In New York: in New York: Simon Says Condo

"I look at it with mixed emotions," Lou Goldstein was saying. His lean, humorous face was at half-mast. "It's like watching your mother-in-law drive over a cliff -- in your new Cadillac."

Goldstein had been more than director of daytime social and athletic activities at Grossinger's Hotel & Country Club. He had been a fixture, like the indoor and outdoor swimming pools and the nonstop kosher fare. For 37 years, celebrities and nobodies had taken orders from him as he led his stand- up antic game of Simon says.

Simon says put up your hands. Simon says bend forward from the waist. Where are you from?

Philadelphia.

Out. Last year a lady stands here and I say to her, "What do you think of sex?" "Sex," she says, "it's a fine department store."

And now the resort, owned by one family since Woodrow Wilson was in the White House, will be operated by a corporation with the upscale name of Servico, Inc. The new owners, with plans to turn the place into a yuppie paradise, had invited the world to watch them "implode" the Grossinger Playhouse, where innumerable comics, singers and dancers had broken in their acts. Dynamite would knock down the floors and ceilings, leaving only a gaunt wooden frame. Bulldozers would take care of that. From some of the older witnesses, the word oy was repeated sotto voce all morning.

And who could blame them? Grossinger's was once the capital of the Borscht Belt, a loose confederation of some 1,000 Catskill Mountain resorts, so named in honor of the East European Jewish clientele who filled the rooms, wandered the greenery, searched for mates, did a locust number on the four Lucullan meals a day (including a midnight snack) and cheered the tummlers, a Yiddish word for exuberant entertainers. The performers themselves were a nation of immigrants: David Daniel Kaminski, Aaron Chwatt, Jacob Pincus Perelmuth, Morris Miller, Eugene Klass, Joseph Levitch, Milton Berlinger, Joseph Gottlieb. All are better known under their noms de borscht: Danny Kaye, Red Buttons, Jan Peerce, Robert Merrill, Gene Barry, Jerry Lewis, Milton Berle, Joey Bishop.

It had all begun three generations ago, when Ellis Island teemed with immigrants. A few of them had gone west -- about 100 miles west (and north) of Manhattan -- to try farming Sullivan County, N.Y.'s inhospitable soil. Vegetables would not grow there, but debts did, and the farmers were obliged to take in boarders. Soon the old houses became inns, sometimes with names that reflected a yearning for assimilation. The splendiferous Nevele is eleven spelled backward, in honor of a group of local visitors. Ratner's place had large Rs in the wrought-iron fencing. The owner called it the Raleigh.

( But Grossinger's never changed its identity. Back in 1914 the Galician emigres Selig and Malke Grossinger bought a farm with a down payment of $450. After they became innkeepers they turned a first-year gross of $81. But things picked up between the wars. Their blond, gregarious daughter Jennie had acquired some nearby property, and with an amalgam of public relations, real estate smarts and philanthropy, she became the lodestar of the Catskills. Politicians came to the place they called the "G" to court the Jewish vote, athletes to use the growing facilities, entertainers to try out new routines en route to Broadway or Hollywood.