The White Lake Mansion House is an abandoned hotel in the Catskill Mountains of New York. It was the first summer resort in the county. The White Lake Mansion House hotel was built in 1848. Owned and operated by the Kinne family in Bethel, NY for over 80 years, it was one of the most opulent hotels in Sullivan County. It offering 175 rooms, restaurant, casino, ballroom, livery, and tennis courts.
By the 1920s, Sullivan County was firmly established as a Jewish resort area and the town began to display upscale sophistication with the construction of numerous mansions and summer cottages. The last vestiges of the agrarian origins of the town faded, with downtown prospering with new intense commercial buildings, theaters, and fueling stations.
By the 1960s, tourism in the “Borscht Belt” had entered a decline. Air travel was becoming increasingly convenient and cheap and the advent of interstate highways made long-distance automobile travel easier. The White Lake Mansion House was closed in 2000.
There were plans to tear down the decrepit White Lake Hotel and build a 58’ 4 story duplicate of the old resort hotel to house a conference center and restaurant. Developer Pawel Efraimov mentioned that additional buildings will be built behind it that will contain 112 hotel rooms and suites as well as a spa, gym and retail shops at a cost $16 million. But today it sits abandoned, another landmark from a time when the Catskills served as a popular vacation spot for wealthy residents of New York City.
