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COMPARISONS ARE ODIOUS, but I can’t help making them. As I travel the byways of Long Island’s South Fork, where I moved recently, a little voice inside me keeps saying, “It’s just not as beautiful as the Hudson Valley” (where I had a weekend place for several years).
But this area is starting to grow on me. It doesn’t have the dramatic Catskill mountain backdrop, but it does have the mighty Atlantic and endless bays and coves.
I decided to make a list, comparing the two regions in various categories to see how they stack up.
HUDSON VALLEY / SOUTH FORK
- mountain views / water views
- stacked stone walls / split rail fences
- clapboard siding / cedar shingles
- day lilies / privet hedges
- funky thrift shops / fancy thrift shops
- Sonny Rollins / Billy Joel
- minor wines / serious wines
- Taconic State Parkway / Long Island Expressway
- dairy barns / marinas
Which do you prefer? Feel free to add to the list.
Main Beach, East Hampton
SOMETIMES IT’S GOOD. When all the rent checks roll in promptly on the first of the month, and there’s a long spell without broken appliances or electrical issues or, God forbid, rats.
Sometimes it sucks. I must make it look easy, because recently someone said to me, don’t you ever have plumbing problems or roof leaks?
Of course. All the time. And worse. Old buildings need frequent maintenance and repair. We’ve had flooded basements and frozen pipes. A few years ago, we rebuilt the entire back wall of our 180-year-old building in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn. The rear facade was peeling away, chunks of brick and window lintel falling into the backyard. We took out a home equity line of credit and hired an engineer and a contractor, who set up scaffolding, draped the building in blue tarp, and rebuilt the back wall brick by brick, replacing all the windows. All the tenants lived through it, by their choice (crazy!)
Mostly I love being a landlady, though the word suggests fuzzy slippers, hair rollers, and a feather duster. Things happen, and I address them. Quickly. I want my tenants to pay the rent lickety-split, so I fix things lickety-split. I’m getting better at it as I get older, partly out of a kind of maternal instinct. I have mostly youngish tenants, and I want them to have a nice place to live. So I try to take good care of them.
Right now the flagship of my real estate empire, a four-story 1850s mews house in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, is vacant. The last tenants, a Hollywood screenwriter who set up shop there with his family while working on a TV show, decamped last week, leaving behind a lot of garbage and dog damage, along with unopened bottles of very good vodka and wine and an array of cooking pots better than the ones I have. (Departing tenants leave very strange things. One woman left her parents’ wedding album and some gold jewelry.)
I spent all day yesterday, from 8:30AM to 5PM, taming the jungle that is the back garden in Cobble Hill and getting the place ready for the painters, who started today, and the housecleaner, who will follow the painters. I have the place listed with six real-estate brokers.
It makes me sad to see that house, where we lived for 20 years and raised our kids, empty. Soon it will be another family’s temporary home. They’ll live in it for a while and then move on.
I may not live there any more, but it’s still my house. I can’t imagine anyone loving it as much as I do.
I CONTINUE TO SCAN the roadsides for cedar-shingled cottages trimmed in different colors.
The case for sage:
(I’m having trouble with that large off-center window. What do you think?)
Actually it’s more of a mint green…
And how about this creamy yellow?
This isn’t a cottage, but it makes me smile every time I pass it on Three Mile Harbor Road. Something you wouldn’t see in New York City!
EAST HAMPTON HAS SOME EXCEPTIONALLY FINE 17th and 18th century buildings. Old-house nerd that I am, I’m eagerly awaiting the start of the two-month summer season when many of them are open to the public.
First on my list is the humble Miss Amelia’s Cottage in nearby Amagansett. Built in 1725, it’s named for Mary Amelia Schellinger (1841-1930), who was born and died there. She was a descendant of Amagansett’s founders, Abraham and Jacob Schellinger, who left New Amsterdam (New York) for parts east when it was taken over by the English in the 1660s.
The little white cottage is full of period furnishings and artifacts. (Until it opens in July, I content myself with peeking in the window.)
It’s part of a compound that includes a barn clad in vertical cedar boards, a carriage house museum with 28 horse-drawn vehicles (red building, bottom) and another cottage undergoing restoration, all set in a broad meadow.
You can actually get a feel for what the area must have been like when Montauk Highway, now whizzing with cars, was a dirt lane.
THE DAY STARTED OFF UNPROMISINGLY. “This is your Sears delivery team,” said the voice on the phone. “We just pulled up to your garage.”
“I don’t have a garage,” I said. “That’s the house.”
I guess in East Hampton 1,000 square feet passes for a garage.
Now I have a washer and dryer (no more trips to the $4 machines at the Amagansett laundromat); a stove, but no pots to cook in (luckily I’m really into Citarella’s Vietnamese chicken wraps); and a noisy little refrigerator I’m thinking of returning. Perhaps best of all is that the cruddy old appliances were carted away.
Here’s the Smeg I coveted and should have gotten, maybe. It comes in great colors, but I’ve only seen it in pictures. Does anybody out there have actual experience with one? They’re close to $2G but look like they could really make a kitchen, if you like that retro thing.
Highlights of this rainy afternoon: planting up two wooden boxes with exotic basil seedlings a friend gave me (Genovese, Greek, lemon) and placing (not yet planting) five Korean boxwoods, top, as you round the corner from driveway to backyard. I saw them at my friend Jill’s house, sprawling magnificently, and promptly copied her, buying them the other day at Home Depot in Riverhead for $15 apiece. They’re very green and glossy and will eventually spread four feet if you let them.
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