#Dirty dancing location virginia movie

Johnny helps her see her own value (“Nobody,” he tells her father in the film, grabbing Baby to come dance on stage, “puts Baby in a corner”). She falls in love with Johnny, the resort’s dance instructor from the other side of the tracks. In that safest-seeming of places, Baby’s life changes. That’s where 17-year-old Baby, played by Jennifer Grey – who is bound for Mt Holyoke, the Peace Corps and, it seems, a lifetime of being a daddy’s girl – vacations with her family in the summer of 1963.

#Dirty dancing location virginia movie

While it was actually filmed in Virginia and North Carolina, the movie that launched a million slumber-party fantasies was set in a scenic family resort in New York’s Catskill Mountains. I’d come here on a quest to see the locations where Dirty Dancing was shot. It’s her ticket to the staff party that introduces her to a world of dancing beyond the foxtrot – and, of course, to Johnny Castle, played by Patrick Swayze. And the staircase, which we could clearly see as we bobbed in the water, is where Frances “Baby” Houseman, the protagonist of the 1987 film, carries a watermelon. But this quiet corner of the lake is better known by its nickname: “Dirty Dancing cove”. 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.Our boat tour of Lake Lure, at the edge of North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains, had just pulled into Firefly Cove. 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. The main location is the hotel itself, which is the Mountain Lake Lodge, Pembroke, off I-460 west of Roanoke, Virginia. 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.