The Canoe Place Inn and its grounds in the Town of Southampton have a history to tell

Cary Grant slept there. For years, Lucille Ball and husband Desi Arnaz summered there. The Ramones, Led Zeppelin, Twisted Sister, Duke Ellington and even a young Sebastian Bach — frontman for the band Skid Row, not that other guy — all played its club hall stage.

British spy John Andre and Revolutionary War traitor Benedict Arnold encamped on its grounds the winter before Andre was arrested and hung out to dry by the Continental Army.

To say the Canoe Place Inn has historical importance to the Town of Southampton, the hamlet of Hampton Bays, to the timeline of Long Island life itself, is as quantifiable — and, as abstract — as the entertaining notion that Albert Einstein once danced there.

Relativity speaking.

Meticulously restored, renovated and re-imagined by Long Island developers Mitchell and Gregg Rechler of Rechler Equity Partners, the Canoe Place Inn & Cottages reopened last week as a luxury East End destination resort following decades of neglect and disrepair.

But its history — which includes being the first recognized inn in America, on land first used by the Shinnecock Indians and later deeded by the Queen of England — bears the imprint of the very being of Long Island.

'A stopping post'

"It's a place," Hampton Bays Historical Society President Brenda Sinclair Berntson said, "that has gone through a lot of permutations. It was a stopping post 'between the wildernesses,' as they called it, long before Montauk Highway, back when the Shinnecock Canal was just a stream."

And, she said of the current incarnation, which followed the 2005 purchase and inspired community backlash that forced both the developers and town officials into a decadelong rethink of the initial plan to level the site: "Quite frankly, there was no thought of saving this when it was purchased. They said it couldn't be saved. But the Rechlers listened to the community and what came out of that is way beyond expectations … It's like a Phoenix."

Rooted in the heart of Colonial America, the first structures on the current Canoe Place Inn site date to about 1635. Southampton Town historian Julie Greene said in the 1690s the Culver family acquired the land, and Gershom Culver built a tavern or post at Canoe Place in the early 1700s.

Back then, it was known as a "coaching inn," a place where wearisome travelers could get a meal, drink, lodge for the night and find care for their horses. In various iterations that followed, Canoe Place served not only as that Revolutionary War encampment for the British but as both a political polling place for townsfolk and a tavern — "a hard place with a lot of hard characters," as one newspaper detailed it.

Once the railroad came east in the 1800s, Canoe Place served as a hunting lodge, a place for sportsmen, hunters and fishermen, a vacation home for the well-heeled from New York City.

This, back when Montauk Highway was still a cowpath — and long before the actual Shinnecock Canal was built, between 1884 and 1892.

The last bare-knuckle boxing champ, John L. Sullivan, known as the "Boston Strong Boy" and "His Fistic Holiness," lived and trained in a gym at Canoe Place before his 1892 world heavyweight title defense against Gentleman Jim Corbett. 
Sullivan must've been thoroughly softened by his time at the inn, since he fell to Corbett, dropping his record to 47-1-2.

Retreat for stars

Like the original Inn itself, that gym is long gone.

Purchased in 1917 by prominent Manhattan restaurateur Julius Keller for $40,000, the original Canoe Place Inn was developed and expanded and soon became a retreat for stars, starlets and for a bevy of politicos, earning the nickname Tammany Hall East.

The original building burned to the ground July 5, 1921, with two workers killed. All that remained were two chimneys.

Following that blaze, William L. Bottomley, a renowned architect with 11 homes on the national register, including the Ziegler House on East 55th Street in Manhattan, was commissioned to redesign and rebuild Canoe Place. Here we get the Phoenix. Bottomley, who also designed the Southampton High School building that now serves as Town Hall, resurrected Canoe Place as a Colonial revival.

Gov. Al Smith lived and drank at Canoe Place during Prohibition, though he claimed no knowledge of its operation as a so-called roadhouse, even after federal G-men infiltrated the place, leading to a major booze bust. John D. Rockefeller, Helen Hayes, Henry Ford all stayed at the Inn. So, did President Theodore Roosevelt and his fifth-cousin President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Gov. Averell Harriman was hosted at the inn by Suffolk and state Democrats.

Her royal highness, Infanta Maria Antonia of Portugal, did the twist there at the Shaggy Dog Ball. The domed ballroom, once the largest dance floor on Long Island, was lined with Doric columns, its ceiling painted "to resemble a dramatized night sky."

Lipstick kisses on bust of Hercules

"My family grew up not far from the Inn," Berntson said. "My aunts would sneak over and watch people dancing in the ballroom. They said it was like watching kings and queens."

In fact, Berntson said, the resultant allure of working at the Inn was so great that waiters, waitstaff, porters and other hotel staff paid the owners as terms of their employment.

During the Depression one porter came from Carrying Place, Ontario, paying his way to Hampton Bays — to work carrying cases for patrons. Tips meant you could earn a living.

"A really good living," Berntson said. 

For years, an 8-foot bust of Hercules, which once adorned the USS Ohio, stood on the property — covered in the lipstick kisses of a thousand girls. Legend had it if you kissed Hercules you'd be married within a year. Berntson has a picture of her mom, who grew up in the Bronx, with Hercules. "Come to think of it, it was from before she met my Dad," Berntson said.

Although the building itself survived countless hurricanes, including the infamous 1938 Long Island Express, Canoe Place Inn fell on hard times.

It went through incarnations as nightclubs, discos, dance clubs, frat bars.

One media account said that by the 1980s the inn's club had a convenience store where you could buy everything needed for a big night out: cigarettes, cologne, aspirin — and condoms.

And then, for decades Canoe Place stood boarded up. Forgotten, until the recent renovation.

By John Valenti

john.valenti@newsday.com

John Valenti, a reporter at Newsday since 1981, has been honored nationally by the Associated Press and Society of the Silurians for investigative, enterprise and breaking news reporting, as well as column writing, and is the author of “Swee'pea,” a book about former New York playground basketball star Lloyd Daniels. Valenti is featured in the Emmy Award-winning ESPN 30-for-30 film “Big Shot.”