"This ambitious 170-room (including outbuildings) Colonial Revival-style structure was designed by Boston architect J. Williams Beal ...," Bryant Tolles wrote in Summer By the Seaside: The Architecture of New England Coastal Resort Hotels.
It included "a low, 260-foot-long three-story gambrel-roof edifice, highlighted by its expansive shed-roof dormers, paired front gambrel bays, and extended veranda with balustrades.
When I was a child, it was used for this purpose and through the years, lapsed into a state of disrepair," Muriel Holmes Anderson Weeks wrote in A Family History in 1975.
In its heyday the Mayflower Inn, "attracted a New York clientele and dominated life along the shoreline in 1950s," according to The Old Colony Memorial newspaper.
The mighty hotel fell on hard times as resorts in the Catskills gained in popularity in the 1960s.The structure was significantly damaged by sequential fires in the 1970s.