Another House on the Move

Huge Life Saving Station Will Be Returned to Amagansett Beach

By Dan Rattiner

Before the Coast Guard, there was the Lifesaving Service. Established here in the Hamptons along the Atlantic Ocean in the early 1800s, it did pretty much what the Coast Guard does now with its gasoline powered rescue ships.

Who knew that gasoline combustion engines would make the Lifesaving Service obsolete? But consider it. Today, when a ship starts taking water in a storm, the call goes out over the radio to the Coast Guard in Montauk, Shinnecock or Moriches and boats are dispatched to the scene.

Before gasoline combustion use became common in 1880, when a ship would start taking water in a storm, there was no effective form of communication between boat and land other than lanterns. And lanterns were not always effective. The only real way to learn if a ship was in trouble was to see it offshore for your self.

And so lifesaving stations -- big wooden buildings with lookout towers on the top -- were constructed along the dunes at about six mile intervals between Montauk Lighthouse and the Moriches Inlet. The men of the Lifesaving Station worked in these buildings. And the longboats and rescue equipment -- longboats, ropes, buoys and breech cannons, which could fire a lifesaving flotation device a few hundred yards -- were kept at the ready inside.

There would only be two or three full-time employees of the Lifesaving Service at each station. When someone would come running in with the information that a boat was foundering offshore nearby, a bell would be rung in a belltower, and every ablebodied man who could would run down to the lifesaving station to help out under the direction of the captain there. In many ways, this parallels our volunteer fire department service today.

The only surviving remnants of the old Lifesaving Stations on the East End are in Hampton Bays at Hot Dog Beach, where the old wooden buildings still stand and up until recently were used as an outdoor nightclub; at Georgica Beach, where the full complement of the buildings remain in use as storage and changing facilities for the East Hampton Lifeguards; in Amagansett on the top of the dune at the beach terminus of Atlantic Avenue, where one of the outbuildings remains, now converted into a snack shop used during the summer months; and in Montauk, as part of the Montauk Shores Condominium complex at Ditch Plains, in use as meeting rooms, administration offices and a common room.

Now, however, one of the biggest structures built by the Lifesaving Service and certainly its most famous, when you consider the role it played in World War II, is going to be returned to the beach where it came from -- it had been towed off -- and turned into a museum.

One hour before dawn on a foggy morning in June of 1942, on a spot about three hundred yards to the east of the Lifesaving Station at Amagansett's Atlantic Avenue Beach, uniformed Nazi soldiers came ashore from an offshore submarine. It was one of the very few times that soldiers from a country with which we were at war successfully landed troops here. The soldiers, four of them, came ashore in a rubber boat that had been launched from the German U-boat Innsbruck. Four sailors rowed them ashore. They buried boxes of explosives and weapons in the sand, changed into civilian clothes and then went to the Amagansett railroad station on foot to take the 6:57 a.m. train to Manhattan with the intent of sabotage.

At the time they came ashore, that Lifesaving Station was being used as a Coast Guard Station. The Lifesaving Service had gone out of business in the 1920s, as the Coast Guard was established to patrol the coast in big boats and the lifesaving stations were turned over to the Coast Guard. In 1944, this big cedar-shingled building was filled with a full complement of Coastguard men, who were conducting foot patrols up and down the beach all night long looking for just such an incursion by the Nazis.

A 21-year-old Coastguardsman named John Cullen was walking down the beach with a flashlight finishing a tour when he came upon the Nazis. They were taking off their uniforms, burying them and putting on civilian clothes. He spoke to them. They gave him a bribe of $350 and told him to forget what he saw. If he didn't, they told him, he and his parents would be killed.

Coastguardsman Cullen said he would not tell a soul, accepted the $350, then ran the remaining few hundred yards to the Lifesaving Station, where he went to see the officer in charge to tell him exactly what transpired. Soldiers were rushed to the scene. Aircraft were launched from the Air Force Base in Westhampton. Washington was notified.

But it was all too late. By the time everyone arrived back at the scene, the Nazis were sitting in the waiting room at the Amagansett Railroad Station with their fishing gear, waiting for a train to take them to New York City.

Four days later, with the Nazi spies holed up in a hotel in Manhattan unable to make contact with any of their allies in America, one of the four turned the other three in. In the end, three of these four, along with four other Germans who came ashore at St. Augustine, Florida that night, were hung. And the man who turned the others in was given a life sentence in prison.

In 1965, with the war long over, the Coast Guard abandoned the Amagansett lifesaving station and declared it surplus property. Various other government officials were asked if their departments would want it. None accepted. So an author and editor named Joel Carmichael purchased it for 74 Cents and paid the $1,500 to have it hauled away. Carmichael ordered it towed up the hill where Atlantic Avenue meets Bluff Road, then brought it two hundred yards to the west and across a yard about 150 feet to the north, to a piece of property he owned. Carmichael intended to raise his family there.

An interesting sideline to this story is how the moving of this building, by Kennelly Movers, resulted in a very interesting photograph appearing in Dan's Papers. (Which we reproduce at the top of this story.)

It took Donnelly several days to prepare the house for the move and during this time, this newspaper got wind of it. I thought we ought to go down there and take pictures of it for the newspaper.

Myself and Rameshwar Das, the prominent photographer who lives in Barnes Landing, went in a Volkswagen Bug that Ramesh owned and we parked it at the top of the hill on the corner of Bluff and Atlantic and looked down at the house. At that point, the house was right in the center of the road, where it ends at the beach. They had moved it off its foundations to get it there, perched on telephone poles and railroad ties with several sets of truck wheels underneath for the tow up the hill the next day. It took up the whole road. And it gave me an idea.

Ramesh remained on the top of the hill with the camera. I drove his Volkswagen down the hill and made a U-turn just in front of the house. We were in yelling distance of one another. From where I was, I could see the coil of a long, heavy tow rope, with one end laying loose on the road and the other attached to the railroad tie platform. I tied the loose end to the back of the Volkswagen and then, since the Volkswagen had a sunroof, stood on the front seat, where Ramesh could take a picture of me half out of the roof of his car, smiling at the camera, with the house apparently under tow, behind. So that is what we did.

Joel Carmichael passed away last year and, as times have changed since 1966 and more value is placed on historic buildings, the Carmichael family decided to give this lifesaving station back to the town. Two months ago, at a ceremony at Town Hall, Isabel Carmichael spoke for the family in donating this building back to the town. It will be placed along the side of Atlantic Avenue almost exactly where it once stood and it will become a museum administered by the East Hampton Historical Society. It is hoped that it will be open by this time next year.

As it turns out, the corner of Atlantic Avenue and Bluff Road is becoming a big historical complex. The Marine Museum is inside one half of a brick structure almost on the corner in what had originally been a water company building. Behind it is a garage that was part of the Lifesaving Station. In the other half of the water company building are the offices of the East Hampton Town Trustees, an ancient body formed by the King of England in 1683 to administer the bays, wetlands and beaches, which it continues to do today. Living history -- pardon the expression.

The old lifesaving station will now be only a few hundred feet from another piece of the station, which today sits on the top of the dune at the end of Atlantic Avenue -- its original location -- to serve as a snack shack for beachgoers in the summertime. And there is to be another donation. Adelaide de Menil and Ted Carpenter, who own a former lifesaving service warming station -- a building not much larger than a payphone booth in which a man could warm up after a windy walk down the beach in the winter -- is being donated to the complex. It will probably be set up not far from the lifesaving station itself.

Finally, there is the small summer home with the three window dormer in the roof, which is exactly where it was in 1942, directly behind where the Coast Guard and Army officials dug up the dynamite, sabotage gear, money, Nazi uniforms and weaponry brought ashore by the German spies and buried there on June 13, 1942.