Lazy Point's 'stilt house' fell into Gardiners Bay. Here's the story of the Hamptons home.

East Hampton's famed "stilt house," standing incongruously but picturesquely in the waters of Gardiners Bay following years of beach erosion, finally collapsed on Jan. 31. The town quickly announced it would remove the debris that was at risk of dispersal into the bay and surrounding wetlands.

Then, the stilt house sank beneath the heavy ice that had buckled its supports, complicating its extraction. "We're hoping for some time this week for our contractor to start the work," a town representative told Newsday on Feb. 17. "Our Marine Patrol was out there earlier and the ice has cleared."

That removal marks the demise of a symbol as much as a structure. Long vacant and unlivable, the one-bedroom bungalow at what had been 163 Mulford Lane in the Lazy Point section of Amagansett had been photographed by people from around the world. For decades it had weathered storm and superstorm, until the encroaching ice of the frozen bay finally left it adrift in a sea of white before it sank and disappeared.

And for former Lazy Pointers, what is still sinking in is that the beloved symbol of another time is gone.

"I think we all said the same thing when we heard it went down, that it's the end of an era," said Ginger Bennis, 72, who now lives in Franklin, North Carolina. The Lazy Point families all knew each other, she said, and all the kids were close. A couple of other stilt houses had stood there, but this was the final relic of a postwar time of Hamptons homesteading, where a blue-collar guy could claim a piece of beach and simply build.

The stilt house's final days

The final owner of the home, Gary Ryan, is a New York City teacher, chaplain and business consultant with a degree from Harvard Divinity School. He often visited Lazy Point to spend time with a multiple sclerosis-stricken friend and her middle school-aged daughter. "We all went to the same church in Chelsea in Manhattan," said Ryan, 67.

Sometime in the mid-2000s, they were out kayaking around the house, already long surrounded by water, and he asked a passing paddle boarder if she knew who the owner was. Fortuitously, this stranger was the wife of Gordon Ryan — no relation — the attorney for then-owner Betty S. Sullivan, an elderly woman who wanted to give the building away.

On  Oct. 15, 2007, Gary Ryan took over the deed — purchase price $0 — as well as the ongoing property tax payments. Public record shows this was $1,201 for tax year 2024-2025, based on a market value of $428,572 — including a $114,286 "land value."

"I got the house I could afford," said Gary Ryan, who wanted to restore it. "At different times, I partnered with different architects, contractors," having done so even recently, he said.

But he had felt stymied by ambivalence from some at Lazy Point. "I had the support of the neighborhood association president and there were others among the neighbors who were on my side," he said. "But, in the end, it was not enough." He never assembled a formal renovation proposal to submit to the town for permits and approval.

A town representative confirmed that, "Per the property card, there does not seem to be any documented history of applications with the Town during his ownership of the property."

The house never had been condemned, the representative added: "Our records show that the property had been considered for condemnation but nothing to say that it ultimately was condemned."

Whiskey stills in the woods

The town's records do not, unfortunately, go back to when the house was constructed, and so its origins are murky. What's known is that it was a vestige of an almost-forgotten time when blue-collar men from the New York City boroughs could build weekend fishing shacks largely without permit or permission.

Those ad hoc homes on the South Fork's northern edge became a riviera of riveters and riggers — summer retreats for wives and children escaping city heat in the largely non-air-conditioned 1940s and '50s. The men came out on weekends and whenever else they could. The kids rode bikes, played on the beach and explored the woods.

"We discovered old whiskey stills, old wells," remembered Paula Kalbacher Easevoli, 80, of Key Largo, who spent Lazy Point summers in her family's Mulford Lane bungalow and, later, with her late husband John, bought the stilt house and lived there full time in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

"It was a real fishing community," she said. "All the people would get together at night and have big bonfires and sing songs. And then in the morning, the men would get up and go fishing."

"Dinners, barbecues. We kids growing up, we used to have a fire on the beach every night," said her brother Billy Kalbacher, 71, of East Hampton, a builder and CEO of the nonprofit environmental and charitable organization the Clamshell Foundation. "And whether it would be my sister or our neighbors, people would come and visit and bring food. It was a community."

That community's roots trace to housing for itinerant workers at a factory that processed a local fish, menhaden (a.k.a. pogy, fatback, shad and bunker), into fish meal. Initially home to the Triton Oil & Fertilizer Co., dating to at least 1911, it became that of the Smith Meal Co. in 1933. Until the factory closed in 1969, its fumes, as even the most rosy-eyed resident recalls, were pungent. The area was no place to live for anyone unaccustomed to strong fish odor.

When land was $25 down, $25 a month

That made it something of an open frontier, and Lazy Point after World War II drew weekend fishermen who constructed shacks along Mulford Lane and thereabouts.

Another Kalbacher sibling — Stephen, 77, a retired NYPD officer living in Matlacha, Florida — recalled how their father, like many of his compatriots, bought land there in a back-of-napkin deal brokered by Alvin Merrill — proprietor of the nearby bar-restaurant Merrill's Irish Mist and its affiliated fishing station/gasoline pump — on behalf of a Sag Harbor attorney for a landowner no one remembers.

"You gave him $25 down and $25 a month until it was paid off, and then you owned the property. This was written on a napkin. 'Oh, I'm going to build a house over there.' That's the way it worked," Stephen Kalbacher marveled.

"There was no building inspector to say, 'Oh, you can't do this, you can't do that.' " He added. "There were some regulations, but the people from town never even came down to check." His sister said lots cost about "$500 or $350, something like that."

Stephen Kalbacher thinks the stilt house was built "around 1949, '50," and a public record in the 2000s gives an original contract date of Jan. 1, 1950. Kalbacher believes it might have been built by the man from whom Easevoli and her husband bought it circa 1968. His first name, as the Kalbachers and Bennis all remember it, was Joe.

He and two other men — one named Frank, who was possibly Joe's brother, and one named Artie — were "great guys. Really terrific guys," Bennis said.

"Frank taught me how to swim," Easevoli recalled.

There were other homes on stilts there at the time, so no one yet called it the "stilt house."

"We always used to call it 'Frank, Joe and Artie's house,' " Bennis said. "And then Paula was there so we kind of changed it to 'Paula's house.' " Easevoli said she and her family themselves just called it "the beach house."

With its 20-foot pilings sunk 10 feet into the ground, the house had electricity, a septic-tank hookup and a porch with a staircase by the time the Easevolis, who put in heat and a telephone, bought it for $5,000.

There was a living and dining area with a picture window overlooking the water, and a kitchen, bedroom and bathroom, plus pulldown stairs to an attic. There, Bennis fondly recalled, she and the other kids "used to camp out — there'd be a dozen people sleeping there!"

The Easevolis, with their young son and daughter and their German shepherd, lived there only about three years until November 1971, when, according to public records, they sold the house to John J. Glennon and his wife for $10,000, with the Easevolis holding the mortgage.

"We had two children and it was getting too small for a year-round home," Easevoli explained.

By 2000, unoccupied and no longer over land

It is unclear when and to whom the Glennons sold it. Town of East Hampton property records "do not show who owned it that far back," a representative said.

Ecologist and Stony Brook University professor Carl Safina, author of the nonfiction book "The View from Lazy Point," said the house was already surrounded by water and unoccupied when he moved to the community in 2000.

Neighbors told him it was still on land as of at least 1991. Public records show a sale for "less than $10" in March 2000 "between relatives or former relatives," without listing names.

"It was still on the beach" in whatever year it was acquired by the late Sullivan, said retired attorney Gordon Ryan, 70, of Lazy Point, her lawyer at the time. "And she had the pilings redone, so the pilings were very robust under it. But slowly, the beach receded and then the house was out in the bay."

Many locals blame a dredging done at the adjacent Napeague Harbor in 2006 for accelerating the natural erosion. A 2011 report in Dan's Papers cited aerial photos showing 1 foot of erosion annually from 1950 to 1999, 5 feet annually from 2000 to 2005 and 10 feet annually beginning in 2006.

Whatever the reason, once the house was in the water, the policy carrier canceled Sullivan's homeowner's insurance, Ryan said. Then, "The electric company cut off the power." By this time, he said, the elderly Sullivan "just wanted to get rid of this house so that it would not be a burden on her children when she died."

Ryan said he tried to give it away.

"I contacted the two houses on the land side of it ... so that they could either remove it themselves and not have to worry about it coming through their walls during a storm," he said. "Or they could use it as a cabana, because the structure was in pretty good shape. Never heard a word from either one, which surprised me."

He then offered it to the local fire department "to see if they wanted to burn it down as an exercise." It, too, declined. And then his wife's chance meeting while paddle boarding led to Gary Ryan's ownership in 2007.

Photos seen round the world

The stilt house is gone, but it lives on: Both on land and on sea, it was the subject of countless photos.

"My nephew was in Thailand, surfing, and on a wall was a picture of that house," Stephen Kalbacher said.

Bennis, an accomplished photographer who made it the subject of many photos, said, "The house is dramatic on both sides," particularly at sunup and sunset. "And it's kind of a lonely house out there, fighting to stay up for so long."

Safina connects the appeal of the house to that of Lazy Point in general.

"I think everybody would like to live in a little place disconnected from the rest of the world and feel at home," he said. The house was "like your own little island — the most simplified island possible. To me, that's the metaphor for its charm."

As for the actual, physical structure, "Part of me is disappointed that I didn't come through for the community," Gary Ryan said. "I think everybody kind of hoped that something would happen, and I didn't figure out a way to make it happen." He added, "I am weighing my options since I still own the property."

He takes solace, he said, in having done all that an average person — not a Hamptons multimillionaire — could do.

"I did," he said. "Yes, I did."