The coronavirus pandemic has forced the owners of this Borscht Belt landmark to sell the farm.
Upstate New York’s Catskill Game Farm has listed its 193-acre petting zoo-turned-boutique hotel after a brutal business period.
“We’ve had three quarters of our reservations cancelled in the last two months,” Sid Blauner, the current owner of the property told The Post.
Blauner, who grew up going to the zoo, said he was forced to sell amid the ongoing uncertainty around the pandemic. The cancelations had also become a financial liability, he added.
The property at 400 Game Farm Road offers a unique array of amenities, including six bedrooms, a game room, outdoor hot tub, multiple “glamping” sites and a large living room-style common area. But it also boasts a rich history. The site started in 1933 as the first privately-owned zoo in the U.S. and, in its heyday, earned the name “America’s greatest zoo” in homage to its 2,000 animals and some 500,000 annual visitors, according to the news site New York Upstate.
In 2006, after 73 years in business, the Catskill Game Farm closed and became a popular destination for urban explorers enticed by its strange, abandoned zoo aesthetic. Then in 2012 it got another lease on life when Ben and Cathy Ballone bought it, renovated its crumbling giraffe barn into a hotel, and reopened the space as The Long Neck Inn in 2019.
Blauner bought it for $1.9 million the following year. It is currently listed for $3.6 million.
In an attempt to stave off the need to sell, he recently converted the booking system to be Airbnb only, but unfortunately the hotel’s key demographic of families has been hard hit by the Omicron wave and reluctant to stay in a hotel.
“Probably 70 percent of the people come as adults with their children,” he said, with many of the older folks former visitors 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” here.
Blauner himself attended the zoo as a child. While “we can’t have a restrictive deed,” he hopes that whoever owns the property next will keep it open to the public.
