Why Nobody Wants to Visit the Poconos, Pennsylvania Anymore

The Pocono Mountains were a quiet resort destination for over a century — Victorian families arriving by railroad, grand hotels like the Kittatinny and the Inn at Buck Hill Falls hosting presidents and celebrities, coal money and mountain air sustaining small towns across Monroe County. Then, in 1963, a World War II veteran named Morris Wilkins poured concrete into a heart-shaped mold, installed six red-tiled bathtubs in his lakeside hotel, and turned the Poconos into the Honeymoon Capital of the World. What followed was one of the strangest boom-and-bust cycles in American tourism: the rise of couples resorts like Cove Haven, Penn Hills, and Mount Airy Lodge — whose TV jingle became unforgettable to a generation — and their collapse after cheap airfare, Atlantic City casinos, and Caribbean cruises stole the market they had invented. The abandoned Poconos resorts now sit in the Pennsylvania woods, heart-shaped tubs filled with dirt, ballrooms open to the sky. This is the story of a region that bet everything on a fantasy, and what was left when the fantasy went out of style. Sources Lawrence Squeri, "Poconos (The)," Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia, Rutgers University, 2022 "The Last Resort," Philadelphia Magazine, October 2007 "250 Out of Work as Mount Airy Lodge Closes Doors," Times Leader, October 30, 2001 "How the Poconos Became the Birthplace of the Heart-Shaped Bathtub," Dwell, 2023 Morris Wilkins biographical entry, Wikipedia, citing Philadelphia Inquirer, Las Vegas Review-Journal, and Wall Street Journal obituaries "The Eerie Abandoned Resorts of the Poconos Mountains," Travel Addicts, 2023