“This is the biggest building in the community, and it has really stood out as both a beautiful building and a very sad reflection on our history [because] it has been in decay for a very long time,” said Jan Jaffe, president of Wellington Blueberry, a community-based multimember LLC established for the Wellington Hotel project.
The old hotel is a 12,000 square foot, three-story Italianate-style building with a wraparound porch and historic moldings, wall finishes, and crafted parquet flooring. First called the Ulster House Hotel, it was built in 1882 to serve the burgeoning tourism industry in the Catskill Mountains, just a train ride away from New York City.
“New Yorkers were able to take a train from Grand Central Station up north, and it was so beautiful,” said Joseph Prieboy, director of the Shandaken Historical Museum, which serves Pine Hill and the eleven other hamlets in the town of Shandaken. Back in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to those accustomed to the hustle and bustle of city life, Prieboy said the Catskill Mountains were “considered kind of idyllic and utopian.”
