This Charming Catskills Ski Town Is Almost Unrecognizable-Here's What's New

""Are we really in Windham?" my mom asked me for the third time that day. It was 7 p.m. on a Saturday last winter, and we were sitting in a corner booth at Babblers, a restaurant in the Wylder Windham hotel. The bar was packed with groups of friends in Canada Goose jackets and cashmere turtlenecks, laughing over martinis while a classic-rock cover band was getting ready to play."

"Set about three hours north of New York City, the tiny hamlet of Windham, in the eastern Catskills, is often overlooked. At least, that was the narrative I grew up with. This is where my grandpa and his cat, Magic, lived in a log cabin; it's where I would go to ski and shoot BB guns at cans a few times a year before returning home to the Boston suburbs."

"For my mom, the story is a bit more convoluted. She was just five when her family moved to Windham from the Upper East Side. Her parents divorced three years later, and both remarried soon after. While she lived with her mom (first in Kingston, New York, then on Long Island), she visited her dad in Windham every other weekend. She rode ATVs with her brothers and taught her five half-sisters how to ski. She knew everyone, and everyone knew her."

Windham, a small Catskills hamlet about three hours north of New York City, has experienced notable change toward upscale tourism. Luxury hotels, fine dining, and an exclusive members' club now sit alongside long-standing family ties. A woman returns with her mother, who has deep childhood memories of Windham, to explore the town as a tourist. Scenes include a packed hotel restaurant, snowy mountain roads, and a town sign proclaiming Windham a "gem of the Catskills." The weekend reveals contrasts between new affluent visitors and locals, and resurfacing personal memories of skiing, ATVs, and family life.

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