Backstory: The Morpurgo Mansion Was Sag Harbor's Grey Gardens

In the 1990s, two women who lived alone in a mansion on Union Street in Sag Harbor began making news. They were sisters. Their father, Baron-Dr. Attilio Giacomo “Jack” Morpurgo, a wealthy physician, had died and left the house to them in his will together with sufficient funds to pay its expenses far into the future.

But now many years had passed and what had earlier been a happy home for the two of them had now deteriorated into name calling and resentment. The police sometimes had to be called. One had locked the other out. There was shouting. Was it disagreements about money? One wanted to have the other leave. Or was it the other way around? The place needed lots of repairs. It was really unclear for a long time what this was all about, at least in part because both women spoke with heavy European accents.

Their father, a successful cardiologist, was Egyptian. Their mother from Sweden. They’d emigrated with their two daughters in 1940. It also didn’t help because now Anselm sometimes called herself Artemis Smith and her sister Helga called herself Chris Stanley.

Well. The situation got worse and worse. And soon, the house became derelict. The heat got turned off. The water got turned off. And their battles soon spilled over into the weekly newspapers.

Eventually, in 2003, the foreclosures began. I say began because there were many. In one in 2004 there were no bidders. At another in 2007 after the home, vermin infested and window glass broken, was declared unfit for human habitation, it got sold for $4 million but the buyers, it turned out, had gotten the money with forged documents and were eventually prosecuted for money laundering, grand larceny and fraud. A former State Assemblyman was involved and went to jail. At another foreclosure, neither sister showed up to sign anything and lawyers, unpaid, threw up their hands. It was getting way out of hand.

During this time, the managers of the John Jermain Library in Sag Harbor, whose property backed up to the rear of the Morpurgo property, tried to buy it.

The library was having its own troubles by 2004. Originally built in 1910 by the wealthy philanthropist Margaret Olivia Slocum Sage in honor of her grandfather, Major John Jermain, it was one of the grandest buildings in town. Constructed in the Italianate style, it was three stories high, had a huge glass enclosed dome on the roof which, by 2000 leaked rain into the rotunda. But the Morpurgo sisters, still living in their house, turned down the library’s offer. As a result, the directors of the library voted to put their building up for sale and move the library into a new location at Mashishimuet Park out of town. But the village wouldn’t approve that either. The library officials would just have to repair their building where it stood. But perhaps with an addition attached to it somehow for additional services.

At the present time, the dome has been fixed and an impossibly awkward modern addition sits tall and narrow on what used to be the library’s back yard. Elevators take you up and down.

A few feet away, the back of the Morpurgo mansion sits now all fixed up and beautiful. It has been magnificently repaired and is now worth tens of millions. How had this come about? In 2016, three local men won the house at auction for $1.325 million, then spent $10 million to restore it. Upon its completion, they sold it to a family for use as a private residence. The Morpurgos were gone. The battles were over.

Most people say the library’s addition enhances their building, at least in a functional way and from the inside looking out.

All the Sturm and Drang, like in an Italian opera, is gone. All is peaceful. And all is well.

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