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

The coronavirus pandemic has compelled the homeowners of this Borscht Belt landmark to promote the farm.

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

“We’ve had three quarters of our reservations cancelled in the last two months,” Sid Blauner, the present proprietor of the property instructed The Post.

Blauner, who grew up going to the zoo, mentioned he was compelled to promote amid the continuing uncertainty across the pandemic. The cancelations had additionally turn into a monetary legal responsibility, he added.

The property at 400 Game Farm Road affords a singular array of facilities, together with six bedrooms, a sport room, outside sizzling tub, a number of “glamping” websites and a big dwelling room-style frequent space. But it additionally boasts a wealthy historical past. The web site began in 1933 as the primary privately-owned zoo within the U.S. and, in its heyday, earned the identify “America’s greatest zoo” in homage to its 2,000 animals and a few 500,000 annual guests, based on the information web site New York Upstate.

In 2006, after 73 years in business, the Catskill Game Farm closed and have become a preferred vacation spot for city explorers enticed by its unusual, deserted zoo aesthetic. Then in 2012 it received one other lease on life when Ben and Cathy Ballone purchased it, renovated its crumbling giraffe barn right into a hotel, and reopened the area as The Long Neck Inn in 2019. 

Blauner purchased it for $1.9 million the next year. It is currently listed for $3.6 million.

In an try and stave off the necessity to promote, he lately transformed the reserving system to be Airbnb solely, however sadly the hotel’s key demographic of households has been onerous hit by the Omicron wave and reluctant to remain in a hotel.

“Probably 70 percent of the people come as adults with their children,” he mentioned, with lots of the older people former guests to the property’s petting zoo incarnation. “You can imagine the memories they have. We’ve seen people break down and cry remembering the happiest memories of their childhood, together with their parents” right here. 

Blauner himself attended the zoo as a toddler. While “we can’t have a restrictive deed,” he hopes that whoever owns the property subsequent will hold it open to the general public.