The Playhouse in Montauk

If you’ve lived on the East End long enough, you will see that many buildings used for one thing get repurposed years later and used for another. A boathouse becomes a disco up in North Sea. A building in Wainscott originally built as a factory for movie special effects becomes a police station. A building on Three Mile Harbor Road originally built as a bowling alley becomes a disco, then a Turkish restaurant.

Nothing, however, compares to what has happened over the years to the century-old indoor tennis building in Montauk built near the Long Island Rail Road station, which last week reopened as a community center, perhaps the largest such center on Long Island. It takes up 120,000 square feet.

Gov. Kathy Hochel was here, ribbon-cutting ceremony scissors in hand, along with other dignitaries to mark the occasion. Just 4,272 people live in Montauk. Without a doubt, this is the largest facility per capita on Long Island. The residents will enjoy an indoor four-lane lap pool and a second pool, this one shallow for children, the elderly, fitness classes and swimming lessons. Also in the building is a full-size gymnasium for basketball, pickleball, and physical therapy, a senior nutrition center, a multipurpose room with a stage and sound system for events, concerts and meetings, a day care center, and an East Hampton Town Annex office.

It was originally built in 1927, and it was one of a kind. People came from far and wide to watch pros and amateurs compete on one of the four courts indoors that were in the sunshine. The Montauk Tennis Auditorium had a roof made entirely of glass.

The man who built it was Carl Fisher, a Florida developer who 10 years earlier had built Miami Beach. Soon he was thinking Miami Beach in the winter, Montauk in the summer. And in 1927, he began building Montauk as if it were a British summer resort. Beach, hotels, boardwalk, golf course, polo field, yacht club, tennis auditorium, etc. He got it about half done, just in time for the great crash of 1929 to wipe him out. Montauk never became what he intended.

As part of the collapse, the Montauk Tennis Auditorium closed around 1933, and remained a derelict building until 1942, when during World War II, it was taken over by the U.S. Army. Soldiers lived in a barracks building by the Montauk Manor nearby. And during the war, the dirt floor of the Tennis Auditorium became a site for military drills, lectures and, sort of amazingly, boxing matches. Contests continued through the war. People came out from the city by train to watch the fights. And during that period, the glass roof began to leak when it rained.

After the war, the building was used as the terminus for cattle drives. In those years, cattle from East Hampton were driven out to pasture in Montauk to get fattened up on grass. At the end of the summer, ranchers would drive the cattle to the dirt floor of the tennis building to await the arrival of railroad trains that would whisk the animals off to slaughterhouses in Brooklyn and Long Island City.

By the mid-1950s, the building with its leaky roof was quite a mess. But a local Montauk builder named Eddie Pospisil intervened, removed the glass roof, replaced it with heavy beams and a strong cedar shingle roof, then repurposed it as the Montauk Playhouse. Troupes of summer stock actors and musicians would come out, erect stage sets, lights, and sound systems, and perform nightly for two weeks, then move on.

As a teenager, I saw Girl Crazy there in 1958. I saw The Boy Friend in 1959. The audience sat on folding captain’s chairs, about three hundred in all. I thought it went quite well.

In the third year, however, the traveling troupes never came. Instead, it became Montauk’s movie theatre. But after several years, that went out of business too.

For the next 40 years, it was once again abandoned. And in 1998, the owners of the building decided it should be torn down. But when they got estimates, they learned that the walls were so thick and the building so strong, that it would be incredibly expensive to do that. And so that plan was abandoned too.

Finally, around 2005, it was decided that money would be raised to make the building into a community center. During the next 20 years, about $1.6 million was raised from the state, another $6 million from East Hampton Town, and about $8 million from generous private donors. And so here we are.

Across the street from the Playhouse, many changes took place near the railroad terminal. An array of six track endings was built in 1895 in the belief that there on the arc of Fort Pond Bay a port city could be created to bring goods from abroad into Manhattan at 60 miles an hour, which would be much faster than freighters from Europe sailing more slowly into the Port of New York. The Montauk plan failed. But the trackage, the pier and the station remained. On the arc of the beach adjacent to it, an entire village of shacks got built on this railroad-owned land by fishermen from Nova Scotia around 1910. They were there when Fisher arrived. There was a restaurant, a school, a general store, and a post office. After Fisher failed, the hurricane of 1938 almost completely wiped that village off the map. Most fishermen moved to where the fishing boats are today, about three miles away. In 1943, the remnants of that village got taken over by the U.S. Navy, which built a huge torpedo-testing facility there. A Navy seaplane would fly overhead above the PT boats to see if the torpedoes they carried worked or not. If they did, they were sent off to war. If not, they got sent back to the factories in Long Island City by rail to be fixed.

After World War II, the buildings got repurposed as fighter jet parts warehouses. And after the Korean War, the torpedo station was abandoned and briefly become a fisherman’s paradise known as “Fishangri-la.” Fishermen would come out on the train at dawn, then board fishing boats docked at the pier to go to sea for the day. One day, the fishing boat The Pelican capsized and 45 drowned. With that, almost everything got torn down. Today, the Navy Beach restaurant, the railroad station and the Rough Riders Landing Condominiums occupy the site.

Quite something. Yes?