daily Worker,” Lapis says. “It was about strong bodies and strong minds.” And yet it was hardly grim. There was dancing. Counseling only with fresh air. Mischief, too. “One local resident told me he’d ride his bike in and hide behind the trees at the pool to watch what he called ‘the ladies in various states of undress,’” she says with a laugh. “It was an open community. A pure escape.”

That openness drew suspicion. Neighbors derided “the Jewish commies.” The Ku Klux Klan sent threats. McCarthy-era paranoia later pushed many to burn pamphlets, photographs, and affiliation records. “People were frightened to lose their jobs,” Lapis says. “The evidence nearly disappeared.”

The camp limped into the 1950s, was sold twice, and succumbed to arson in 1963. Today it sits beneath Hudson Highlands State Park, where hikers can still stumble upon the pool’s stone dam, dining-hall pillars, and glinting shards of glass. Lapis’s decade-long excavation—of both land and memory—now fills the museum’s galleries.

Highlights include mismatched camp dishware from an archeological dig, postcards in Yiddish, Communist songbooks, and the recorded revival of the original camp anthem. “I found the sheet music, gathered a singer and pianist, booked a studio, and brought it back to life after a hundred years,” she says.

The result is less nostalgia than revelation. “Everything’s been paved over, and people forget there was history there,” Lapis reflects. “Uncovering this small slice of a tumultuous time, and sharing it—it’s been the joy of a lifetime.”

“Beacon’s Camp Nitgedaiget: A Vanished Utopia” runs December 1-20 at the Beacon Historical Society, 61 Leonard Street in Beacon, open Thursdays and Saturdays, or by appointment.

This article appears in December 2025.