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The Lure of the Water

When you live on an island, a view of the ocean (or the sound, or the bay) is the goal of many of homeowner

By Carol Polsky | Staff Writer

Brian McQuade says his backyard is the Great South Bay, just beyond the deck of his newly purchased home in Bayport. (Newsday Photo / J. Michael Dombroski)

Jeanne Dipolito had always been house-proud. Her colonial in Baldwin was coiffed and groomed to perfection, meticulously decorated with her various collections of pottery and antiques. But last year, she and her husband, Tom, decided they'd like to live on the water and one day, Tom told her he'd found what they were looking for.

It was an unpretentious A-frame backing onto Freeport Bay.

``Don't look at the house, just look at the water,'' he told her. And that's exactly what they've been doing for the year since they moved in. Looking at the water.

``It's an endless backyard,'' says Tom, whose widowed mother lives up the block. He recalls making fun of his father. ``I'd say, `What are you doing?' and he'd say `Nothing.' I'd say, `What are you watching, the tides go in and out?' And you know what? Yeah, you watch the tides go in and out.''

Now Tom has come to love doing exactly that. His wife loves to watch the birds feeding on the sandbars at low tide, the creaking docks and the smell of water, even the floods and howling winds. She loves it when the music floats in from the party boats that sometimes anchor nearby.

``The front of the house is reality,'' she says. ``You go to work out the front, bring in the groceries, the bus comes. The back of the house is ...''

``Contentment,'' her husband finishes, gazing out at the late afternoon sun glinting off the swells. ``Tranquility.''

The lure of the water is powerful. You reach the edge and come face to face with something more elemental, more mysterious, more meditative and spiritual than anything on the road behind. The sun is more intense, the wind is fresher. The body breathes deeper, and is soothed.

The waterfront has lured Long Islanders since the beginning, when Indians lived along the shore to fish, clam and hunt whales, and maybe to enjoy the cool breezes and the view.

European settlement on Long Island soon followed Henry Hudson's 1609 voyage of discovery here. The first deed officially recorded on Long Island, in 1636, was on the bay in western Brooklyn.

Europeans began settling the coasts, where they had easy water access back to New England. Englishman Lion Gardiner bought his island from the Indians in 1639, Puritans settled Southold and Southampton in 1640. By 1700, settlements of farmers and fishermen had spread out along both the North and South Shores, and from there, inland.

Now Long Island's mile after mile of shoreline -- ocean and bay, canals, creeks and rivers, the Sound and its harbors -- offers a relatively democratic residential opportunity. The Island's shore is fringed with modest high ranches that would fit into any standard suburban cul-de-sac, and mansions of opulent desire incarnate. Tuscan fantasy villas. Concrete houses with decks like an ocean liner. Geodesic domes. Beach shacks and splits. Tiny converted summer bungalows and architectural statements. Gingerbread Victorians and postmoderns.

People set on waterfront living are willing to pay ``a significant premium,'' says Jim Williamson, a sales agent at Harbor Light Real Estate of Massapequa, where perhaps a third of the prospective homebuyers come in looking for waterfront property. Many other buyers, he says, say their ultimate dream is to live on the water even if they cannot yet afford it.

``There are a lot of customers who'll sacrifice an awful lot to get onto the water,'' he says, adding he often has customers who tell him they don't care what a house in a lower price range looks like, or in what condition it is, as long as it's on the water.

A home costing $270,000 to $300,000 inland might sell for $400,000 or more on the bay, he says.

A waterfront location carries another cost. The National Flood Insurance Program, which backs and regulates flood insurance underwritten by companies, charges $300 a year per $98,000 of coverage. That's on top of regular homeowner insurance policies.

Although waterfront homes suffered a sales glut and low demand after the storms and flooding of the winter of 1992-93, Williamson says demand is back up, and supply is low. And there's the logic that says if you live on an island, you might as well take advantage of what makes it most distinctive, and own a piece of its shoreline.

Long Islanders want to own a piece of the waterfront, says Brian McQuade, a native of Valley Stream who is buying a contemporary three-bedroom home in Bayport. A boater, he thinks Long Island waters are more beautiful than any he's seen in his various relocations, including Southern California.

``You're in the city working during the week and you feel like you're on vacation every weekend,'' says McQuade, who sells Internet products and services to Fortune 100 companies. ``My backyard is the bay. There's a deck, a little bit of sand and the bulkhead on the Great South Bay and the sailboats going by.''

The water view is worth the floods and the insurance premiums, he says. ``It's a distraction from the day-to-day stresses of life, a sense of freedom. You don't feel boxed in.''

The ocean, bay and Sound are the most obvious of Long Island's watery pleasures, but hidden behind the trees along otherwise innocuous roads are the river homes. Huntington marina owner Armand DeRose lives on the Nissequogue in Smithtown in an expanded mid-19th Century white clapboard cottage at the end of a long, private driveway.

Every window and deck offer views of the last remaining still-natural river flowing into Long Island Sound. ``It's very placid and serene,'' says DeRose, who moved here in 1985. ``In the summertime I can't see other houses, and it appears like you're out in the wilderness somewhere.''

He watches the egrets and blue herons fishing, the muskrats and the puddle ducks, the common and hooded mergansers, and other migrating waterfowl. ``Sitting motionless out there you see things ... It's quite a show,'' he says. ``It's just very relaxing, and tranquilizing here.'' Such sentiments are widely shared by those who live on water. They find a special romance and power in the view from their windows that makes them feel fortunate to be there no matter what the drawbacks.

Gayle and Jack Haines went through 10 years of planning and getting environmental permits to build their dream house on Captree Island in the Great South Bay, one of 31 homes on a barrier beach island just off the Robert Moses Causeway. The kitchen overlooks vast saltwater meadows, while the living room affords a view of the boats traversing the bay waters. They endure the mosquitos, the long drive for a carton of milk, the winter winds, and think themselves lucky.

``It gets into your blood,'' says Gayle Haines, a retired teacher now active in lighthouse preservation. ``There's nothing like getting up early and sitting in my living room to see the sunrise.''

Cliff Benfield, curator of the Horton Point Lighthouse Museum, and his wife, Eunice, lived in Roslyn before his retirement. Then they winterized and expanded their summer home on the Peconic Bay in Southold, and moved in full time. ``I guess my wife and I felt if we had a place on the water it could provide some attraction for children and grandchildren to return to,'' he says, recalling his own childhood summers on the water in Southampton. ``They come out for holidays and summer.''

His home, where all the windows face the water, was built in 1971 by a Bulgarian woman and designed by an Austrian architect. ``It's a great place to live,'' Benfield says. ``It's always changing, it's never the same ... It's plain beautiful, that's all.''

Perhaps it is the association of water with leisure, childhood summers and freedom that draws people back to the shore full time. Mary Ann Whitehead's parents began bringing her to a summer colony in Sag Harbor back in the 1940s and she has returned ever since. She and her husband, Arch, run their executive search firm out of the summer home on the beach they made their full-time residence in 1990. Her friends are her summer friends from childhood who all own summer homes there now. Their children grew up spending all their summers together too. ``I'm a beach person,'' says Whitehead, whose daughter and son-in-law plan to start building soon on a nearby lot. ``I go to the beach and swim every day from mid-June to mid-September. My friends come over and we sit on the beach.''

Lydia Nolan, a mother of year-old triplet boys, and her husband, Bill, just completed a year of remodeling on the home they moved into six years ago on the bay in Freeport. Pleasure and fishing boaters, they lived before in another waterfront home in that village. They now enjoy a backyard with a pool and double-decker columned porches, where they watch the boats go by and the wind whip up the swells. ``It's nice to look out at the activity, things happening instead of just trees,'' she says.

Life on the waters of Long Island has changed over the years in some ways. Walter and Ruby Kast chose to buy a small house on the waterfront in Massapequa 42 years ago when their contemporaries were buying development splits. As they reared their children and expanded their bunglalow, they watched the land fill in nearby, and the houses go up. They marveled at people spending as much as $25,000 for a house. Although their home is still their bit of paradise, they now contend with more noise and traffic, especially from water scooters zooming into the town beach where children swim just beyond their bulkhead.

And in Sands Point, Marian Goodman lives with her husband, Edmund, a retired surgeon, in the shingle house they built on land bought from old friend W. Averell Harriman, a statesman and once governor of New York. She recalls clamming, when clams were still plentiful, and beach bonfire cookouts, now banned.

Her family and the Harrimans would fish for whitebait: ``We'd go out with big nets stretched between us when they were close to shore and bring them in immediately to the Harrimans' chef and they were quite crisp and delicious.'' Most of the clams and mussels are gone, as are the hermit crabs that used to delight her children. The Harrimans' rambling white clapboard summer house also is gone, replaced by two new mansions. But, she says, nice young families with children are moving into the big new homes in the neighborhood and the winds still blow fresh. And the water view is forever.