For years, the building at 276 Watch Hill Road sat there the way old schoolhouses do: too charming to tear down, too specific to easily reuse. Longtime residents still call it the Red Schoolhouse, a one-room building with a bar that locals say once drew Jackie Gleason. It had the bones of somewhere great and the recent history of somewhere empty. Then, on November 7, 2025, a couple who had lived in Cortlandt Manor since 2009 opened the doors and turned it into The Goodmark, and the building finally started acting like it belonged to the neighborhood again.
That reopening is a good story on its own. But it points to something bigger about how Cortlandt Manor eats, sweats, and spends a Tuesday night right now, and it is not the story most guides to this hamlet tell.
The Town That Was Built for Weddings, Not Weeknights
If you have lived here more than a few years, you already know the type of restaurant Cortlandt Manor has historically been good at: the kind built for an occasion. Cortlandt Colonial Restaurant & Ballroom on Albany Post Road has been family owned since 1978, and it still runs the way it always has. George Liaskos, the patriarch, oversees the property (he also owns a Holiday Inn Express in Peekskill), while his son Evan, a Culinary Institute of America graduate, runs the kitchen. The restaurant, known internally as the Grill Room, is set up to handle a full spectrum of milestones, from an intimate dinner for two to a wedding for 200. Its Sunday champagne brunch buffet and its soup-and-salad bar have been signatures for decades, and the slow-roasted prime rib is still the dish regulars order without opening a menu.
That is not a criticism. It is a description of what this stretch of Route 6 and Albany Post Road has specialized in for almost half a century: places built around a banquet room, a private garden, a catering division that handles parties to go. If you needed somewhere for a sweet sixteen or a christening, Cortlandt Manor delivered. If you just wanted a burger on a random Tuesday because you didn't feel like cooking, your options were thinner.
That is the gap The Goodmark and a new studio on East Main Street are quietly filling.
What Nine Months In a Schoolhouse Looks Like
Mark and Gina Goodenow moved to Cortlandt Manor in June 2009, when Gina was pregnant with their daughter Mia. Mark spent three decades bouncing between restaurant kitchens, a stint in aerospace, and five failed attempts to buy a restaurant of his own before the Red Schoolhouse became available. Nine months into service, The Goodmark has settled into a rhythm that looks less like an event space and more like a place you'd actually stop into after work.
The kitchen keeps almost nothing frozen except French fries and ice cream. Everything else arrives fresh three days a week, sourced in part from Hemlock Hill Farm five minutes away and desserts from Baked by Susan in Croton-on-Hudson. Executive chef Ally Epstein, a Johnson & Wales graduate, runs the line, and she is training Mark and Gina's daughter Mia, now a junior at Hendrick Hudson High School, on the garde manger station handling salads and appetizers.
The dish that has actually put the restaurant on the map is not the salmon on cedar planks or the scallops with risotto, both of which show up on the seasonal menu. It's the burger.
"The burger is a huge seller because it's local and it's so fresh. People try it and they're telling their friends miles away to come and try it."
That is not a wedding dish. That is a Tuesday dish, the kind of thing a place needs to earn regulars instead of reservations for a milestone. The couple was counting on their patio to extend that everyday feeling into the warmer months, and by now, deep into an August that has surely seen it in full use, that expansion has done exactly what they hoped: given the restaurant a second dining room that doesn't require a special occasion to use.
A Studio Built Around Dropping In, Not Signing Up
The same shift shows up half a mile away, on a different kind of real estate entirely. Lila Within, a hot yoga and wellness studio on East Main Street, does not run on the country-club logic that dominates a lot of suburban fitness. There's no long-term contract required to walk in the door. New students get two weeks of unlimited classes before deciding whether to commit, and the studio's summer programming pushes outside entirely, with paddleboard yoga and paddleboard Pilates sessions on the Hudson River through Peekskill and Fort Montgomery.
That waterfront piece matters more than it might sound. Cortlandt Manor has river access that a lot of Westchester towns would trade for, but historically that access has meant a boat launch or a hiking trail, not a guided class you can show up for after work. A studio treating a stretch of the Hudson like a rotating classroom is a genuinely new use of a landscape residents have always had.
The Pattern, If You're Paying Attention
Put these three places next to each other and a shape emerges. Cortlandt Colonial represents what this town has always done well: the big room, the banquet, the once-a-year visit done exactly right. The Goodmark and Lila Within represent something the town hasn't had much of until recently: the everyday version. A burger you order without planning ahead. A yoga class you can drop into on a whim. Neither new business is trying to replace the banquet-hall model, and neither should. They're filling the space next to it, the space for a Tuesday that doesn't need a reason.
If you're already living here and wondering what to actually do with a free evening this fall, a short list:
- Dinner without a reservation: The Goodmark is open for dinner most nights and does weekend brunch, with chicken and waffles and stuffed French toast alongside the burger that made its name.
- A special-occasion table: Cortlandt Colonial still handles the Sunday buffet and can seat a private party of 15 or a full wedding, the way it has since 1978.
- An after-work reset: Lila Within's studio classes run daily, with the Hudson paddle sessions typically continuing through the warmer months before the river cools off in fall.
Why This Is Worth Noticing Now
None of this shows up if you search generic "things to do in Cortlandt Manor" lists, most of which still point to Blue Mountain Reservation and the town pool and stop there. Those places are real and worth using. But a neighborhood's character shows up just as much in what opens in an old schoolhouse as in what's already protected as parkland. The Goodmark filling a building that sat vacant, and a paddleboard studio treating the Hudson as a classroom, tell you something about who is choosing to invest here right now, on a scale small enough that it doesn't show up in county data but real enough that you can taste it.
If you already call Cortlandt Manor home, that's a decent case for using both of these places while they're still finding their footing. If you're weighing whether this corner of Westchester fits the life you're trying to build, and it's the kind of neighborhood where small, personal businesses are betting on old buildings and open water, that's worth knowing before you write your own next chapter here. Either way, the Nancy Kennedy Team spends as much time tracking what opens in this neighborhood as what closes on it, and we're happy to talk through what any of it might mean for your own plans. If a move is somewhere on your horizon, you can request a local market consultation whenever you're ready.
