‘America’s Biggest Zoo’-turned hotel detailed for $3.6M

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

Upstate New York’s Catskill Video game Farm has shown the home housing its petting zoo-turned-boutique lodge after a brutal small business time period.

“We’ve experienced 3-quarters of our reservations cancelled in the last two months,” Sid Blauner, the latest operator of the house, advised The Submit.

Blauner, who grew up going to the zoo, reported that, amid the ongoing uncertainty all around the pandemic, he experienced no alternative but to list the 193-acre plot. The cancelations had also turn into a monetary legal responsibility, he extra.

The property at 400 Sport Farm Highway provides a one of a kind array of facilities, like six bedrooms, a game area, an outdoor hot tub, many “glamping” sites and a huge, dwelling area-fashion widespread region. But it also offers a rich historical past. The web page began in 1933 as the first privately owned zoo in the US, and, in its heyday, gained the name “America’s biggest zoo” in homage to its 2,000 animals and some 500,000 annual readers, in accordance to New York Upstate.

In 2006, right after 73 decades in business, the Catskill Sport Farm shut and became a preferred spot for city explorers enticed by its odd, deserted zoo aesthetic. Then, in 2012, it acquired yet another lease on lifetime just after Ben and Cathy Ballone acquired it and subsequently renovated the crumbling giraffe barn therein, turning it into a lodge. They reopened the room in 2019 as the Long Neck Inn. 

Blauner purchased it for $1.9 million the pursuing year. It is at this time outlined for $3.6 million.

In an attempt to stave off the want to promote, he not long ago converted the reserving program to be Airbnb-only, but regrettably the hotel’s important demographic of households has been strike hard by the Omicron wave and continue being unwilling to stay in a resort.

“Probably 70% of the folks appear as adults with their young children,” he stated, with lots of of the more mature individuals former site visitors to the property’s petting zoo incarnation. “You can picture the recollections they have. We’ve witnessed people split down and cry remembering the happiest memories of their childhood, alongside one another with their dad and mom [here].” 

Blauner himself attended the zoo as a baby. While “we can not have a restrictive deed,” he hopes that whoever owns the house up coming will keep it open to the general public.