Remembering Montauk in the 1970s: A fishing town turns celebrity hotspot

At the end of Long Island, there's Montauk.

In the early 1970s, it was still a fishing town: salt-bitten, unhurried, too far out to be fashionable and too wild to care. Through the decade, the famous came for the quiet and the young came for the carefree summer. What happened when they all washed up together doesn't have a perfect name. The people who were there will tell you it was something you couldn't plan and can't repeat.

On a Sunday afternoon in 1975, Katherine Nielsen Havlik was at The Dock restaurant when a stranger asked her for a ride back to the city. No big deal — except the stranger was Mick Jagger.

"They were wild," she says. "I was afraid of them." When she turned down the offer to drive, the Rolling Stone made her another one: Could he buy her Volkswagen camper?

She turned that down too.

It's the kind of story that would be hard to believe almost anywhere else. But in Montauk in the 1970s, it was just another Sunday.

An escape at the end of the road

"It was a hidden jewel that was never found out," says Jimmy Daunt, whose parents bought the Albatross Motel in 1976. "Less traffic. You could go to the beach without dealing with crowds. It was a lot quieter."

Nielsen Havlik's family had been there since the 1950s. Her parents built the Twin Pond Motel piece by piece, adding rooms yearly through the early 1960s. Rates ran $35 to $75 a night. She graduated from high school in 1970 and fell into the rhythm the town offered: cashier or server, beach, nightlife, repeat.

Each May, young crowds arrived and mixed with the locals — surfers, servers, artists, anyone looking for a place to spend a season away. Montauk had options, though none of them luxury.

Olsen’s Cabins on North Shore Road was a landing spot. Eight small cabins circled a shared yard, "like wagon trains," recalls Jacqueline Beh Clark, who arrived at 18. No heat. A volleyball court. Bonfires that lasted until the wood ran out — and then whatever furniture was nearby. A full season cost $800 to $1,100.

"Everyone was around 19 or 20 years old, all the same mentality — live and let live, make love not war," says Nielsen Havlik, who lived there from 1972 to 1976. "A lot of comradeship that you don’t see today."

Others found something closer to home at Mrs. Woodrow’s cabins on South Elroy Drive, where Ruth Woodrow hosted generations of seasonal workers.

"Montauk was my paradise and Mrs. Woodrow was a large part of it," says Virginia Garrison, 69, who moved to Montauk in 1968. She remembers sleeping in a room with multiple beds and Ruth setting out homemade cakes in glass stands and milk in glass bottles outside for the girls to share. A full summer cost five or six hundred dollars.

At the East Deck Motel in Ditch Plains, bunk-style cabins went for $40 a week. Across town, plots at the Ditch Plains trailer park rented for $20 — fishermen on one side, surfers in tents on the other.

"For me, growing up between working at the motel and the gas station, you got to know everyone," Daunt says. "You could basically do what you want. You looked after each other."

Daily routines

The rhythm of the summer was simple: work, beach, nightlife.

Nielsen Havlik, 73, of East Hampton, waited tables at Luigi’s from 5 to 11 p.m. Clark, 75, who currently lives in Hawley, Pennsylvania, worked at Bob and Dee’s Lakeside Inn and rented a room upstairs for $40 a week.

"We chambermaided, clerked, waitressed by night and played at the beach by day," she says.

Days centered on Ditch Plains and the docks. A hot dog wagon fed the crowds. What is now Kirk Park Beach filled up on the Fourth of July with pickup trucks, dogs riding in the back, and long-haired, sunburned crowds.

Nights stretched longer. The Dock stayed open until 2 or 4 a.m. The Pirate’s Den filled its upper deck with dancing. The Place, now the Surf Lodge, had live music and no cover. The Shagwong was the constant.

The look was waist-length hair, bell-bottoms, Frye boots, flip-flops.

"Get home at 3 a.m., sleep until 9 or 10, go to the beach," Nielsen Havlik says. "Watch the surfers at Ditch Plains. You can’t really describe it. It didn’t happen in too many places the way it did in Montauk."

You can’t really describe it. It didn’t happen in too many places the way it did in Montauk.

— Katherine Nielsen Havlik

When the world showed up

The shift toward celebrity came in 1971, when Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey bought Eothen, a sprawling cliff-top estate, for $225,000. It drew visitors like Jackie Kennedy-Onassis and Lee Radziwill, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Liza Minnelli and Truman Capote.

In 1975, The Rolling Stones rented the property to rehearse the ''Black and Blue'' album. At night, they drifted to the Memory Motel — the only place in town with a piano and pool table — drinking, playing and staying until sunrise. The song "Memory Motel" immortalized the property and freewheeling era.

TV talk-show host Dick Cavett owned Tick Hall nearby and lived among his neighbors the way anyone might. Beh Clark still laughs about the afternoon she found his two dogs on the side of the road — a white poodle and a black poodle — and Cavett came knocking on her door to collect them.

That ease between the famous and locals defined the decade. In 1972, more than 700 people packed the Montauk Manor for the Greenery Scenery party — a fundraiser for trees with a $6 entry ticket — served by celebrity bartenders like Cavett, actor Al Pacino, playwright Edward Albee and writer-activist Betty Friedan.

In July 1973, thousands gathered at Gosman's Dock to watch singer Richie Havens perform for free, part of a Sunday series that brought musicians Toots Thielemans, Ruth Brown and the Heath Brothers to the harbor. 

"There was more intermixing than there would ever be now," Garrison says. "Celebrities were part of the community."

What came after

By the late 1970s, change had begun. Building permits multiplied. The 1980s boomed. By the 2000s, second homes were everywhere.

Eothen eventually sold for $50 million in 2015. The East Deck Motel, Mrs. Woodrow’s cabins and Olsen’s Cabins were demolished to make way for million-dollar properties.

The Shagwong and The Dock are still there, as is the Memory Motel. The Albatross is now in its third generation of the Daunt family. Fishing boats still unload at the harbor. The surf still breaks at Ditch Plains.

But the insouciant Montauk of that decade couldn’t last forever and the people who were there seem to have known it.

"The isolation of the place," Garrison says, thinking about what made it work. The wealthy and celebrity were isolated on the cliffs, but in Montauk they could socialize. The young and carefree could make memories of a lifetime.

"Montauk is still home and always will be," Nielsen Havlik says. "That was, for a lot of us, the top-notch decade to be living there."

Beh Clark remembers it simply: "It was an idyllic time you could never revisit."