Is This a Special Delivery?

Mystery Photo (Photo by C.H. Rogers / )

When Bill Liebman moved into his 22-year-old Wantagh home in 1970, this photograph of milk haulers was found against a wall of the garage, behind other objects. The back of the photo carries some writing that appears to say, ``Milk Haulers Arthur L. Spring and Barney Reisse at [illegible word] Elgano. A photo by C.H. Rogers, `The up to date photographer.''' Liebman says that there are no other clues to the origin of the photograph and its route to the garage.

The photo at the bottom, published on Sept. 27 as an unidentified North Shore mansion, drew about two dozen swift replies noting it was not a mansion at all, instead identifying it as the main clubhouse of the Piping Rock Club in Locust Valley. ``The picture is from the grass tennis courts looking west,'' Thomas Reardon of Oyster Bay reports in an e-mail message. The building at the private club ``looks much the same today as it did then,'' he adds.

The Piping Rock Clubhouse, built in 1911, was designed by Boston architect Guy Lowell, who had designed Boston's Museum of Fine Arts and had gained note as a landscape architect. For the Piping Rock club, Lowell designed the building around an open courtyard, utilizing colonial motifs with its shingles and porticoed forms. Country Life in America magazine remarked in 1920 that the building was ``the sort of thing George Washington would have built if he had the money.''