Wiltwyck Golf Club to close
Barring sale, 63-year run of one of area’s premier courses to end
Wiltwyck Golf Club will shut down on Nov. 5, ending a 63-year run as one of the area’s premier clubs, Board of Directors president Steve Digilio said Saturday.
“Barring a sale anytime between now and next spring, Wiltwyck will not reopen as a member-owned club,” Digilio said.
The club’s restaurant, which previously remained open through New Year’s Eve and reopened in early April, will also close on Nov. 5, he said. Ten employees will be laid off on that date, Digilio added.
There are “several interested buyers,” some of whom have said they might continue operating a restaurant at the 150-acre golf course, Digilio said.
The property, listed in August for $3.5 million with the Murphy Realty Group in Kingston, is currently listed for $2.9 million.
Most of the interested buyers would like to maintain the golf course, but “would decide how they want to operate the golf facility,” Digilio said. He said Wiltwyck could reopen as a private club, a semi-private club or a public golf course.
It is hoped that whoever purchases the club at 404 Steward Lane will continue to operate it as an 18-hole, Robert Trent Jones Sr.-designed golf club, Digilio said.
“We’re earnestly still trying to sell in hopes ... someone else will open it (as a golf club) in the spring,” he said.
But Digilio noted that there are about 600 golf courses for sale throughout the country and sales are slow, in part because “millenials are not playing golf in the numbers they were when I was their age.”
At its peak, Wiltwyck had “conservatively, 500 members,” including social members and golfers, he said. Those numbers began to decline after IBM left the town of Ulster in the early 1990s.
Currently, the club has about 200 members, including pool and social members, Digilio said.
As membership declined, he said, the cost to maintain the facility remained “roughly the same,” pushing up the cost of membership.
In a letter sent to club members on Friday, Digilio, 70, wrote, “In my 70-plus years, this is one of the hardest letters that I have ever written. The Board of Directors voted unanimously at its Oct. 25, 2017 meeting, that Wiltwyck Golf Club will officially terminate.”
Originally, Digilio said, the club was scheduled to close Sunday, but “the weather has been so fantastic and the membership encouraged us to keep it open” until Nov. 5.
A membership meeting is planned at 3 p.m. Sunday at the club at which time “we will explain the recent developments that have brought us to this point and outline the official closing down procedure,” the letter continued.
In the end, Digilio said, aside from the personal loss he and other club members are facing, “If it isn’t sold and it can’t be saved, it will be a tremendous loss to the community.”
The site has been used free of charge by the golf teams at the John A. Coleman Catholic High School, Kingston High School and SUNY New Paltz. It has hosted fundraising golf tournaments on behalf of the American Cancer Society, Michael B. Finnegan, the YMCA, SUNY New Paltz, Hospice of the Hudson Valley and many others, Digilio said.
“I could go on and on ... there are too many to actually list,” Digilio said. “In many cases, it’s their most successful fundraiser of the year.”