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MONTAUK MEMORIES
"There's a Summer Place....."

THERE'S A SUMMER PLACE......The Stone House at Caswell's Cove in Montauk, New York is, by far, our favorite place on Earth. Through the generous spirit of my friend, Jackie, we were able to enjoy this awesome location from 1982 to 1987 when her husband Alex sold it to Anthony Ingrao.  No matter what the season or whether we were alone for a romantic weekend, with the children for a week of sun and fun, or entertaining friends, every minute was a memorable experience.  For those who don't know....Montauk is a quiet village located at the eastern tip of Long Island.  The population swells in the summer but, unlike the swinging Hamptons , it attracts families and people who enjoy fishing, biking, pristine beaches,  their privacy and fine but casual dining.  For us, the main attraction was the Stone House.  Starstruck as I am, waving to our neighbors: Cheryl Tiegs, Richard Avedon and Paul Simon added to the already indescribable atmosphere of the location.  Alex bought the house, situated on 10 acres of prime real estate, 1n 1962.  He rented it out occasionally to celebrities, the likes of Truman Capote, the Rolling Stones, and John Lennon (who had an affair with his secretary, May Pang , which was sanctioned and set up by Yoko Ono to control John's desires.  Lennon fell in love with May and went into contract with Alex to buy the house for himself and his lover.  The deal fell through when Yoko learned of it.  Interesting stuff for us silly namedroppers...To describe the house and it's history, I will put in quotes the partial contents of a House and Garden magazine article (May issue, 1990) which featured the house on it's cover and titled it, "Romancing the Stone".  Teal blue will indicate my own text.

"Tony Ingrao fell in love with his house through a black and white photograph not much bigger than a postage stamp.  He was in Southampton when he saw the humble ad for a stone cottage on the ocean and was immediately seized by a desire to own it.  Five hours later he did.  "The ad said East Hampton, but I knew everything in East Hampton and I'd never seen this house," he remembers.  Then a friend casually remarked that it looked a lot like the house next Richard Avedon's by the Montauk lighthouse.  With those directions in his head Ingrao got in his green Jaguar and drove east.  It was a foggy night, but several dead ends later he stumbled upon the English country cottage magnificently rising out of a tangled copse of cranberry bushes on a cliff seventy feet over the Atlantic Ocean.   We know exactly how he felt.  Jackie gave me directions to the house which were easy to follow until we got to the private road with the gates and long dirt driveways off them.  At 11pm, they all looked the same.  We finally found the one that had a horseshoe on it  Nicky opened the gate, and waited until we drove in, then closed it and hopped in the car.  At that time the scrub pines and underbrush were so overgrown it swiped the roof rack of our station wagon as we bumped along the dark sand and gravel path.  We obsessed about driving off the edge of the cliff when suddenly the road hair-pinned to the left and we saw the silhouette of a house that reminded me of Wuthering Heights against the moonlit sky.  I had no idea as to how magnificent it would be.  What a surprise, and the best was yet to come.  We chose our bedrooms and drifted off to the sound of crashing waves and a faint flicker of light through the window from the lighthouse.  We woke up early to see the sun rise over the ocean and saw the spectacular view awaiting us.  We were wrapped in blankets, drinking hot chocolate and smelling the salt air.  We could see fishing boats rounding the point and watched as the seagulls below us dove for broken clams on the rocks of the beach below.  My motherly instincts were on guard because of the cliffs drop but after a few treks up and down the bluff on terraced sand steps, my fears were curtailed.  Back to the article)  

"I couldn't see more than five feet in front of  and I was too frightened to disturb the people inside, but all I really needed to see were the wooden gutters.  That's when I knew  I had to have it."  A 32 year-old antiques dealer and decorator who specializes in historic renovation, Ingrao recognized the vintage trim as a precious detail no amount of artful antiquing could create.  But besides the architectural details there was something else that drew him to the cottage, something that is harder to put into words.  "It's just a powerful place," he says trying to describe it.  Me again....On our last week at the Stone House, we had 2 visitors.  The first was Peter Baird, Cheryl Teigs ex-husband who was dressed in a long African Skirt and carried a man-purse.  He said he just returned from a safari and asked if he could show his friend, a beautiful Nubian princess from Africa,  the windows in the house.  They were wavy leaded glass, apparently the same as Cézanne, the famed artist, had in his home in France.  Baird said that Cézanne painted looking through his windows thus giving that unique look to his work.  I don't think he impressed Nick who looked very macho in his cut off jeans and construction boots.  Our second guest that week was Anthony Ingrao who said he negotiated a deal on the house sight unseen except for a quick exterior view and his love for the wooden gutters.  He asked us for a tour and we had a nice visit with him.  When we told him how much we would miss the place, he gave us his card and said to give him a call if we wanted to stop by for a visit.
"Ingrao may not have been familiar with the house initially, but virtually everyone in Montauk could have pointed him to it.  It's been there so long nobody can even remember when it was first built, though the oldest foundations date back to the mid nineteenth century.  Locals call it Stone House and still remember when a rudimentary shack stood on the site as a delivery station for lighthouse supplies.  "The people of Montauk think of this place as their own - it's part of their history," says Ingrao's fiancée, Diane Eckstein, an elegant blonde originally from Nebraska.  "Maybe they all know it because it's the only structure you can see from the ocean at Montauk Point except for the lighthouse."  She is referring, of course, to the famous Montauk lighthouse, which marks the easternmost point of  New York State and lights up the cottage windows on stormy nights.  Ingrao's getaway is also rich in a different kind of history.  The first recorded tenant, Rosina Hoyt Hoppin, was a poet from Southampton who in 1912 hired a Stanford White associate to transform the one room structure into a two story Cotswolds'style cottage that she used for romantic trysts.  Hoppin's friendly ghost is said to inhabit the premises, making strange banging noises and even stranger appearances as balls of mist bouncing over the lawn.  Over the years others have taken advantage of the romantic possibilities such isolation affords.  John Lennon is said to have escaped to the house with his lover May Pang.  Lennon Later tried unsuccessfully to buy it.  I explained that earlier.  "Even the rocks on the beach are famous for their heart shapes, a natural oddity created by the way the waves break in the cove.  Perhaps these lovers have also been attracted by the inherent danger of the terrain, for the house literally perches on the edge of the world.  At its closest point it sits a mere ten feet from the precipice creating an effect both exhilarating and terrifying - not unlike love itself.  (From the master bedroom window we can look straight down to the stony beach below).  Years of erosion, however had brought the house closer and closer to the sea, and many would -be buyers (including Richard Gere, Woody Allen and, Billy Joel) were frightened by the prospect of watching, or worse yet accompanying the structure as it tumbled into the ocean.  It didn't bother Ingrao..  He solved the problem by trucking in over 500,000 pounds of New England granite to build a retaining wall.  "Anything you want to do can be done," he says in the unflappable manner of a man used to doing what he wants.  Tony comes from a long line of haute-couture clothing manufacturers, and as a child he spent hours watching Bill Blass and Halston creation emerge from bolts of fabric.  "When I was ten, I'd gather the silk remnants from the lining of coats and make wild bow ties out of them."  In the end it was this ability to sense potential that brought Tony Ingrao to Stone House - just as the boy saw a bow tie in a scrap of silk, the man saw the perfect place to live in a grainy black and white photograph.  Over the years he's been offered many times what he paid for the cottage, but he can only let go of something when he finds something better.  Potential buyers should not hold their breath....written by editor Ruth Ansel. 

We contacted Tony Ingrao in 1993, which was 6 years after our meeting, to ask if we could toast our 25th wedding anniversary on the cliff at Caswell's Cove.  True to his word, he remembered us and said we could spend the whole day at the house if we didn't mind having a carpenter there putting some finishing touches on the renovation.  He said to make ourselves at home and he hoped we liked the changes he made after the fire...FIRE!!!  WHAT FIRE!  Sure enough, after making a call to the Montauk library and receiving a copy of the local newspaper I learned the house burnt to the ground leaving only the foundation and the stone shell. No more wooden gutters.  With his seemingly unlimited resources, Tony rebuilt the house changing some of the profile and incorporating doors from 17th century castles, antique windows, balconies, and tiles , statues and mantles from excavations in Europe.  The house looked and felt completely different but our disappointment vanished because nothing could change the outrageous view from the cliff.  So Nick and I popped open our Champaign, settled in on the deck hanging off the cliff and enjoyed the afternoon sun, our picnic lunch, each other and memories of the most fabulous vacation spot ever.