Originally called Sheldrake Pond, Loch Sheldrake was a Borscht Belt resort community with about 48 hotels, including Brown's, Edgewood, Evans, Holiday, Karmel, New Roxy, Riverside Hotel, and Shady Nook, and about 36 bungalow colonies including Kushners, Pesekows, and Melamed's Villa. From 1929 to 1941, Murder Inc., an organized crime group of Jewish and Italian mobsters from New York City, frequented the Catskills, and some of their victims perished in the lake, with one making national headlines in 1939. Opening in 1944, Brown's Hotel became known for entertainment and atmosphere, and the Brown family, who had a long relationship with comedian Jerry Lewis, named their nightclub the Jerry Lewis Theater Club, the only one in the Borscht Belt named for a celebrity; performers there included Harry Belafonte, Totie Fields, Dean Martin, Woody Allen, Sammy Shore, and Liberace. Hotel Evans also became part of boxing history as Jimmy Braddock, Marcel Cerdan, and others trained there, and the Karmel Hotel later became Stagedoor Manor, a performing arts camp. More broadly, from the 1920s through the early 1970s, the Borscht Belt was the leading summer resort destination for hundreds of thousands of predominantly East Coast American Jews after their exclusion from existing establishments in the 1920s helped drive Jewish entrepreneurs to create more than 500 resorts, 50,000 bungalows, and 1,000 rooming houses in Sullivan County and parts of Ulster County. It provided a sense of community for working and vacationing Jews, strongly influenced American entertainment, music, and sports, attracted many of the 20th century's best-known figures, and then began a gradual decline around 1960 because of suburbia's growth, inexpensive air travel, and generational change.