On a summer afternoon in Tannersville, every picnic table outside Mama’s Boy Burgers is full. Dogs sprawl underfoot. Kids dart between tables, sticky-fingered from ice cream cones. The line at the window snakes toward the sidewalk, made up of hikers in trail shoes, families fresh off Kaaterskill Falls, and first-timers asking the same question owner Michael Koegel still hears a decade in: How long have you been open?
Ten years, Koegel tells them. Long enough to remember when this stretch of Main Street felt like an outpost—half the buildings empty, the town just a little too far north to catch the momentum that had already transformed Phoenicia. Long enough, too, to have become something like an institution, a marker of how the Catskills’ mountain towns of Tannersville, Hunter, and Windham have changed—and how they’ve stayed stubbornly the same.
“It was completely different,” Koegel says of opening Mama’s Boy in 2015. “Tannersville felt like it was still kind of languishing.”
What has emerged since then is not a simple comeback story. These towns have seen booms and busts before—many of them—and the people shaping their future are acutely aware of how fragile momentum can be.
A Place That Knows the Cycle
Long before Airbnb and Vail Resorts took over Hunter Mountain in 2019, this corner of the Catskills was a destination. In the 19th century, the Catskill Mountain House perched above North–South Lake drew visitors who arrived by steamboat, train, and even funicular. In the mid-20th century, Hunter Mountain anchored a ski economy that brought winter crowds and a rowdier apres-ski scene. Then came the inevitable dip: shuttered storefronts, thinning school enrollment, and a sense that the action had moved elsewhere.
“It’s always gone through boom-bust cycles,” says Mark Chodock, owner of Scribner’s Catskill Lodge, which reopened in 2016 as part of a wave of contemporary hospitality projects across the Catskills. “But there’s always been a scene here. It was waiting for its next chapter.”
That chapter, as it turns out, has been written as much by institutions as by entrepreneurs—and by a steady recalibration of what it means to be a mountain town in the 21st century.
Foundations as Ballast
At the center of that recalibration is the Hunter Foundation, a nonprofit that has quietly shaped Tannersville’s trajectory since the 1980s, when its Painted Village Project helped establish the town’s now-familiar identity. Today, the foundation owns and manages properties, supports small businesses, and serves as a connective tissue between local government, cultural organizations, and the private sector.
“If the Hunter Foundation had not existed, I don’t think we would have ended up here,” Chodock says. “They really kept Tannersville going, especially during the end of the last boom cycle.”
Sean Mahoney, the foundation’s executive director and a lifelong local, speaks about the region less in terms of reinvention than continuity. “By and large, we are a tourism town with a lot of blue-collar people who live here,” he says. “But it’s really hard to live here if you work in a middle-range, blue-collar occupation. The real estate market is wildly expensive.”
That pressure has been building for years. But now, there’s tangible movement. A $10 million Downtown Revitalization Initiative (DRI) grant awarded to Tannersville by the state has unlocked projects that had long been stalled.
Chief among them is Cold Spring Apartments, a $36 million RUPCO development now under construction, creating 56 units of affordable workforce housing just outside the village. “It’s not the ultimate solution,” Mahoney says, “but it’s a huge step in the right direction.”
Housing, in this context, is not an abstract policy issue. It’s the difference between retaining workers and watching them leave the mountain altogether. Chodock has purchased housing to keep staff close and has employees who commute from an hour away. “There’s a lack of housing,” Chodock says bluntly. “And a lack of community because nobody lives there.”
Culture As Infrastucture
If housing is the region’s most urgent challenge, culture has been its most effective counterweight. Over the past two decades, the Catskill Mountain Foundation (CMF) has built what is, by any measure, a world-class arts organization in a town of just a few hundred residents.
In 1998, philanthropists Peter and Sarah Finn founded the Catskill Mountain Foundation in Hunter with the idea that arts and culture could be engines of community revitalization in a place that had experienced decades of economic decline and downtown blight. What began as a modest plan to restore a run-down movie theater and create a gathering place in the village has grown into a multi-venue arts organization, with performance spaces, film programming, artist residencies, and creative education offerings that draw thousands of people to the mountain towns every year.
“When you first hear about the foundation, you don’t realize how wide-reaching it is,” says Amy Schiebe, CMF’s newly appointed executive director. The organization operates three movie theaters, multiple performance spaces, an organic farm, and Sugar Maples Center for Creative Arts, a ceramics and arts retreat campus near Windham. Coming out of the pandemic, CMF tripled its programming and now presents roughly 80 performances a year.
Recent upgrades to the Orpheum Performing Art Center—funded in part by the DRI—have added state-of-the-art sound and lighting, along with new rehearsal and dance studio spaces that allow artists to develop work on the mountaintop before taking it to major institutions downstate. “We’re not just housing culture,” Schiebe says. “We’re shaping it.”
That shaping is intentional. CMF keeps ticket prices low—often under $30—and makes accommodations for anyone who can’t afford to attend. “We live in one of the most impoverished townships in the state,” Schiebe notes. “We’re not in the business of making money. We’re in the business of bringing culture and accessibility to people who wouldn’t have it if we weren’t here.”
Like the Hunter Foundation, CMF has taken a long view. “If you grow too fast, you topple,” Schiebe says. “If you grow too slow, people stop wanting to be part of it.” Sustainable growth, in this context, is not a slogan but a survival strategy.
The Double Edge of Tourism
That strategy is constantly tested by the region’s natural assets—none more so than Kaaterskill Falls. The highest cascading waterfall in New York State, it draws tens of thousands of visitors each year and has become, as Mahoney puts it, “definitively the number one attraction in the Catskills.”
For businesses, the traffic is a boon. For towns and emergency services, it’s a strain. “Trash, road blockages, EMS calls—that’s been an issue,” Mahoney says. “But I’d much rather have these problems than not have these problems at all.”
The same is true of hiking more broadly, which Koegel credits with transforming the local economy. “Ten years ago, nobody said hiking was their hobby,” he says. “Now everybody loves hiking. The town is three times busier in the summer than it used to be.”
That shift—from a ski-only destination to a four-season one—has brought opportunity and confusion in equal measure. After 2020, a wave of city-based entrepreneurs arrived, drawn by packed summer weekends. “They weren’t coming up in February on a Wednesday,” Koegel says. “You have to learn the ebb and flow of life up here.”
Many didn’t. Businesses opened and closed. Others pivoted. The rhythm of the towns—busy when school is out, quiet when it’s in—asserted itself.
Holding the Middle
For those who have stayed, the goal is not to freeze the Catskills in amber, nor to turn them into a luxury enclave divorced from local life. Koegel worries about pricing out both locals and the average tourist. “I like us being the center of hiking and outdoor activity,” he says. “I’d hate for us to become just a trendy escape from the city.”
Chodock echoes that sentiment, calling for more housing—hundreds of units, by his estimate—to support year-round life. “Even consistent weekenders aren’t a bad thing,” he says. “What matters is that people are vested.”
That sense of investment—emotional, financial, institutional—may be the region’s greatest asset. Despite differing visions and occasional friction, leaders across sectors describe a community that looks after its own. “There are a lot of really good actors in this village,” Chodock says. “People care about one another.”
Back at Mama’s Boy, the line keeps moving. Burgers go out. Dogs settle in the shade. Somewhere up the road, hikers stream back from the falls. The scene is easy to romanticize, but it’s built on years of careful, often unglamorous work—rehabbing buildings, stabilizing schools, keeping the lights on between seasons.
In the Catskills’ mountain towns, the future isn’t about chasing the next boom. It’s about holding the center long enough for the cycle to bend, just slightly, toward permanence.
This article appears in February 2026.
