The White Lake Mansion House is an abandoned hotel in New York’s Catskill Mountains. It was the county’s first summer resort. The hotel White Lake Mansion House was established in 1848. It was one of the most elegant hotels in Sullivan County, owned and run by the Kinne family in Bethel, NY for almost 80 years. It has 175 rooms as well as a restaurant, casino, ballroom, livery, and tennis courts.
Sullivan County was firmly established as a Jewish resort region by the 1920s, and the town began to exhibit elite elegance with the development of several homes and summer cottages. The remaining elements of the town’s rural beginnings vanished, and downtown thrived with new intense commercial buildings, theaters, and gas stations.
Tourism in the “Borscht Belt” had begun to wane by the 1960s. Air travel was becoming more easy and affordable, while the development of interstate roads simplified long-distance vehicle travel. In the year 2000, the White Lake Mansion House was closed.
There were plans to demolish the dilapidated White Lake Hotel and replace it with a 58′ 4 storey replica that would contain a convention center and restaurant. Developer Pawel Efraimov stated that 112 hotel rooms and suites, as well as a spa, gym, and retail outlets, will be erected behind it at a cost of $16 million. It is now abandoned, another reminder of a time when the Catskills were a popular vacation destination for rich New York City residents.