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Book Reviews
Fire Island's Surf Hotel and other Hostelries on Fire Island's Beaches in the Nineteenth Century.
By Harry W. Havemeyer. (Mattituck, N.Y.: Amereon House, 2006. Illustrations, maps, bibliography, and index. Pp. 178. $22.95.)
Reviewed by Leroy E. Douglas, trustee of the Long Island Republic Airport Historical Society, East Farmingdale, New York.1
| Harry W. Havemeyer's interesting, informed, and richly textured Fire Island's Surf Hotel and other Hostelries on Fire Island's Beaches in the Nineteenth Century is the final volume in his magnificent Great South Bay trilogy.2 Surf Hotel is as sure an historical guiding light for history buffs and researchers as the Fire Island lighthouses were for mariners. This slender, but significant, volume authoritatively details the fascinating history of the numerous hotels, resorts, communities, lifesaving stations, and the two lighthouses, which existed on the barrier islands of the Great South Bay since the 1830s. Havemeyer is a gifted narrative historian. His vivid prose is embedded with a storehouse of interesting details and insightful biographical data, patiently culled from exhaustive research in newspapers, magazines, atlases, diaries, and books. This excellent book is bolstered by Havemeyer's remarkable memory and encyclopedic knowledge of the experiences and associations of his family, which has lived along the Great South Bay in Islip for almost one hundred and twenty years. |
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Surf Hotel chronicles the creation of the eight-sided, seventy-four- foot-high first Fire Island Lighthouse (1826). It brilliantly describes how Felix Dominy, the second lighthouse keeper, "gradually became an innkeeper" and established the original Fire Island hostelry, the Dominy House, by "taking in guests" in his upper-floor bedrooms between 1835 and 1844. David S. S. Sammis then opened a "chowder house" on Fire Island west of the Dominy House in July 1856 and within two years expanded it into the commodious Surf Hotel, where up to one hundred guests could be accommodated and entertained. The Surf Hotel prospered after the Civil War when: the Long Island Rail Road extended train service to Babylon (1867); guests could comfortably sail across the Great South Bay from Babylon to Fire Island in improved steam-powered ferries; and the hotel was celebrated and widely publicized by prominent New York City newspaper publishers such as James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald and Charles A. Dana of the New York Sun. Many famous guests, including John Jacob Astor, Jay Cooke, Horace Greeley, Peter Cooper, Samuel J. Tilden, James A. Garfield, Chester A. Arthur, and Grover Cleveland, relaxed in the cooling sea breezes and brilliant sunshine, went bluefishing in the bay and ocean, and dined on delightful meals at Sammis's Surf Hotel at the western tip of Fire Island in the Gilded Age. Harry Havemeyer believes Herman Melville wrote much of his novelette, Billy Budd, while vacationing at the Surf Hotel. |
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In what may be his most valuable chapter, Havemeyer does an amazing job in detailing the hardships and incredible suffering unnecessarily endured by the victims of the tragic September 1892 Cholera Scare in New York and in revealing how the hyperemotionalism of panic-struck Long Islanders—who violently refused to allow passengers to land on the mainland of Long Island—led the state of New York to purchase the Surf Hotel as a quarantine station. The Surf Hotel property became Long Island's first state park in 1908 after a fierce coastal storm had destroyed the historic hotel a year earlier. Surf Hotel concisely and accurately explains the development of housing, first on Oak Island (1879), the original summer residential community on the south shore's outer beaches, and later on Oak Beach. Havemeyer describes how the tides extended Fire Island six miles west from 1825 to the present, and he imaginatively explains how the islands in the bay such as the Fire Islands and Sexton Island were reduced in size once they were no longer directly on the Atlantic, as Fire Island grew to the west and blocked the sand-giving waves from lapping their shores. |
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While his discussion of Sammis's Surf Hotel is lively and interesting, his picturesque descriptions of lesser-known hostelries such as the Whig Inlet House (1877), Castle Conklin and the Wa-Wa Yanda Club (1878) on Captree Island, the Short Beach Club (1887), Sidney Van Nostrand's Hotel and the Ocean View House on Oak Beach, the Muncie Island Hotel (early 1890s), and Wesley Van Nostrand's Hemlock Inlet House (1876) west of Cedar Beach, are even more valuable, since few people today know anything about them. Artists from the newly formed Tile Club in Manhattan visited Castle Conklin for a day and a night on June 10, 1878, where they drew and painted seaside sketches and watercolors. R. Swain Gifford's watercolor, Morning at Jesse Conklin's, helps us visualize Castle Conklin. Surf Hotel is richly illustrated with remarkable photographs, but readers would have benefited immensely if the author had included a comprehensive map showing the approximate locations and dates of origins of all the outer-beach hostelries. |
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Surf Hotel cogently describes: the evolution of the Fire Island communities, starting with Point O' Woods in 1894; the effects of the devastating September 1938 hurricane on Fire Island; the preservation of the Sunken Forest (1959); the complex struggle to create the Fire Island National Seashore, finally accomplished in 1964 during the Johnson administration; and the heroic efforts of the Fire Island Lighthouse Preservation Society to restore, renovate, and relight the 167-foot-high 1858 Fire Island Lighthouse in the 1980s. Few present-day visitors to the delightful Robert Moses State Park realize that the original park buildings, boardwalks, and docks located near the lighthouse were wiped out by the 1938 hurricane, and that Robert Moses relocated the Fire Island State Park facilities to "a new location two and a half miles to the west of the lighthouse where the dunes were higher and offered more protection." The reconstituted Fire Island State Park complex was sited at the present Field Three (then only reachable by boat or ferry), and was opened to the public in June 1940. |
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Havemeyer is ambivalent about Robert Moses. He praises Moses for: persuading the United States Congress (1924) to give the state of New York "all federal land west of the Lighthouse"; for dredging the State Boat Channel "in 1928–9 from Jones Beach to the Fire Island Inlet"; and for having the "passion for bringing people to the beach by automobile." Havemeyer, on the other hand, criticizes: Moses's unrelenting obsession to connect Fire Island State Park and the Smith Point with a massive community-busting Ocean Boulevard on Fire Island; his determined and persistent opposition to the creation of the Fire Island National Seashore; and his "ruthless" destruction of the Muncie Island Hotel during the dredging of the State Boat Channel. A few caveats may be in order. Robert Moses also deserves credit for preserving the historic outer-beach communities in the Town of Babylon (Oak Island, Oak Beach, the Association, and Gilgo), while providing the public convenient access via attractive parkways and stunning bridges to the enjoyable recreational facilities at Captree State Park, Robert Moses State Park, and the Town of Babylon's three lovely ocean-beach parks. The ride between Jones Beach and Robert Moses State Park is arguably the most scenic, unspoiled, and pleasurable drive on Long Island. Robert Moses also deserves kudos for not destroying the High Hill Beach cottages near Jones Beach's Field Six, but for allowing the homeowners to move almost seventy cottages to West Gilgo in the Town of Babylon in mid-1940 when their leases at High Hill Beach expired. Moses also deserves praise for having the state of New York permanently transfer to the Town of Babylon its previously muddy title to the bay bottoms under the Great South Bay, this by a historic agreement reached by the State Land Board at the original August Belmont mansion in North Babylon in May 1929. Surf Hotel recognizes that Robert Moses "made the barrier beach of the Great South Bay what it looks like today." Robert Moses's public works greatly enhanced the quality of life and the recreational opportunities on Long Island for countless millions, at construction costs which are totally unfathomable today. |
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These minor criticisms aside, Harry W. Havemeyer has served his readers well with his sixteen-year labor of love which reminds us that for over one hundred years Suffolk's south shore from Babylon to Sayville was also an internationally famous Gold Coast. We are in his debt for his exhaustive research and marvelous writing. These remarkable books are a joy to read, are jam-packed with appealing information, and will be permanently valuable as research tools. |
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1. Leroy E. Douglas is a trustee of the LI-Republic Airport Historical Society and has written numerous historical articles in the Long Island Forum, the Nassau County Historical Society Journal, and the Journal of Long Island History.
2. The earlier volumes in Harry Havemeyer's Great South Bay trilogy are: Along the Great South Bay: From Oakdale to Babylon: The Story of a Summer Spa: 1840 to 1940 (Mattituck, N.Y.: Amereon House, 1996), and East on the Great South Bay: Sayville and Bayport: 1860–1960 (Mattituck, N.Y.: Amereon House, 2001).
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