“There was nothing there but a few screaming seagulls and the bell buoy, and the old fish house with the roof caving in,” Mary Gosman recollected, in a 1996 oral history interview, about the harbor area – mostly still swampland and sand — in 1943 when she and her husband, Robert, took over Charlie Bonner’s gas dock. “And then there was the Round House.”
Before long the couple added a food counter at the dock for fishermen, planting the seed of what eventually became the enormous Gosman’s complex. For many years they lived in Amagansett while school was in session but spent summers with their six children in the small, round harbormaster’s house, which Carl Fisher and the Montauk Beach Development Corporation had built in the 1920s after opening Lake Montauk to Block Island Sound and thereby creating Montauk Harbor.
“Fisher had a Danish captain who lived there taking care of the entrance and the harbor and so on,” Mary said in the interview. “And his duty when the palatial yachts came around the breakwater, he had to go out and check their credentials.”
For the Gosman family living there about 20 years after that, the Round House was somewhat primitive. Still, it saved a daily commute from Amagansett to pack fish and run the restaurant out in Montauk.
“I used to rent my house in Amagansett for $400 for the coal bill and the taxes,” Mary told her interviewer. “Those were the ‘30s and the ‘40s … Then we moved down, of course, and lived in the Round House in the summertime. And somebody said to me, In the name of God, Mary, what do you do in Montauk? Well now, I said, I’ll just give you a little experience.”
“Last night I was very tired, and I decided to stay down for the night. And the gang was coming the following day with all their belongings. I got into a tub of hot water right up to my neck, and then I got into bed and I turned the radio on. And I had one hour of Toscanini, so don’t ask me what do we do in Montauk … But, oh, it was wonderful.”
One of the couple’s six children, Bill Gosman, remembers lightning raining down around the Round House, and his mother hiding in a closet with a broom to ward off mice. A man he called Uncle Milton would bring out leftover pastries from his restaurant in Amagansett, the occasional drunken fisherman would wander into their home, and his mother served coffee to survivors of the sportfishermen killed on the “Pelican” in 1951.
“People were different then,” Bill said.
Over the decades Mary and Robert bought more property from the Montauk Beach Development Company as well as homes from Ed Pospisil, which they turned into a restaurant whose popularity grew exponentially. In the late 1960s it was razed to create a large new one, now accompanied by retail stores, new wholesale and retail fish markets, and eventually a clam bar and other auxiliary restaurants.
Mary Gosman said in the oral history interview that her son John, “a frustrated architect,” took it upon himself to design the layout of the complex. “With John, everything is, or was, a plan, and we started with the Round House as a focal point. And, of course, Marilyn has a shop there and she does very well.”
She was referring to Marilyn Bogdan, who with her husband, Tom, has run the Summer Stock clothing store in the former harbormaster’s house for nearly half a century, beginning in the 1970s.
“Montauk was so exciting then,” the Summer Stock website says of the store’s beginnings. “They were the years of Warhol, Halston, the Rolling Stones, Dick Cavett, Truman Capote and other luminaries. You never really knew who would appear at Gosman’s Dock. But the real joys were Marilyn and Tom’s regular customers. … It was so heartwarming to see them return year after year.”
2 Comments
Wonderful, as always.
Loved this, thank you!