On Wednesday afternoon, in Upper Marlboro, Maryland, I attended the latest resentencing hearing requested by the man who killed my dad. I had the opportunity to say a few words, which I did.
Wednesday night, understandably, I slept uneasily.
Early Thursday I drove seven hours to Sharon Springs, New York, for a long-planned vacation and roots-seeking. One can’t currently soak in the Village’s miracle waters, but I liked the idea of spending time in a place once world famous for curing all manner of ailments. I thought it might help my state of mind, after a stressful few days.
This place also has literary resonance for me. In 1878, Watt O’Hugh, the main character of my historical sci-fi novels, survives a series of impossibly grueling misadventures in our world and in the 18th level of Hell, then, of course, takes Sharon Springs’ mineral cure.
But for me, there’s more to it.
A Global Resort
As “Watt” wrote,
One of the Village founders, a man by the name of Jacob Dievendorff, was scalped in 1781 and subsequently returned to Sharon Springs, where he lived a long life with a metal plate in his head, a guy who had lost his skull and part of his brain but just kept on…. Furthermore, his ghost had haunted the Village ever since. William Beekman, a Village elder who … had been absent from the land of Sharon Springs and the living for some decades, and who had lived in a massive Palladian style mansion in town, had watched eight out of his nine children die before him, seven in their early youth, and their ghosts also floated about town, mostly near the crypt on his property, an elaborate marble and chandeliered residence for the dead. I was sorry for their trauma, but I liked living someplace with a lot of ghosts, especially because I figured my own ghosts would appreciate the companionship and the sympathetic conversation. I imagined that Beekman had never been lonely.
Some afternoons, if I were feeling meditative, I would venture from Main Street and ride my horse through the woods to the Magnesia Temple, an arched, cast-iron structure with Corinthian columns, draped with statues of grapevines; mineral water flowed from the mouths of two stone lions, from which I could drink the cure. Sometimes my horse and I galloped through the woods and the surrounding countryside. In the afternoon, when necessary, I shopped at Hyney’s store, in the early evening, I bet on billiards at Lane’s Billiard Hall, across Main Street from the American Hotel, and two or three evenings a week, I drank with the hop pickers and the hard cider quartet at Finkelstein’s … “Bucket of Blood” Tavern, in the southernmost point of the Village, which used locally grown hops, and which was every bit as unseemly as you might imagine.
Mr. Gardner’s Pavilion was beautiful, a grand Italianate hotel built with local limestone, held aloft by fourteen stone columns; croquet and tennis courts dotted the grounds, and out front, horse-drawn carriages hauled high society into town from New York, France, Spain, Mexico, Cuba.
Oscar Wilde visited, where he gave a reading from the porch of the Pavilion Hotel. The Roosevelts and the Vanderbilts summered here too, Dickens came for a while, and many many others. Sharon Springs was the scene of debutante balls, for a while.
Before a European eye looked at Sharon Springs, the place was already a site of longstanding importance to Indigenous peoples. It has been populated for thousands of years, originally by Iroquoian-speaking peoples, including the Mohawk. In addition to the mineral springs, the area has good hunting, forested hills and exceptionally fertile valleys. The springs were noted for their strong smell and taste of sulfur and iron-rich water, and they have genuine healing powers as well as palliative effects, and it is all but certain that they were used during prehistorical times both medicinally for their curing qualities as well as for religious purposes. During the Revolutionary War, Sharon Springs was the bread basket for Washington’s army.
On Thursday, I needed an emotional and physical cure too, after the trauma of the day before. But I was not in Sharon Springs to drink or soak in the mineral waters, which are now inaccessible behind Private Property signs, or just to follow in Watt’s footsteps, although that was part of it. I came to see a place that has loomed large in my imagination for my entire life, but which I had never seen till last week.
Because after its incredible 19th-century heyday, Sharon Springs went into decline, and at the turn of the 20thcentury, only Drachman family money and ingenuity saved it, reinventing the Village in our own image, which lasted for the better part of a hundred years.
My great-grandfather founded 20th-century Sharon Springs, after all. Which is to say, Jewish Sharon Springs.
A Jewish Rebirth
By the late 1890s and early twentieth century, Sharon Springs’ fanciest clientele no longer summered there, for a variety of reasons, but in part the decline is attributed to the emergence of modern medicine’s targeted treatments for specific illnesses, which made the “water cure’s” broad, palliative effects less appealing in certain cases.
In the summer of 1901, my great-grandfather, Rabbi Bernard Drachman, had just turned forty years old, but he already had a lifetime of achievements to his name. In 1890, while still in his twenties, he founded and built a Manhattan synagogue, which still stands today (as the Park East Synagogue), where he served as the first rabbi; in 1893, the kosher hospital he founded, Lebanon Hospital in the Bronx, opened its doors; and three years later, he was one of the original founders of the Jewish Theological Seminary.
Of course, he was able to do all these things because he married well, to the daughter of Jonas Weill, a fantastically wealthy 19th century real estate magnate. But he and his father-in-law used their money generously, which is why, when Weill died, there was very little left, and why I have had to work for a living, rather than coast through life like a Trump boy.
Anyway, that summer, very much a successful man, Rabbi Drachman rented a place in Bay Shore, where his fifth child, a son, was born, and where his mother-in-law visited with an exciting baby gift in hand.
“I have seen a very nice cottage at Sharon,” she said. “It has quite a number of rooms and is in very good condition. It also has a nice piece of land attached to it. I think it would be just the right thing for you and your family. I have taken an option on it, and if you both are satisfied, I would like to present it to you.”
“Our own Van Buren cottage [with] its sway-backed yellow barn,” wrote Rabbi Drachman’s son, Julian (my grandfather). “[From] the back porch, [I could look] up toward Apple Tree Road…. Officially our street was called Willow Street, but no one ever called it by that name. For one thing, though it was flanked by a noble archway of big maples and an elm or two, there wasn’t a willow tree anywhere along it. Incidentally, ‘Apple Tree Road’ itself was only a nickname, which I myself had made up for what was officially Pavilion Avenue, but it suited a road which had few houses but several flourishing orchards.”
“Summers in Sharon Springs were most pleasant and enjoyable,” Rabbi Drachman wrote. “The country around Sharon is most picturesque and truly rustic. Situated in the heart of the beautiful and romantic Mohawk Valley with its entrancing scenery and its memories of colonial and pre-colonial history, it fairly urged one to forget the great city with its congestion and its artificiality, to yield to the charm of unspoiled nature and to inhale with delight the cool ozone which exudes from forest and mountains.”
Rabbi Drachman nevertheless noted the observation of his friend, Mr. Ochs: “You know, Dr. Drachman, I think Sharon Springs is the queerest place in the world.”
Rabbi Drachman bought more land from a neighbor, so that he eventually had enough property for a small farm, with a cow, a goat and a vegetable garden.
The Jewish Renaissance
The only thing missing from this Garden of Eden was other Jews. So he convinced an old friend of his, Amelia Rosenberg, to open a “strictly kosher” hotel, and she did.
Her new hotel, he wrote, “became at once a decided success, patronized by a select clientele of Jewish residents of New York and Baltimore. Our taking up of our summer residence and Mrs. Rosenberg’s opening of her hotel called the attention of Jewish people generally to Sharon Springs, and it speedily became a favorite summer and health resort for our co-religionists.”
Amelia Rosenberg’s new hotel not only provided kosher food and Jewish living; Rabbi Drachman also led Shabbat services on Friday night and Saturday morning in the hotel’s parlor.
A hotel parlor was not an optimal place for religious services, however, and he determined to purchase land to build a proper synagogue.
A meeting of Village residents was convened.
“One of those present,” Rabbi Drachman wrote, “a Gentile hotel keeper, took a distinctly anti-Semitic attitude. He advised the people of Sharon to discourage the growth of the Jewish element in their town, using the familiar anti-Semitic calumnies to impress their undesirability upon those present. He proposed that no Gentile owner of real estate should sell his land for the erection of a synagogue. It looked for a time … as though this view might prevail. But the situation was saved by the action of the oldest and most respected resident and landowner of Sharon, … Judge Jackson. This gentleman warmly opposed the anti-Semitic views of the previous speaker. He said that the Jews, as American citizens, had a perfect right to settle in Sharon Springs either permanently or as summer visitors if they so desired, and that the people of Sharon should be glad to welcome them, as peaceful and progressive people, through whose presence the prosperity of Sharon could only be increased.”
According to Julian Drachman, Judge Jackson had become a family friend during their first summer in the Village, when he, his father and various siblings had accidentally trespassed on Judge Jackson’s land to pick berries. Judge Jackson caught them; however, he was thrilled to meet a rabbi for the first time, and the families became friends.
The friendship paid off; thanks to Judge Jackson, the inclusive view prevailed at the Village meeting, and Rabbi Drachman purchased land at 118 Willow Street, very close to his family home, and he oversaw construction of Sharon Springs’ first and only synagogue
The synagogue opened on July 22, 1904. It had room for three hundred people and was usually full. At the first service, even non-Jewish residents came to participate, and during Rabbi Drachman’s tenure, during which he served as rabbi, financial officer and caretaker, Reform Jews worshiped alongside Orthodox Jews.
After his kids grew up, Rabbi Drachman sold his Sharon Springs home in 1921, and he handed over the synagogue, free and clear of debt, to a committee of Jewish hotel keepers.
The Jewish renaissance that Rabbi Drachman envisioned continued even in his absence, and in 1943, shortly before his death, he wrote, “At the present time, it may truthfully be called a Jewish resort. Almost all of the hotels, of which there is a goodly number, and the great majority of the summer residents, are Jewish.”
The Sharon Springs Jewish community grew even larger after Rabbi Drachman’s death. In the wake of World War 2, the German government paid reparations to Holocaust survivors for medical treatment, and many came to Sharon Springs for rehabilitation. The type of Jewish people in Sharon Springs varied from period to period; by the 1950s, the Satmar sect, began to predominate, with the Adler Hotel as its locus, a group with which my great-grandfather and his family, with their politically, socially and economically progressive views, would have had very little in common. As the Adler and other core infrastructure deteriorated, the Orthodox clientele gradually disappeared. By the early 1990s, Sharon Springs had become a near ghost town surrounded by farmland, its grand hotels in ruin, its streets quiet. Some “Jewyness” lingered, but Jewish life had essentially ended long before 2021, when the Village seized my great-grandfather’s synagogue, and Sharon Springs’ last rabbi left town.
Today’s Sharon Springs
That was the state of Sharon Springs when Doug Plummer and Garth Roberts found it in the early 2000s and decided, against all common sense, to restore the abandoned and decrepit American Hotel. While some people wondered whether the conservative farming community that surrounded the decrepit downtown would support two gay men opening a hotel and destination restaurant, they did, and the American Hotel became not only a resounding success, but also a draw for other businesses to come to downtown Sharon Springs. Many, such as Beekman 1802, which opened in 2008, were LGBTQ+-owned. Beekman’s success even led to a reality show set in Sharon Springs. (Josh and Brent, who opened their Beekman organic farm in 2008, sold the company in 2021 for $92 million.) Once again, but in a different way, Sharon Springs is “the queerest place in the world,” as my great-grandfather’s friend, Mr. Ochs, described it more than a hundred years earlier.
Sharon Springs is history layered on history, with multiple waves of internal migration. The local farming community leans MAGA but is heartily warm and welcoming to newcomers who do not. Business developers who arrived two decades ago now live alongside artists, writers of varying renown and the occasional famous guest. There are writers and musicians and filmmakers here who you have certainly heard of, and some you might not have, but definitely should, like the acclaimed Veronica Klaus, a retro-jazz chanteuse and cabaret artist whose repertoire and performance draw heavily on the lounge-jazz and sophisticated ballad style of the 1940s and ’50s.
“Sharon Springs,” says local merchant Eileen Harcourt, “more than a lot of the other counties, is more open. They do realize that their history is built on having to depend on new groups of people coming in, to survive.”
There are so many Sharon Springs to choose from; take your pick. Today’s Sharon Springs, with a small but growing downtown of excellent restaurants and shops. Yesterday’s Sharon Springs, the lavish 19th century era and spiritual 20th century Jewish era, both of which are represented in the interpretive panels along Main Street, the Sharon Historical Society & Museum, and even as a charming, in-the-works historical village that abuts the museum.
“It’s a melting pot,” says Michael Palaia, one of the new owners of the American Hotel. “It’s the American dream. Artists. Authors. Mostly people that bi-locate between the Upper West Side and here, and some that for a while tri-located between Milan and Manhattan and here, LA and here, Tuscany and here, Boston and here. There are a lot of second homes for artists. The Village is full of people that used to be on Broadway. This attracts a contingent of very intelligent, knowledgeable, experienced people here, and artistic. It is a lot of people from different countries, from Lebanon, from Germany. It is a place that is attracting people that want a simpler way of life, but they don’t want to sacrifice any of the cosmopolitan comforts that they have grown to love and indulge in.”
Eileen Harcourt is a highly esteemed celebrity aesthetician, beauty product creator and perfumer who has created custom fragrances for Lenny Kravitz, and has worked with many, many other big names. Her latest venture, E H Rural Provisions, is a beautifully curated shop at 197 Main Street, where she sells her own lines, such as personal fragrances, goat-milk soaps and CBD beauty products, alongside artisanal items like creams, balms, home candles and local honey. Her store brand image is an old travel photograph of her great-grandmother and her sister on a ship.
“I have her with me all the time,” she says, “because the more I got to know her through letters, I felt like I always wanted her strength. She was such a figurehead in our family, as a self-sufficient, independent woman, so I like having her energy to kind of have an impact on what I do here in the shop, and how I connect with people.”
Her brand image gives you some hint as to which version of Sharon Spring she embraces: “The Gilded Age,” she says. “People came here that appreciated the natural springs, appreciated the natural beauty, but they had money to spend, and appreciation for a certain aesthetic of living…. When I meet people here, my goal is, even if they don’t shop at my store, I want to make sure they have an amazing experience when they visit here, so that they want to come back to the Village.”
What if that Gilded Age included a new Golden Age of Jewish Sharon Springs?
“I’d be thrilled,” she said.
Israeli-born Tatia Rosenthal lives in Sharon Springs with her husband, Jim Hodgson, in a massive Victorian-Italianate limestone mansion built around 1850, with seven bedrooms and three bathrooms; its nearly twelve acres, just down the street from the old Drachman homestead, is the site of some of the ruins of the Pavilion Hotel. In case you want to see her amazing home for yourself, they run an Airbnb.
They both work remotely; she is a skilled and successful animation director, and in 2008, she directed a movie I really love, 9.99, a stop-motion animation feature based on a story by my favorite Israeli author, Etgar Keret, and starring Geoffrey Rush.
She and Jim moved here recently from Brooklyn, trying to keep a step ahead of climate change, but it’s the post-Holocaust Jewish history that drew her to Sharon Springs specifically.
“I mean, it’s kind of fascinating that part of the compensation was to send them to spas,” she says. “I like that people came here for the cure at first, and then the people came here after the Holocaust to heal. This is a very turbulent time in the world, and this place reminds me that people healed from terrible things.” And Sharon Springs, she says, is still healing people today. “I love it. I just love it.”
Another resident told me, “This place saved my life.”
Residents who have lived here their whole lives can be charmed by the newcomers’ enthusiasm. “Before, when I was young,” one told me, “I never understood the history that was downtown, at the bottom of the hill.”
Tomorrow’s Sharon Springs
Sharon Springs is a little like Coney Island, a decayed relic of its former greatness that is constantly rumored to be on the verge of a full renaissance. Or is it more like Glen Echo Park, a onetime Maryland amusement park which has become an arts center, something very different from its original mission? In Glen Echo, potters spin in yurts, in the shadow of rusting amusement park rides. Or will Sharon Springs ultimately be a historical destination, nostalgia for something no one remembers, that almost no one has ever heard of?
Maybe something is changing.
For over 18 years, Sharon Springs Inc., a Korean-owned company, has been working to rejuvenate the village’s historic spa infrastructure, reportedly ultimately to include Sharon Springs as a stop on a tour from New York City to Niagara Falls. Their focus has been on restoring the Imperial Baths, with plans to incorporate Asian design elements while preserving the building’s original façade. The long-term vision includes rehabilitating the Adler Hotel (which remains closed and off-limits to the public) and developing townhouses on adjacent land. Obviously, eighteen years is a long time! While in 2021, it appeared unlikely the project would ever be completed, SSI has recently made progress on the Imperial Baths as well as an inhalation building, which would allow visitors to breathe the sulfur vapors. Regardless of the timing of the Adler Hotel’s opening, merely making the springs and healing vapors available to the public will give more people a reason to visit.
Much more stunningly, Hoshino Resorts, a renowned Japanese hospitality company, announced plans to open its first U.S. property in Sharon Springs.
“We aim to revive Sharon Springs’ mineral water legacy through presenting the onsen ryokan experience,” Yoshiharu Hoshino, the fourth-generation CEO of Hoshino Resorts recently told the Times Union.
Scheduled to debut in 2028, this forty-acre luxury onsen ryokan will feature up to forty guest rooms, offering an authentic Japanese hot spring experience. The resort, which will encompass the Magnesium Temple, aims to blend traditional Japanese architecture and hospitality with the natural mineral springs of Sharon Springs, creating a serene retreat for guests seeking relaxation and cultural immersion. While full design details have not yet been released (it is rumored to have in-room springs), the resort will incorporate the town’s historic mineral springs into its onsen facilities, offering guests an authentic hot spring experience modeled on traditional Japanese bathing culture.
Finally, architect Nick Drummond and his partners are spearheading a project to transform the historic Pavilion Cottages, near the Drachman homestead, into a queer-centric Victorian resort and glampground. The plan includes restoring the existing cottages and adding new accommodations such as tiny cottages and cabanas, all designed to provide a safe and welcoming space for the LGBTQ+ community and allies. The initiative not only aims to preserve the architectural heritage of the site but also to foster a sense of community and inclusivity.
Does Sharon Springs Have a Jewish Future?
As I talked to the Sharon Springers, almost all of them expressed the view that bringing a spiritual Jewish life back to the Village would be a great idea, and one that they would welcome. But I also encountered some resistance to the idea.
Ron Ketelsen is president of the Sharon Historical Society, he owns the historic Roseboro Hotel, and he is a Member of the Schoharie County Joint Planning Board and President of the Schoharie County Chamber of Commerce.
“The Jewish people kind of burned their bridges when they came here,” he says. “The reason that they kind of burned their bridges is they were still coming when the synagogue was open, but they were so entitled and so demanding that people didn’t want them to come anymore, because they were — I mean, this is bad, but they were very dirty and they would leave trash everywhere, and they would just throw stuff down and walk away and leave it. They would. The last person that had them stay here, he had a bed-and-breakfast, and they came, stayed there for three days, and then they left in the middle of the night, and they plugged all of the toilets with baby diapers. They turned on the air conditioners, all the lights, and they locked the doors, took the keys, left in the middle of the night, never paid. And that was the end of it. They never, nobody will take them back now….”
I asked Ketelsen why, in his opinion, they behaved so badly.
“Just because they felt entitled,” he replied. “I don’t know why.”
According to Ketelsen, arson was also an issue during this period.
“We have numerous places,” Ketelsen says, “that they moved the furniture out one day and they mysteriously caught on fire the next day, and they collected the insurance on them.” Many fires over the years in Sharon Springs, Ketelsen says, were caused by something he calls “Jewish lightning.”
Ketelsen remembered one example from his own life.
“I used to have an antique store in the Roseboro,” he recalled, “and one day, this rabbi came in and he had all these kids, and without saying a word, he just goes over and starts, opens up the door, starts to go upstairs. I’m like, ‘Hey, what are you doing?’ ‘I’m taking these kids upstairs,’ I’m like, ‘No, you’re not. I mean, you can’t go up there.’ ‘Yeah, I’m taking these kids upstairs, upstairs,’ and wouldn’t listen to me. I finally had to go over and tell him that he had to leave. So I’m sitting there, and somebody comes and says, ‘Hey, I just thought you should know there’s this man, this Jewish man, and he’s taking all these kids up your fire escape in the back, and he’s trying to get a window open to go up there.’ So I had to go out and tell him, ‘Hey, leave, or I’m going to have to call the sheriff.’ I mean, what is that? Who does that? You know? So they haven’t come back.”
I pointed out to Ketelsen that not all of us are bad; he readily agreed.
“I know,” he said. “I have a very good friend. One Jewish person is left [in Sharon Springs], and he owns the Brustman House and, very good friend of mine. He’s not, what do you call the very — where you practice the, you know, the kosher stuff…. I call him our ‘token Jew’ because he’s the last person here.”
While I don’t agree with trespassing, I still had a different reaction to Ketelsen’s Roseboro story than what he intended. His Roseboro Hotel served a primarily Jewish clientele during the 20th century. Who knows why this Jewish man wanted to see the Roseboro? What did it mean to him, to his family? Maybe some engagement at the very beginning of the confrontation would have led to a different result, one that brought communities together rather than creating discord.
Sharon Springs is a Jewish Village, Even Without its Jews
Of course, Ketelsen is wrong about the number of Jews in Sharon Springs; there is more than one. But maybe he means there is only one left from the days when Sharon Springs was a distinctly Jewish place.
Still, I think Sharon Springs could be spiritually Jewish again. With or without a spiritual Jewish life, Sharon Springs is a magical place, and its magic goes back thousands of years. But wedged somewhere among the artistic, celebrity and LGBTQ+ communities, the farmers, the Amish, in between the Japanese and Korean resorts, the Village could accommodate a little synagogue and a little kosher restaurant without losing its identity. Our arrival in the Village would not mean an end to progressive and inclusive values. Indeed, if the extended Drachman family of the 1940s and 1950s (including our in-laws) suddenly appeared in today’s Sharon Springs from out of the past, we would be both very hygienic and also more than progressive enough (and even just gay enough) for today’s Villagers. Indeed, a few of us would probably be too leftist for even the most leftist of the Village’s leftists. That is, we have had our share of Communists.
I also do think that progressive and observant Jewish people might today find a past lingering here that would greet them like a warm hug. In 2025, even without our presence, there is something spiritually Jewish here, floating around in what Rabbi Drachman called “the cool ozone.”
It was always a holy place, after all, since the first indigenous people worshiped here. I like to imagine that as he prayed, my great-grandfather could feel the spirit of those indigenous peoples who had also prayed by the springs thousands of years before him. As he wrote, so long ago, “I had indescribable joy in offering up my prayers to the Almighty morning and afternoon and evening while God’s cool breeze fanned my cheeks and all the surroundings [of Sharon Springs] spoke of a Merciful and Loving Creator. I never had greater intellectual and spiritual satisfaction than when I sat in my cozy, airy room in our cottage in the quiet, shady village street.”
^^^
Steven S. Drachman is a novelist.
Quotations from the interviews with Eileen Harcourt, Tatia Rosenthal and Michael Palaia have been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
Top image: Sharon Springs, 1950, during its Jewish years.