It’s hard to believe, standing on a busy Lakewood street in 2025, that this was once a sleepy resort town where New Yorkers came to escape the summer heat. But the grand old hotels are still there in the history books — and if you know where to look, in the street names and the lake at the center of it all.
This is the story of how Lakewood became Lakewood.
The resort years
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Lakewood was the Catskills before the Catskills — a pine-barren resort town where wealthy New Yorkers built grand hotels around Lake Carasaljo. The Laurel House, the Lakewood Hotel: sprawling wooden palaces with verandas, ballrooms, and guests who arrived by train for the “healthy air.”
The town’s whole identity was leisure. People came for the summer, breathed the pine air, strolled the lake, and went home. Nobody — nobody — could have predicted what came next.
The war years and a rabbi’s vision
By the 1930s, the resort era was fading. The Depression had emptied the grand hotels. Lakewood was quiet, a little down on its luck, the kind of town people drove through.
Then came 1943. Rav Aharon Kotler, one of the great Torah leaders of the generation, arrived in America as a refugee from the war in Europe. He looked at this fading resort town — cheap land, quiet streets, a train line to New York — and saw something nobody else saw: a place to rebuild.
He founded Beth Medrash Govoha with fourteen students. Fourteen. In a town of a few thousand, in the middle of a world war, the idea that this would become a world center of Torah learning sounded like a fantasy.
Rav Aharon didn’t deal in fantasy. He dealt in vision.
The slow build
For the first couple of decades, growth was steady but modest. BMG grew to hundreds of students. Families moved in — kollel families, yeshiva families, people drawn by the learning and the affordable houses. The town’s character began to shift: more shuls, more schools, more seforim stores, fewer summer tourists.
The old-timers watched their resort town become something else entirely. Some embraced it. Some moved on. But the direction was set.
The boom
Then, starting in the 1970s and accelerating through the 80s, 90s, and 2000s, Lakewood exploded. Families poured in from Brooklyn, from the Five Towns, from out of town — drawn by the yeshivas, the kollelim, the community, and (for a long time) the relatively affordable housing.
The numbers tell the story: from a few thousand residents mid-century to tens of thousands today, making Lakewood one of the largest and fastest-growing Jewish communities in the world. New neighborhoods rose on former farmland. Schools couldn’t be built fast enough. The infrastructure of frum life — shuls, mikvaos, kosher stores, simcha halls — multiplied to serve a population that kept doubling.
The new neighborhoods
If the mid-century story was the yeshiva’s growth, the twenty-first-century story is the neighborhoods. Former farmland and pine forest gave way to developments with names every local knows — streets of new colonials and duplexes, each with its own shuls, its own schools, its own character. The town pushed outward in every direction, and the infrastructure of frum life raced to keep up: new shopping centers, new simcha halls, new mikvaos.
Drive around today and you can read the decades like tree rings — the older blocks near the lake, the seventies and eighties colonials, the nineties expansions, the brand-new developments still smelling of fresh paint. Each ring tells the same story: more families, more learning, more life.
What remains of the old Lakewood
It’s still there if you look. Lake Carasaljo still anchors the town, ringed by a park where families stroll on Shabbos afternoon — though the grand hotels are long gone. Some street names, some old buildings, the pines themselves: the resort town is buried under the Torah town, but not entirely gone.
Longtime residents love to point out the spots: “That used to be all woods.” “I remember when this was a farm.” The transformation happened within living memory, which is part of what makes it so remarkable.
Living history
Here’s what makes Lakewood’s story special for a visitor: you’re not touring a museum. You’re walking through a transformation that’s still happening. The yeshiva that started with fourteen students now has thousands. The neighborhoods keep growing. Every year, new families arrive, new shuls open, new schools break ground.
When you stay in Lakewood — really stay, in a house on a residential street, walking to shul with the neighbors — you’re not just observing this story. You’re briefly part of it. The town that a visionary rabbi imagined in 1943 is the town outside your window.
Come see it for yourself. Walk around the lake. Drive past the yeshiva. And then settle into a LakewoodHosts villa for Shabbos and feel what eighty years of growth feels like from the inside: like home.
