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

Old-Timer Tales

Mr. Neidnig, who said he once spent two days in Riverhead examining real estate records, found that the earliest reference to his own property was a transaction in 1844, when George Fordham bought the house and land for $450. The house changed hands fairly frequently after that, he said, but stayed in the $500 range "up until about 1861." In 1867, the Kelly family moved in and stayed put until Mr. Neidnig's uncle bought the house in 1921, by which time Mr. Neidnig reckoned it had perhaps doubled in price. "If he paid $1,000, he was doing good," he said.

When he began coming out after World War II to visit his parents, who had inherited the house from his uncle, it seemed to Mr. Neidnig that the neighborhood had barely changed since his uncle's arrival. The Spodicks, a large Orthodox Jewish family whose patriarch had arrived in Sag Harbor in 1884, were next door. The McDonoughs, another old family, were across the street, and various members of the King family accounted for a significant portion of the Glover Street population.

Neighbors traipsed over the lawns of neighbors to make unannounced visits or to gain access to the cove. "We got so friendly," recalled Mr. Neidnig, "that they just walked into your house. They didn't ring any bells, and you had to be sure you were dressed."

One former Glover Street resident, who had recently visited Eastport, Maine, an old village where many quaint houses are unoccupied and deteriorating, said he was struck by the resemblance to Sag Harbor in the 1950s. "That was when people were buying houses in Sag Harbor for $5,500," he said. "They were boarded up, and nobody wanted them.

Another former resident, Jon Snow, who now lives in Bridgehampton, said he spent about a year in the early 1960s on Glover Street, when his parents moved into the former Spodick house at the corner of Long Island Avenue. The house, which has lately been seen in the pages of Elie Decor, was hardly luxurious at the time, according to Mr. Snow. "When we lived there," he said, "there wasn't even any heat."

There are many versions of the house's origins. Mr. Tortora's is that it came to Sag Harbor from Connecticut, served as the village's first Catholic Church—some say the first in all of Suffolk County—and was moved a second time to its present site. What is easier to confirm is that by 1916 it was owned by the Spodick family, and that from the mid-1970s until about five years ago, when Steve Gambrel and Christopher Connor were finally able to buy it from Spodick descendants, it sat forlorn and unoccupied. By the time it changed hands, the price was well into six figures—and when it changed hands again, after a complete renovation plus pool, it was more than $2 million.