If you put your forefinger and thumb on a map of New York and gently squish
Westchester County towards Long Island, pushing the waters of the Sound east into the
ocean, Rye would connect to the north shore right around Bayville. With a little luck
Edith Read Wildlife Sanctuary could slide right through Oyster Bay and into Cold Spring
Harbor, maybe even landing next door to Theodore Roosevelt’s summer home. In the
possible event we may one day be connected by a bridge or a tunnel spanning the 6.1
mile Sound crossing, I thought it wise to take a few days to explore our sister city. I like
places when emptied of their high season hubbub, after the boys of summer are gone.
What I discovered were the many hamlets comprising the town of Oyster Bay, bordered
to the west by the waters of Hemstead Harbor (rumored to hide buried treasure of Captain Kidd), to the east by the actual bay, to the north by the coves, bays and beaches of the Sound and to the south by the postwar housing subdivisions which took the place of the potato fields of the Hempstead Plains. “Affordable homes” mass produced at thousands per day to provide “homes fit for heroes.”
Each village has its own mood, accent and bumper sticker: Seacliff, Glen Cove, Locust Valley, Bayville, Lattingtown and Center Island cover the shore area of this illustrious middle “neck” with the village of Cold Spring Harbor to the east at the base of the Huntington neck. All of these necks of land and bays from Great Neck to Huntington comprise the fabled “Gold Coast,” rich in history, lore, cash and competition. I may be hyper sensitive, but there seems to be a simmering class war just below the surface,
rearing its ugly head most notably in road rage and territorial disputes (parking).
To be honest, my adventure kicked off as an errand to redeem a Groupon purchase in Old Westbury. I figured there must be something more out there, so I threw a map in the car, put a yellow sticky on Levittown and The Vanderbilt Mansion, and headed out with nothing more than a notion and a new copy of Nelson DeMille’s The Gold Coast. Turns out these two sites are the alpha and omega of a century of land use on the North Shore. Fascinating stuff.
The North Shore is hilly as is the remnant of a coastal moraine with rocky beaches and large boulders (Execution Rock and Target Rock) scattered across the bay. First inhabited by The Mantinecoc and the Seawanhaka. Settled in the 1600s by the Dutch then the English, agriculture and whaling.
Wealthy Captains of Industry flocked to the Gold Coast from NYC at the turn of the 20th
century to build their extravagant summer nests in a multitude of styles. French chateaux, Italian Renaissance Georgian revival, Beaux-Arts palaces, timbered Tudor and Mediterranean stucco absorbed the shoreline and dotted the countryside, each outdoing the next in grandeur and style. Vanderbilt, Roosevelt, Guggenheim, Phipps, Kahn, Pratt, Woolworth, Frick, Dodge (to drop a few names) were the founding fathers of the Roaring
Twenties . They bought and brought over whole rooms and ruins from Europe as
everything had a price tag after WWI. The rich lived large, Great Gatsy-large, before it all started to tumble after the Crash of ’29 ushered in the Great Depression. WWII was the death knell as servants left to serve their country rather than their masters. By the end of the war, it was high time to move the remnants of the very rich out to build much needed housing for returning GI’s and their new families. Mansions were razed, land was
cleared and infrastructure for high density was put in place. Levittown sprung up almost
overnight like a patch of mushrooms, the first mass-produced suburb and the archetype
for many that followed.
The super rich were on the run. In the end, if gout didn’t get ‘em, post-war inflation, the introduction of property and income taxes (many reached a bracket of 90% by the 1950s) and the expense of large staff and maintenance did. The largest concentration of wealth and power in America dismantled its playground. Some tore their manses down rather than pay taxes as developed property. Some gave land away in order to save it from little pink houses for you and me. Target Rock National Wildlife Refuge, Caumsett State Historic Park, Bailey Arboretum, Sands Point Preserve (the famed East Egg in The Great Gatsby), Cold Spring Harbor State Park, Mutton Town Preserve, North Shore Wildlife Sanctuary(and Shu Swamp), Welwyn Preserve and Planting Fields Arboretum were all made public through the very private business of dismantling estates.
The village of Oyster Bay used this trick in 1968, donating 3,100 acres (all underwater) to the federal government as a wildlife refuge to prevent the proposed bridge to Rye. Oyster Bay Wildlife Refuge, the gift that keeps on giving.
Some sold their homes for a song to non-profit organizations for the tax write off. Private
schools, religious institutions and health care facilities are still operating in many of the
old homes. These uses were preferable to high-density development…at least the land
would be unscathed. The Mill Neck Manor School for the Deaf, the Seminary of the Immaculate Conception, the Nassau County Museum of Art, the United States Merchant Marine Academy, the Webb Institute of Naval Architecture and the Gurdwara Sahib Sikh Forum all still intact. It’s weird.
There are some manses still standing in their former glory, yours for the touring. Sagamore Hill (Theodore Roosevelt), Oheka Castle (Otto Kahn), Eagles Nest (Willie Vanderbilt), Mansion at Glen Cove ( John Teele and Ruth Pratt who was widowed young and rumored to be the lover of Robert Moses. Jamie the Maintenance Man showed me the hidden door where Moses would go up to Ruth’s bedroom) , Hempstead House and Castle Gould and Falaise (Great Gatsby) at Sands Point.
The clubs: Seawanake Corinthian, The Creek, Piping Rock, Meadowbrook Hunt Club
I found places by land (1) which I’ve only seen by sea (2):
The Sand Hole – part of the Caumsett estate on Lloyd Neck, formerly called Clam
Diggers Cove. About a 2 mile walk down Fisherman’s Drive from the parking lot of the
State Park stables area
Louie’s – On Port Washington in Manhassett
PLAN IT:
Read The Gold Coast by Nelson DeMille while sipping a dark and stormy in the library
at Oheka Castle
Take the Sagamore Hill tour then find the cemetery and the sanctuary
Visit Eagles Nest! You can see the marine museum, the Habitat and Stoll Wings and the
memorial wing without taking the tour of the mansion.
DeMille-isms:
“It is a land that at first glance seems frozen in time, as though the clocks had stopped at
the sound of the closing bell on October 29, 1929.”
“This place has a 300 year history of secret protocols, ancient grievances, and a stifling
class structure.”
“This world was half ruin and half museum, and we were all surrounded by the evidence
of former glory, which is not a psychologically healthy thing, or good for our collective
egos. What lies out there in the American heartland? Like many of my peers, I’ve been
all around the world, but I’ve never been to America.”
“It’ as if the aristocracy from all over western Europe for the last four hundred years had
been granted a hundred acres each to create an earthly nirvana in the new world. By
1929, most of Long Island’s Gold Coast was divided into about a thousand great and
small estates, fiefdoms, the largest concentration of wealth and power in the America,
probably in the world.”
“In some ways this place reminds me of the post-civil war south, except that the decline
of the GC is not the result of military operations, but of a single economic catastrophe
followed by a more subtle class war.”
“Most of this suburban county’s massive population are contained in the southern two thirds, and very close by are new york’s teeming millions. These fact – the numbers, the history, the present realities of population, taxes, and land development – color our world and explain, I hope, our collective psyches and our obsession with wanting to freeze a moment in time, any moment in time, except tomorrow.”
“The architects and their American clients of this period were not looking into the future, or even trying to create the present: they were looking back over their shoulders into a European past that had flowered and died even before the first block of granite arrived on this site. What these people were trying to create or re-create here in this new world is beyond me. I can’t put myself in their minds or their hearts, but I can sympathize with their struggle for an identity, with their puzzlement, which has troubled Americans from the very beginning-Who are we, where do we fit, where are we going? It occurred to me that these estates are not only architectural shams, but they are shams in a more profound way. Unlike their European models, these estates never produced a profitable stalk of wheat, a bucket of milk, or a bottle of wine. There was some hobby farming, to be sure, but the crops certainly didn’t support the house and the servants and the Rolls-Royces. This whole silly Gold Coast was a sham, An American anomaly, in a country that was an anomaly to the rest of the world.”
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