‘America’s Greatest Zoo’-turned hotel listed for $3.6M

The coronavirus pandemic has compelled the owners of this Borscht Belt landmark to advertise the farm.

Upstate New York’s Catskill Recreation Farm has listed its 193-acre petting zoo-turned-boutique hotel after a brutal enterprise interval.

“We’ve had three quarters of our reservations cancelled within the final two months,” Sid Blauner, the current proprietor of the property instructed The Publish.

Blauner, who grew up going to the zoo, talked about he was compelled to advertise amid the persevering with uncertainty throughout the pandemic. The cancelations had moreover flip right into a financial obligation, he added.

The property at 400 Recreation Farm Highway affords a singular array of amenities, along with six bedrooms, a sport room, outdoors scorching tub, quite a lot of “glamping” web sites and a giant dwelling room-style frequent house. However it moreover boasts a rich historic previous. The website started in 1933 as the first privately-owned zoo inside the U.S. and, in its heyday, earned the establish “America’s best zoo” in homage to its 2,000 animals and some 500,000 annual friends, based mostly on the data website New York Upstate.

In 2006, after 73 years in enterprise, the Catskill Recreation Farm closed and have turn out to be a most well-liked trip spot for metropolis explorers enticed by its uncommon, abandoned zoo aesthetic. Then in 2012 it obtained one different lease on life when Ben and Cathy Ballone bought it, renovated its crumbling giraffe barn proper right into a hotel, and reopened the world as The Lengthy Neck Inn in 2019. 

Blauner bought it for $1.9 million the following 12 months. It’s currently listed for $3.6 million.

In an attempt to stave off the need to advertise, he recently remodeled the reserving system to be Airbnb solely, nonetheless sadly the hotel’s key demographic of households has been onerous hit by the Omicron wave and reluctant to stay in a hotel.

“Most likely 70 % of the individuals come as adults with their kids,” he talked about, with plenty of the older individuals former friends to the property’s petting zoo incarnation. “You may think about the reminiscences they’ve. We’ve seen individuals break down and cry remembering the happiest reminiscences of their childhood, along with their mother and father” proper right here. 

Blauner himself attended the zoo as a toddler. Whereas “we are able to’t have a restrictive deed,” he hopes that whoever owns the property subsequent will maintain it open to most people.