They Made a Difference

McKim, Mead & White | Architects

Charles McKim, William Mead and Stanford White were the most influential and prolific architects of Long Island's Gilded Age, from the late 1870s to the early 1900s. Among the first to design estates for the newly developing resort areas along the North and South Shores, they popularized the Shingle Style, drawing upon traditional American elements in reaction to designs of the High Victorians. Besides residential commissions from Roslyn to Oyster Bay to Montauk, they designed the Shinnecock Hills Golf Club, as well as clubhouses, churches and stables all over Long Island. White was the most flamboyant of the partners, his notoriety ensured by his murder in 1906 in the roof garden of Madison Square Garden by Henry K. Thaw, husband of White's former lover, chorus girl Evelyn Nesbit.

Frank Lloyd Wright | Architect

One of America's most famous architects, Wright built only one home on Long Island, the 1938 Rehbuhn House in Great Neck, a wood, brick and glass house in the style of his early Prairie houses. But his highly original designs incorporating flowing interior space, long horizontal planes, flattened roofs, an interplay of geometric forms replacing an emphasis on the wall, were influential in furthering modernist trends in residential design on Long Island as elsewhere. Born in Wisconsin in 1867, he did early and groundbreaking work in Chicago and its suburbs, especially Oak Park, where he lived. His prairie house style was exemplified by the 1909 Robie House of Chicago. Among his most famous commissions were Falling Water, a home in Bear Run, Pa., of 1935, and the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan in 1959. He died in 1959 at age 92.

Kalman Klein and David Teicholz | Builders

Kalman Klein and his late partner, David Teicholz, may not be famous but are representative of the builders who helped shape Long Island's suburbs. They began building on Long Island in 1937 in Franklin Square, where they hired a man with a horse and a scoop (a plow-like shovel) to dig the basements of their first three brick capes. They then bought a succession of farms and a golf course near the Queens line in New Hyde Park, where in the the '30s and '40s they built several thousand houses and some shopping centers. Houses there sold for $5,000, with payments of $36.98 a month. The partners went on to build, from the late '40s through the early '60s, almost 4,000 ranches, splits and colonials in East Meadow, Plainview and Roslyn's Lakeville Estates. Klein, who turns 92 in January, was trained as a draftsman at Cooper Union and worked for state and city agencies before launching the business. He said he believes he was among the first to build split-levels on Long Island, and credits New Deal housing policies such as federally insured mortgages with making the postwar housing boom possible.

Richard Meier | Architect

Born in Newark in 1934, Meier received a degree in architecture in 1957 and worked for two other architectural firms before striking out on his own in 1963. He quickly met with success, winning numerous awards and competitions for excellence in residential architecture, culminating in the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1984. He became known for boldly designed, vertically massed buildings painted stark white, in contrast to the natural surroundings. His houses in the Hamptons - influential though few in number -- were in the spirit of the abstract, geometric and sculptural forms that now dot the former farm fields.

His first commission was the Lambert Beach House on Fire Island in 1962, and he has designed houses in East Hampton, Old Westbury and Sands Point.

Morris Sosnow | Builder

Sosnow and his partner, Leonard Schwartz, founded their company, Birchwood Homes, in 1946 to take advantage of federally backed mortgages, newly available funds for construction and a huge demand for housing for returning veterans. Since then, they have built tens of thousands of middle-class, affordable houses on the Island, including their most ambitious project: 2,200 houses in Jericho that turned a little-populated area into a thriving community. They built capes, splits and ranches from New Hyde Park to Mineola, East Meadow, Westbury, Syosset, Woodbury and Plainview out to Oakdale, Holtsville, Coram, Farmingville, Medford, Commack and Holbrook. They were among the first to build large communities of condos and townhouses around nine-hole golf courses here. The firm - still family-run, and modestly scaled compared with today's national building corporations - is still active on Long Island, and in Maryland and Virginia.

Andrew Monaco | Builder

Monaco started out as a salesman for Morris Sosnow, among others, in the late 1940s and '50s before going into business for himself in the '60s as the building boom picked up steam in Suffolk County. He and his partner, Robert Dyckes, were perhaps typical of the contractors and builders working then: finding available land, building up to 100 houses a year, offering designs that were readily marketed. They eventually built close to 1,500 houses from Hauppauge to South Setauket, Stony Brook, Selden, Centereach, Islip and Patchogue. Monaco, now retired, was president of the Long Island Builders Institute and the New York State Builders Association. His sons, Andrew Jr. and Anthony, began building on Long Island in the 1970s, and have built Springbriar homes in Huntington, Sachem, Lake Ronkonkama, Smithtown, Farmingville and other locales.

Robert A.M. Stern | Architect

Stern, well known as a lecturer, author and critic, advocates a style of architecture with links to a historic and symbolic context. Where many of his contemporaries were reveling in the modernist credo of pure form and bold geometries, Stern defended the use of ornament and traditional materials and shapes. Rather than sleek wood siding, Stern chose shingles. Rather than flat roof lines, he used gables, and instead of flat stark walls and irregular expanses of glass, he used porches, columns and paned windows. Yet he designed homes with enough idiosyncrasy to give a distinctly modern feel, and has completed numerous commissions on the East End. Born in New York City in 1939, Stern was educated at Columbia University and the Yale School of Architecture.

Charles Gwathmey | Architect

Charles Gwathmey's first commission after graduating from the Yale University School of Architecture and completing fellowships in Europe, was a house on Fire Island in 1964. He and his then-partner, Richard Henderson, went on to complete a number of other commissions on Long Island, including a vacation house with guesthouse-studio for Gwathmey's parents in Amagansett in 1965. That house - showing the geometric interplay of flat surface and window expanse that he went on to develop with great complexity in later commissions -- won acclaim and wide imitation. Later commissions on the East End, including Francois de Menil's mansion in East Hampton, Toad Hall, in 1979, helped establish that area as a hotbed of innovative and aggressively attention-getting design. Gwathmey, in partnership with Robert Siegel since 1971, practices a highly geometric and abstract approach, combined with distinctive American elements of scale, spatial juxtaposition and material.

Gwathmey was born in North Carolina in 1938, graduated from the High School of Music and Art in New York City in 1956, and studied architecture at the University of Pennsylvania and Yale. He's built homes, offices and institutional projects all over the country, and in 1985 won the commission to build the addition to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City.

Delano & Aldrich | Architects

William Adams Delano and Chester Holmes Aldrich were among the most prominent and respected of architects designing homes for the wealthy in the first four decades of this century. They worked throughout the United States, but the main body of their work was here, for Astors and Rockefellers, Vanderbilts and Whitneys. Their designs were praised for what some have called a conservative modernism, showing some European influences, but making them distinctly their own. Their designs showed a tight organization and a geometric massing that simplified form. They were known for the care with which they placed their buildings in the landscape. Although Oheka in Cold Spring Harbor was their largest residential commission, it was not typical of their designs in its size and ornate style.

William and Alfred Levitt | Builders

Best known for Levittown, the brothers pioneered mass production of affordable housing in the years following World War II. Acknowleged as innovators and trailblazers, their techniques revolutionized the home-building industry and were widely copied. The Levitts bought huge parcels of land and employed simple designs developed by younger brother Arthur. With rigid standardization and prefabricated materials, they were able to produce solid housing rapidly and inexpensively. Besides Levittown, they also built the Strathmore developments in Rockville Centre and Manhasset Hills, and the Roslyn Country Club homes, among others.