Gold Coast Mansions - Historic Long Island: Keewaydin

Wednesday, October 9, 2013

Inisfada, Continued

Inisfada © North Shore Long Island Country Houses

As discussed in our last post, the future of Inisfada remains the most pressing topic in Long Island's historic mansions today. According to the mayor of North Hills, Marvin Natiss, the group that has purchased Inisfada is interested in fully developing the property, and has not mentioned incorporating the house. (1) Over the past few weeks, asbestos abatement has been going on. This can be a sign of demolition or restoration, but in this case it is most likely the former. (2) If this story ends in the demolition of the house, it will join a long list of other impressive properties that have succumbed to suburbia on the North Shore—though perhaps none quite so large or significant throughout the community as Inisfada.

Von Stade Estate © North Shore Long Island Country Houses

• Von Stade Estate, Old Westbury - also William Entenmann's Timber Point Farm
Once a thriving horse farm, built by equine enthusiast F. Skiddy Von Stade and later part of the Entenmann family, the house was left to ruins for decades before finally succumbing to the wrecking ball to make way for a housing development in February 2012.

Dark Hollow © North Shore Long Island Country Houses

• Dark Hollow, Cold Spring Harbor - Oliver Burr Jennings

Designed by architects Mott B. Schmidt and Mogens Tvede in 1930, the centerpiece of the home was the barrel vaulted living room and a two-story rotunda with a repeating star pattern in its large skylight, chandelier, and terrazzo floor. Occupied privately up until 2010, new owners left it to ruin before razing it in January 2012.

• Keewaydin, Sands Point - John Scott Browning

Long credited as an inspiration for Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (and once owned by F. Scott Fitzgerald's publisher Herbert Bayard Swopes), Keewaydin was last sold in 2004, and torn down in 2011, when the new owner claimed to be unable to keep up with the costs of maintaining the aging property.

Flora Whitney House © North Shore Long Island Country Houses

• Flora Whitney House
The Delano & Aldrich designed home was sold in 1963 to the New York Institute of Technology, who used it until 1999 when it and its 113 acres was sold again for approximately $10 million. It was demolished by its new owners in 2001, when it was replaced by a newly built, even larger home.

Little Ipswich © North Shore Long Island Country Houses

• Little Ipswich, Woodbury - Ruby Ross and Chalmers Wood
Another Delano house, Little Ipswich was a favorite of the architect. The classically styled country home was called "gemlike" by Architectural Digest, and sold to Count Uzielli after Ruby Ross Wood's death. In 1995 it was razed and replaced by a modern development called Peroni Estates.

Burrwood © North Shore Long Island Country Houses

• Burrwood, Cold Spring Harbor - Walter Jennings

Designed by Carrère & Hastings in 1898, with its grounds done by the Olmsted Brothers, Burrwood sat on 400 sweeping acres with an impressive 4 stories and 50 rooms. Occupied by Jennings for 50 years, Burrwood was occupied for the next 40 years by the Industrial Home for the Blind until it was sold off to a developer and razed in 1993. Not unlike Inisfada, this was a very unpopular and contested decision at the time.

Check back here in the upcoming weeks as crucial meetings and other developments in the story of Inisfada unfold.

Friday, April 12, 2013

The Gold Coast of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s "The Great Gatsby"

Although Baz Luhrmann's upcoming film adaptation of The Great Gatsby, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire, was shot on location in Australia, the original inspiration for F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel was our own Long Island.

While based in New York in the early twenties, Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda rented a house at 6 Gateway Drive in Great Neck, which would become the inspiration for the novel's West Egg. Just across Manhasset Bay, the neighboring village of Sand's Point would become known as East Egg. The north shore of Long Island, dubbed the “Gold Coast”, was at its heyday lined with over 1,200 grand country homes dotting the shoreline. Approximately 400 of these survive today; many are still in private hands, while others are open to the public.

The Fitzgeralds, perhaps surprisingly, moved to Long Island to save money after the birth of their child. The Gateway Drive house, a short walk from the Great Neck Long Island Rail Road station, rented for only $300 a month (about $3,000 in today’s money), compared to the $200 a week they were spending to stay at a hotel in Manhattan. Though Fitzgerald had enjoyed some success on the heels of his first and second novels, This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and the Damned, the celebrity couple was well known to live extravagantly—and often above their means.

As development on Long Island’s North Shore increased, the larger, more private, and thus more fashionable, estates were spreading eastwards towards Sands Point (East Egg). Villages like Great Neck became more populated, with smaller plots of land and a closer vicinity to one’s neighbors. The Fitzgeralds fellow residents included theater folks (like Groucho Marx and Basil Rathbone), stockbrokers, bootleggers, and fellow writers like Fitzgerald’s neighbor and friend, Ring Lardner.

F. Scott Fitzgerald likely drove his rented Rolls Royce over to Lardner’s house on the bay, where it was said the two liked to sit on the porch, drinking and looking out across the water, and next door to Fitzgerald’s publisher, Herbert Bayard Swope’s, “Gatsby-style” parties. Swope would eventually move across the bay and buy a grand estate called as Keewaydin, which is often referred to as one of Fitzgerald's inspiration for the character Daisy Buchanan's home.