Home Delivery

The Early Colonials

Spunky and tenacious like the people who built them, these homes served as anchors to a new and unfamiliar land

The Sands-Norstrand house was built in the still-sleepy Sands Point generations before the American Revolution loomed on the horizon.

By Denise Flaim | Staff Writer

Article tools

E-mail

Share
- Digg
- Del.icio.us
- Facebook
- Fark
- Google
- Newsvine
- Reddit
- Yahoo

There's no such thing as a sure thing, but often there is a tried-and-true. If you're hobnobbing, for instance, it's the little black dress. If you're apologizing, it's a dozen red, red roses.

And if you're house-hunting, it's a colonial.

Because it connotes the early years of our nation's history and the classical ideals of its founders, the colonial virtually shouts respectability and groundedness. But what we call colonials today bear little resemblance to the simple, low-ceilinged homes that dotted the Long Island landscape at the beginning of European settlement.

In fact, the word is so overused it has become almost a generic. ``Colonial is a very wide-ranging term,'' agrees John Flynn, a Roslyn-based developer and builder. ``A colonial in a real-estate sense of the word is a two-story house. It has the image of home and seriousness.''

Architecturally speaking, the modern-day colonials that builders are marketing today -- symmetrical rooms radiating off a center hall, with a balanced facade - borrow from the polished colonials of the mid- to late 18th Century. By that time, Long Islanders had developed a sense of prosperity, and their houses revealed it: No longer constrained in the center of the house for heat conservation, chimneys migrated to the outside walls, leaving room for a showy center hall. Ceilings were raised, as were esthetics, from elaborate moldings and pediments to multi-paned windows.

But the very first colonial homes on Long Island were almost the antithesis of these very mannered, often-copied buildings that evolved from them. They are spunky, tenacious, a bit meandering - just like the 17th- and 18th-Century adventurers who built them as anchors to a new and unfamiliar land. And, like their builders, many of those early colonial houses are survivors.

Here are just two of those early colonial grand dames -- the Riker farmhouse in Queens and the Sands farmhouse in Sands Point. Examples, respectively, of the Dutch and English building traditions, they represent the polemics of early design influences on Long Island. Their surroundings, too, couldn't have evolved into more starkly different tableaux: Tucked between a private ambulance service and some Tudor-style condos, the low-slung Riker house is obscured by a veil of wisteria that is helpless to drown out the roar of jets from nearby LaGuardia Airport. The Sands house sits on a quiet corner in plush suburbia, the biggest incursion on its privacy the adjacent saltwater marsh that sometimes has intruded so far as to lap up a few yards from the back door.

But both houses have infinitely more in common than their locations and architecture would suggest. Both have watched from the roadside for centuries as Long Island evolved from a verdant landscape painting to an increasingly jam-packed Polaroid. Built by farming families whose surnames are instantly recognizable today, both were in need of repair, cloaked in Sixties carpeting and vinyl flooring when their respective owners embarked on extensive restorations. And both houses, in their imperfect quirkiness and hodgepodged additions, tell the history of Long Island as it muddled into modernity.

Get breaking news alerts!