

Dirty dancing location in virginia movie#
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. On August 21, 1987, the blockbuster movie Dirty Dancing was released in theaters across the country. You can even stay in Baby's cabin Visitors are always welcome and a Dirty Dancing scavenger hunt is available to everyone. Enjoy the time of your life imagining yourself as a star of Dirty Dancing. The hotel hosts Dirty Dancing-themed weekends where you can walk in the footsteps of Johnnie and Baby. It’s often claimed that this famous scene was filmed at Lake Lure in North Carolina, but it wasn’t. Visit the Dirty Dancing filming location, Mountain Lake Lodge in Pembroke, Virginia.

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. That was provided by a dilapidated former boys camp in Lake Lure, N.C., where there was no active resort business to get in the way of 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. It remained mostly empty from 2008 to 2012," said the Roanoke Times.ĬNN Travel went on to state that Roanoke College professor Jon Cawley and other scientists discovered, after studying the lake bed, that it hits a low about every 400 years.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. "No living person had seen the lake disappear, although records from the 1700s describe a grassy meadow growing on at least part of the lake bed. "According to scientists, this phenomenon of the lake draining and filling back up makes Mountain Lake one of a kind," said CNN Travel. In 2006, it dropped again, and by 2008, it went completely dry," according to The Roanoke Times.įans of the movie and guests of the lodge are excited to see the lake filling back up.

"The lake's water level first dropped in 1999 but came back in 2003.

How many commercials have we seen where the couple tries to emulate the same trademark lift Swayze and Grey practice in that lake? Better yet, how many have actually tried to do that lift?īut the lake is not what it once was, according to an article by CNN Travel. DREAM HOME SWIMMING POOLS: Dream home swimming pools in the Houston area
