"The Hamptonization of Glover Street"
by Mary Cummings
The Southampton Press, May 26, 2005

The Sag Harbor Strip Is a Market Microcosm

Glover Street, one of Sag Harbor's oldest, runs west from Main Street, following the shoreline of Upper Sag Harbor Cove. From the village's earliest days, when it hummed with entrepreneurial activity, it has always been an important street. In the 18th century, the Hommedieu family had a ropewalk—a long, narrow building where rope is made—at the Main Street end of Glover. There was also a spider-legged windmill for grinding grain on the cove side at Peter's Green. And, in the early 1800s, ships were built on the Green and launched in the cove.

When whaling wealth enriched Sag Harbor's 19th century captains and shipowners and filtered down to its shipwrights and sailmakers, the new prosperity was reflected in Glover Street's two handsome Federal style homes facing Main Street: the 1820 house of Captain George S. Tooker on the southwest corner, and, opposite it, the home built around 1810 by master carpenter Benjamin Glover for his family and later elegantly expanded by Captain David Vail.

Now Glover Street is in the midst of another transition, one that reflects what has been noticeable for some time elsewhere on the East End, as village homes, increasingly viewed as prime real estate, have been snapped up, renovated and reborn as luxury second homes.

If the trend has taken longer to reach Sag Harbor, it is probably because, from its earliest days, the village has had a distinct spirit, combining the urbanity and openness of a small city with the beauty and sense of community of a small town. With its busy waterfront and entrepreneurial energy, Sag Harbor never moved to the agricultural rhythms that once governed life in the East End’s farming communities, nor did the village experience the stark high-season/off-season contrast so characteristic of the resort towns those farming communities became. Sag Harbor has always been mainly a year-round community, and it has been the rare Sag Harborite who aspired to the fashionable life, Hamptons-style.

Which is why what is happening on Glover Street is significant, for there is no denying it: Glover Street has become Hamptons fashionable.

Old-timer Andrew Neidnig, whose family has owned the house he lives in at 52 Glover Street since 1921, recalls a time, not so long ago, when "everybody knew everybody," and he laments that now he and members of the Mortensen family, who live at number 37, are just about the only ones left. Captain Tooker's house on the Main Street corner has been meticulously restored and is on the market for $3,100,000, while the Glover house, on the opposite corner, which has also undergone extensive renovations, is being offered for $2,850,000.

Glover Street properties priced at less than $1 million, meanwhile, have pretty much gone the way of the rope walk and the windmill.