Old tavern house becomes new HQ for Mill Neck nonprofit

Nestled in the heart of 150 protected acres in Mill Neck, a nonprofit that's focused on land conservation has found a new home.

North Shore Land Alliance restored a dilapidated 18th century tavern house on the 28-acre Humes Preserve on Oyster Bay Road to serve as its headquarters, said the nonprofit's president, Lisa Ott.

The $1.2 million project, funded mostly by grants from various foundations and the state, married the old with the new by maintaining the facade's historic character while bringing the interior into the 21st century, according to nonprofit officials.

“We gutted the inside and it's very modern on the inside yet it still looks like it did in the 1700s on the outside,” Ott said.

Kathryn Curran, executive director of the Robert David Lion Gardiner Foundation — one of the groups that helped fund the project — said North Shore Land Alliance's vision “on adaptive reuse can serve and inspire other groups with historic sites.”

The Mill Neck nonprofit initially purchased the Humes Preserve, the former estate of John P. Humes, who served as a U.S. ambassador to Austria, for $5.2 million in 2015.

North Shore Land Alliance later commissioned research known as a cultural resource inventory to learn more about the location, which helped with getting the tavern house listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2020, according to Ott.

Daniel Underhill, a Quaker and member of one of the early European families to settle on Long Island, built the former tavern in the mid-to-late 18th century. He positioned it along a bend in what is now Oyster Bay Road, making it easily visible to weary travelers who would stop inside to rest, the research showed.

Other Quakers owned the structure in the years that followed, which saw the tavern undergo extensions and renovations. Beginning in the 1950s, it became a summer home for the Humes family and was the last place the ambassador lived before his death in 1985.

The ambassador's wife, Jean Schmidlapp-Humes, who died in 2000, was the last private owner to live in the residence before her family and other tenants sporadically stayed there.

North Shore Land Alliance's restoration effort began in mid-2022 and included meeting challenges that mold and weak foundational beams presented.

Locust Valley-based architect Eduardo LaCroze said wood beams from the original foundation line the stairway between the first and second floors also and serve as corner posts to some of the individual offices.

He said the use of the older elements of the building alongside modern touches like tempered glass office walls “speaks to the North Shore Land Alliance’s mission of preservation.”

The nonprofit's 12-person staff moved into the building in early 2023. But final touches to the project still are underway.

They will include the installation of a full-grown tree that will stretch from the first to second story of the building — an homage to the nonprofit's aim of preserving nature, Ott said.

The nonprofit has played a role in the protection of nearly 1,100 acres of land, owns 258 acres of preserves and holds easements that protect 182 acres of private and public land, according to its website.

By Joseph Ostapiuk

joseph.ostapiuk@newsday.com@OstapiukJ

Joseph Ostapiuk covers the Town of Oyster Bay and the City of Glen Cove. He joined Newsday in 2023 after spending more than six years at the Staten Island Advance/SILive.com.