Inisfada, The Final Chapter

Rear Facade
© Paul J. Mateyunas

We are sad to say that today marks the loss of America's fourth largest home, Inisfada. For its century-long lifetime, Inisfada was the largest residential project, and only on Long Island, in existence by noted Philadelphia architect John Torrey Windrim. 

It is truly devastating that those responsible for the demolition of this significant piece of local and architectural history have further erased the kind of landmark that makes the North Shore unique, and plan to replace it with a high end version of tract housing.

Loss of the Great Room with many details still left in the building
© Paul J. Mateyunas

Example: carved beam ceilings still clinging to the ceiling and now exposed to the sky 
© Paul J. Mateyunas

During the course of its history, Long Island has inspired numerous artists and writers, among them William Cullen Bryant, Walt Whitman, Louis Comfort Tiffany, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, just to name a few. Novels and movies like The Great Gatsby and Sabrina have become American classics. Current pop culture is providing a resurgence of interest in our history, and works like Downton Abbey and Baz Luhrman's remake of The Great Gatsby are causing visitors to flock to places like Newport, RI; Long Island's Vanderbilt Museum and Old Westbury Gardens; and Biltmore in Ashville, NC by the thousands and watch shows like Selling Spelling Manor and The Queen of Versailles. Vast and imposing, the awe-inspiring Inisfada could easily have become "America's Downton Abbey", but now that its physical presence is lost, it is likely that future generations may never even hear about this snippet of our history.

© Paul J. Mateyunas

Inisfada is the most significant house to be razed on Long Island in over three decades, and we suggest that our community take this as the North Shore equivalent of a wake-up call like Manhattan's Penn Station. We hope a loss of this magnitude will finally spark a local movement for mix of new and old buildings and the kind of adaptive reuse that enables us to keep the fabric of our community unique. Let's use this horrible loss as a lesson to appreciate and preserve what we have left.

Leaded glass windows, crushed and smashed in the rubble© Paul J. Mateyunas

© Paul J. Mateyunas

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 © 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 © 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.

© Paul J. Mateyunas

© Paul J. Mateyunas

• 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 © North Shore Long Island Country Houses

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 © North Shore Long Island Country Houses

Burrwood © North Shore Long Island Country Houses

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.

Gold Coast Influences in Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby

While at the Long Island premiere of The Great Gatsby on Wednesday I had the chance to see Baz Luhrmann’s remake of the classic novel.

Before the film started, Luhrmann discussed his influences and the research he did on the North Shore, visiting surviving estate houses and walking the shores of East and West Egg (Sands Point and Great Neck).

The overall film had a lot of recognizable North Shore details. Well-researched, Luhrmann, like Fitzgerald, took influence from a number of North Shore houses both surviving and long razed.  

Most recognizable were the similarities of Gatsby’s house to Beacon Towers, which included overall style, rooflines, portions of the gatehouse, and even minute details like the dragon head finials on the Beacon Towers’ gates.

The Great Gatsby © Warner Bros.

Beacon Towers © North Shore Long Island Country Houses

Eagle's Nest © North Shore Long Island Country Houses

The swimming pool in the movie is a cross between that at Willie K. Vanderbilt’s Eagle's Nest and DeLamar’s Pembroke. 

Inside Gatsby’s lavish home, the floating staircase of La Selva was incorporated into the larger than life Gatsby set.

La Selva © Paul J. Mateyunas

La Selva © Paul J. Mateyunas

The Great Gatsby © Warner Bros.

Luhrmann's attention for detail further impressed me with the view from the Plaza suite window, which included the tower of 1 West 57^th Street (Cornelius Vanderbilt’s townhouse) that has long been replaced by Bergdorf Goodman. 

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.

6 Gateway Drive © Great Neck Library

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. 

Swope's 325 East Shore Road © Great Neck Library

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.