The Glenmere mansion, overlooking Glenmere Lake, approximately 50 miles northwest of New York City in Orange County, New York, was built by New York City real estate developer Robert Wilson Goelet (not to be confused with his first cousin Robert Walton Goelet) in 1911, on the grounds of his sprawling estate in Sugar Loaf, a hamlet of the town of Chester, New York.[1]
Goelet commissioned the architects Carrère and Hastings to design a country villa in 1911; it was designed in a Tuscan style because Goelet's wife, the former Miss Elsie Whelen of Philadelphia, had always wanted to live in an Italian villa. The house features a central courtyard with an Italian marble fountain, and ochre-colored stucco walls. Beatrix Jones Farrand was hired to landscape the grounds, and Samuel Yellin did the ironwork for the house.[2] In addition to their horses, Goelet and his wife were breeders of Highland Terriers and Great Danes and maintained extensive kennels. Soon the estate and its storied hunting grounds became a regular haunt of Babe Ruth, and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.
Goelet hosted numerous sporting-set events at the estate, including equine ice-racing.[3] The younger of Goelet's two sons, Peter, began radio station WGNY on the grounds of the mansion in 1930.
Glenmere mansion was sold to Abraham Prusoff during the second World War, Under his ownership the private mansion was transformed into a resort hotel with upscale amenities which included a golf course, ski run, and tennis courts.[4] By the 1960s, Prusoff found it increasingly difficult to keep the resort's finances in order; in the next decade, the mansion and estate were seized by Orange County as a tax lien.
In 1985 the mansion and estate were purchased at tax auction by real estate magnate Rick Mandel.
The mansion changed hands again in 2007, becoming a luxury 19-room hotel, restaurant, and spa, after undergoing an extensive and costly renovation. The mansion's developers were fined and cited by the New York Department of Environmental Conservation for violations of having proper paperwork in regard to the impact of construction on the endangered northern cricket frog. Studies found no frog habitats on the property.[5]
The developers named the mansion's pub the Frog's End Tavern.[5]
An historic archive of photographs, ephemera and documents pertaining to the storied mansion is maintained by the non-profit Chester Historical Society.