Bill Murray once wanted to take a late-night swim at The Lodge in Woodstock.
The actor, who was in the area while filming the 2019 movie “The Dead Don’t Die” in Fleischmanns, became a regular at the bar, hotel, and restaurant tucked behind Woodstock Elementary School. He showed up at Levon Helm Studios, dropped by The Lodge repeatedly for dinner, and once danced so exuberantly that staff still remember it years later.
“He was doing Bill Murray dances,” said Brian Parillo of Woodstock, a managing partner and general manager at The Lodge from 2016 to 2019, and a DJ, party host, and bartender there from 2010 to 2015. “I was behind the bar. I felt like I was in a movie.”
After dancing, Murray told the hotel manager he wanted to go swimming, Parillo recalled. He told the actor about The Lodge’s heated saltwater pool.
But Murray, riffing on a famous line from the 1980 film “Caddyshack,” had another idea.
“A pond is good for me.”
These days, celebrity sightings at The Lodge, formerly the Pinecrest, are a dim memory. The once-popular property at 20 Country Club Road, long known for its bar, lounge, cabins, trails, and pool, is now largely dormant, and its future is uncertain.
Ulster County property records show the 6.5-acre parcel changed hands in May 2024, selling for $3 million to Nomade Capital Woodstock. The property was then listed for sale in August for $2.2 million, according to Zillow. The listing was removed in February.
Any new sale would open yet another chapter for a property that has shifted hands and identities over decades, and whose next use may be constrained by local zoning.
Parillo’s business partner, Michael Skurnick, sold the property for $2.8 million in 2019 to Selina Woodstock, an arm of the now-defunct global hospitality company Selina, which planned to create an “experience-driven” destination with co-working space and wellness programs.
Months later, Selina sued Skurnick, whom it had also hired for renovations, alleging “material misrepresentations” about the property’s zoning status. The suit was dropped a year later, but the zoning issues helped derail Selina’s plans.
“The hotel operation and bar/restaurant were a pre-existing condition that superseded the adoption of zoning,” Woodstock Building Inspector and Code Enforcement Officer Francis “Butch” Hoffman Jr. wrote in an email.
“That use was able to continue as long as the property, buildings, and use were maintained. When the property was left abandoned and let the application for site plan review and process expire for a period of over one year, the nonconforming use was forfeited.”
The parcel behind the elementary school includes cleared grounds, trails, nine structures, a workshop, and the in-ground pool that once caught Murray’s attention.
Its history stretches back much further. According to Assistant Town Historian Janine Mower, the site was once owned by the Risely family, whose holdings included a farm and a popular boarding house. In 1929, she said, the parcel was slated, along with the elementary school property, to become the back nine of the nearby Woodstock Golf Club. The Great Depression ended those plans.
For Parillo, the property’s uncertainty is about more than real estate.
“I just feel, as a town, we’re missing out on this great place that was enjoyed by so many people,” he said. “Woodstock is just not the same without that place.”
John W. Barry is a reporter for The Overlook. Reach him at john@theoverlooknews.com.