Mamakating Park Historic District

Mamakating Park is a small summer cottage colony on a wooded ridge top about five miles northwest of Wurtsboro, in Sullivan County, New York. It was the only developed part of an 1890s scheme to build a vast resort of more than two thousand lots on over four thousand acres around a large hotel. The Depression of 1897 ended that plan, leaving the hotel and about twenty cottages built by 1903. The hotel operated for decades before a fire in the 1970s, but its horseshoe-shaped site still anchors the street grid. The surviving cottages, dating from 1891 to 1903, are rambling gable-roofed frame buildings with wide verandas, varied siding, large fireplaces and beaded-board interiors. A ruined stone chapel, a casino, a barber shop and tennis courts also remain. By the late 1940s an owners association of families from New York City held most cottages. The district is notable for its role in Catskills recreation and its intact resort architecture and landscape.