Backstory: The Montauk Skyscraper

This year is the 100th anniversary of the largest real estate purchase on the East End by a developer. The purchase was made by Carl Fisher, the developer of Miami Beach, in the year 1925. Fisher paid just $2.6 million for more than 9,500 acres of prime real estate extending west from the Montauk Lighthouse to Napeague.

Upon this land he and his architects laid out a beachfront city that, when completed would be home to about 140,000 people involved in the resort business. During the next four years, until the Crash of 1929, all sorts of buildings were built, most of which still stand today, somehow repurposed from what they were originally intended to be. He built a yacht club, a giant hotel on a hill, a surf club, a golf course, a race track, a beach club complete with a boardwalk and cabanas, a polo field and a downtown Main Street of stores.

The first thing he did was the downtown. The central plaza you see today was to be bordered by tall white skyscrapers. The first of those, and the only one he ever built, still stands today as this strange white six-story structure with a penthouse up top, facing the ocean, but completely out of context. It is tall and narrow, as if it would be hemmed in by other downtown buildings. They don’t exist. But the intent was there, with possible other developers taken up to the penthouse to look down at plots on the plaza that might be suitable for similar structures built by his wealthy guests.

Today, that building is an apartment house. The elevator stops at seven floors. A strange thing, a skyscraper in a field. Something anyone passing by might imagine has quite a history. And it does. My dad bought a drug store in Montauk in 1956 when I was 16. It was in a building a block off the plaza built with a half timber design Mr. Fisher wanted his resort in Montauk to give off — an English country resort feel. From up top it looks down to the plaza where everyone in the 1950s called it “The White Elephant” because it had been completely abandoned since 1936, which was when Fisher’s operation in bankruptcy by others gave up the ghost – and Carl Fisher had moved to a more modest retirement situation back in Miami Beach. You could go into the White Elephant if you wished.

It may have been abandoned, but there was an exception, an office on the ground floor where a local man had a modest insurance business. His name was Richard Gilmartin, and he moved around his little office in a wheelchair, having been crippled as a boy in Montauk with polio. Gilmartin was, as it happened, much loved. A vigorous man in spite of his disability, he had served two terms as Supervisor of East Hampton Town. Everyone liked him. But that’s not what this story is about. Having entered Mr. Gilmartin’s office, it was easy enough to go through a door and find yourself in the cold, musty first floor lobby with the dust, grime, peeling paint and bank of non-operation elevators.

There was also a mezzanine that looked down at that large and at one time lavish space. And there were also the fire stairs that still stood, although littered with trash, as you went up. Around 1985, this lonely abandoned skyscraper got sold and subsequently remodeled and fixed up. The elevators now work. The apartments built inside are now occupied. The exterior re-bricked and stuccoed. I now remember the name of the man who led that restoration project – Dale Hemmerdinger of the firm New Jersey Brick — and his work restoring the decrepit penthouse up top from which millionaires from the Roaring Twenties were taken by Carl Fisher to look down at the imaginary city, now from one of the most expensive apartments in the Hamptons.

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