Inquiring Minds: Southampton’s Gin Lane ‘Cottages’

FOR TODAY’S CURBED HAMPTONS COLUMN, I interviewed Sally Spanburgh, local historian and author of a new book, The Southampton Cottages of Gin Lane (History Press). She’s also a blogger, and the book is an outgrowth of her 4-year-old blog about the historic architecture of Southampton (Long Island, N.Y.)

Gin Lane (aka Dune Road) is a three-mile long oceanfront strip on which 19 original cottages remain. The joke, to me, is that these so-called ‘cottages’ are actually sprawling mansions with untold square footage and numbers of bedrooms. They were built in the 1870s through 1920s, not by the “upper echelon” (they were in Newport) but by bankers, lawyers, doctors, judges, stockbrokers, and so on.

Love their evocative names: Nightbrink, Sandymount (shown in the postcard, top), Happy Go Lucky. Click here to read the whole post.