The following are excerpts from an article appearing in today’s Times Herald Record: 

Sullivan County, NY – From now on, sleepy Sullivan County’s population starts to triple.

And Shragie Feller knows what that means.

He opened his kosher pizza/fried sea bass/Israeli salads shop in the Village of Wood­ridge Thursday after being closed since last fall.

“We don’t call it busy,” he said. “The boom is going to start.”

The county estimates that Sullivan’s population will swell to 250,000 over the next week. Ultra-Orthodox families from places like Brooklyn, Monsey and Montreal load up their cars and vans and head to the old bungalow colonies and camps of eastern Sullivan County.

Ghost towns like Woodbourne and Loch Sheldrake, largely closed and boarded in the winter, are open for business. Crowds gather around stores that are mere curiosities most of the year, places like Bubby’s in Woodbourne, Kosher Sox in South Fallsburg and Coby’s Corner in Woodridge.

Izzy Minzer stood before his still empty counter at Izzy’s Knishes in Loch Sheldrake. He’ll soon be frying the potatoes and baking his famed knishes.

Wouldn’t think to open earlier.

“The winter?” he said. “Dead. Ghost town, ghost town.”

But busy Sullivan also means long lines at Wal-Mart and frayed nerves, curses, honking and double parking on the roads.

There’s still an uneasy tension among the locals and the largely Orthodox seasonal residents.

But businesses have never complained about extra customers. Like Izzy cooking up his knishes, business owners like the Kristt Company’s Les Kristt are hoping the extra people cook up some business.

Kristt has never seen Sullivan County’s biggest village, Monticello, slower. It has more than a dozen empty storefronts on Broadway, a ghost town that unlike the two-month boom towns never seems to open.

With gas at more than $4 a gallon and penny-pinching families trying to pay off their debts, this has been a particularly hard time.

“In the winter, there isn’t much going on here,” said Victor Waknine, flipping a pizza pie in the air at the Buona Fortuna’s “The Brooklyn Way” pizzeria on Route 42, just outside Monticello. Now he’s getting calls from Kutsher’s and some camps.

“Things are starting to pick up.”

Herby Schechter, the vice president of the historic synagogue in Loch Sheldrake, came Thursday to unpack the Torah from a case, preparing for the first service of the year.

He pointed at the gas station across the street.

“His business is going to double,” he said.

“And so is ours.”