Yes, Lake Lure, southeast of Asheville, is the film’s other location but it hasn’t fared so well as Mountain Lake in terms of what’s left to see. It’s often claimed that this famous scene was filmed at Lake Lure in North Carolina, but it wasn’t. It’s unlikely you’ll find enough water to practice your lifts like Baby and Johnny in the spot just down the path from the gazebo. The main building still overlooks what was the Houseman family’s cabin and the waterside gazebo where Mr Houseman ( Jerry Orbach) sulks after beloved daughter Baby ( Jennifer Grey) admits spending the night with cocky dance instructor Johnny Castle ( Patrick Swayze).īut what has happened to the lake? A geological anomaly has seen the water of Mountain Lake fluctuate dramatically until today it’s rarely more than a dry bed. All of the dancing scenes, including the final dance scene, was filmed inside the old gymnasium which was turned into a 'dinner theatre' for filming. The main location is the hotel itself, which is the Mountain Lake Lodge, Pembroke, off I-460 west of Roanoke, Virginia. The main film location was at the Chimney Rock Camp for Boys which had been closed down for several years prior to the 1987 filming. The film knits together two separate locations to represent the resort, neither of which is in the Catskills or even New York. The fictitious ‘Kellerman’s Mountain House’ was based on Grossinger's Catskill Resort, which stood near the town of Liberty from the Twenties until closing down in 1986, just a year before the film was released. More formally the Catskill Mountains, the area is in the southeastern part of New York State, about100 miles northwest of New York City or 40 miles southwest of Albany. The Houseman’s destination is the Catskills area of New York State, home to hotels owned by and catering to Jews – becoming dubbed the ‘Borscht Belt’. It’s the summer of ’63, Kennedy is still President and the Houseman family heads off for the annual holiday at a time when many resorts were still openly anti-Semitic in their policies. Looking back, I was a bit sniffy about Dirty Dancing in the first edition of The Worldwide Guide To Movie Locations but it’s stood the test of time both as a musical romance and as a reminder of that period when the Fifties began to morph into the Sixties.
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