Backstory: Montauk's Leisurama History
By Dan Rattiner
There was a time that you could buy a brand new house in Montauk for just $12,990. The year was 1963. About 200 people paid to get one. And all got built, side by side as a housing development at Culloden Shores. Many still stand, though most have had additions put onto them. You didn’t get a lot of house for the money. But there was a living room, a kitchen, a dining area, two bedrooms and a carport. And it came complete – furnished with beds, tables and chairs, sofas, lamps and even dishes and silverware – just pay the money and move right in.
The development was called Leisurama and the homes were virtually identical to one another. But the design was created by Raymond Lowe, one of Americas top industrial designers. Levittown had been built with rows of identical house for year around homeowners. These were advertised as summer places. You could see one on the site. Or go to Macy’s in Manhattan. It was up on the fourteenth floor. Maybe it was for you. Culloden Shores had 450 quarter acre lots. Either on the bay at Montauk Harbor or just a block or two inland. It didn’t sell out. But still, 200 is a lot.
Leisurama at Culloden Shores came about because in 1925, a wealthy developer who’d built Miami Beach bought all 10,000 acres of Montauk, a virtually uninhabited peninsula at the end of Long Island, and had laid out plans to develop it from stem to stern as an English countryside resort. The developer was Carl Fisher. It was to be “Miami Beach in the Winter, Montauk Beach in the Summer.” He had plans drawn for hundreds of new roads, thousands of lots for residences, three big hotels, a surf club and boardwalk, a yacht club, a racetrack, a dude ranch, a polo field and a Main Street downtown along two miles of oceanfront beach with two churches, stores, restaurants, a central plaza and a six-story apartment house along the way. Much of this got built before the Crash of 1929 drove Carl Fisher into bankruptcy. And when that happened, construction stopped on the building of hundreds of new roads, and tens of thousands of new building lots on these roads. Fisher had envisioned a resort of perhaps 40,000 people. One of these developments, laid out on the map, never built, was Culloden Shores.
By 1960, downtown was thriving with many new motels and stores, Montauk was getting a second chance at becoming a resort, and the plans that Carl Fisher had made were still on the map, with attempts by real estate agents to sell these lots.
The leftover business of the late Carl Fisher were being offered on the first-floor office of that six story building downtown, now an abandoned shell from the second floor up to the penthouse. A sign over the entrance read “Montauk Improvement Company.” Inside was this amazing idea that came to life as Leisurama.
Had the whole thing succeeded, and the other 39,000 lots sold, it surely would have dramatically changed Montauk, and possibly the whole South Fork. Well, it didn’t.
Last summer, one of the Leisurama homes was created, room for room as a kind of stage set inside the giant living room of the home built by Carl Fisher for his wife on Fairview Avenue in Montauk in 1928.
Fisher’s home today is a museum. Currently on exhibit there is “How Dry We Weren’t” a collection of paraphernalia from the rum running era of prohibition between 1920 and 1932 when bootleg liquor was brought ashore at Montauk at night for transport to the bars and clubs of Manhattan.
Feel free to stop by. Montauk has an amazing history.
Have a East End real estate story? Want to share? Text us at 516-527-3566. We’ll call you back, and then write it up for this weekly column. –Dan
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