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

A Million Plus

It may be hyperbole today, but reality will probably soon catch up with Mr. Neidnig's take on the Glover Street boom—his sense that "all of a sudden, all of the houses on this block are million-dollar homes."

Some are; some, like the former Mackery house (number 15), which is getting the full Tortora treatment, will no doubt reach that status before he has finished. But not everyone is happy about the street's metamor­phosis into Millionaire's Row.

Tracy Loggia, a renter in the house owned by feminist Betty Friedan at 31 Glover Street, is among those with deep reservations. A year-round resident now who has spent time in the area, off and on, for many years, she finds the gentrification distress­ingly similar to the changes she has witnessed in various other neighbor-hoods where she has lived.

"What I see happening here is the same as in places like Tribeca and Soho," she said. "There is a big influx into the community by people with no ties to the community." Once affordable family houses become "showcase houses,^" she said, transformed by and for people who "are looking at houses as a piece of art."

She does not deny that the houses are beautiful, or that families might find themselves very happily installed in them. But they are designed for "a different kind of living," she suggested, and too pricey for most local families, or families that would like to become local.

Nor does Mr. Tortora deny that his houses are probably destined to be lived in part-time by people of taste whose lives are elsewhere; he noted that one was actually purchased by a man who flies in for the weekend from Milwaukee. But he makes no apologies for his work, which is root­ed, he said, in his love for old houses. His approach, he said, is "to take out what is unhistoric or unsavable.^" He saves architectural elements, whenever possible, for reuse, and when he can't save the original, he combs the sources he has ferreted out over the years for the most authentic replacements.

A Life Cycle

Change, of course, is inevitable and if Sag Harbor is shifting again, there is certainly an aesthetic gain in the change. After three years of painstaking restoration, the Tooker House, with its handsome blue door elegantly flanked by glass side panels, has regained its claim to a place on "Captain's Row," as has the Glover House on the other side of the street.

For his part, Mr. Neidnig speaks wistfully but without resentment of the changes that have overtaken his neighborhood. "There's no family life here any more," he acknowledged. "You go out on the street, and you don't know anybody."

But he also recalls that when he first began coming to Glover Street in the 1940s, he was "a fairly young man, and most of the people were pretty old." Now, at 86, he realizes that he is "in the same boat" as those elderly residents were at the time, and that now a new generation, with different priorities, is moving in.

"They're all young people, and very few are living here year-round," he said. "That's the cycle."