Built in 1929 and designed by Walker and Gillette, the Montauk Tennis Auditorium boasted tennis courts, a boxing ring, a stage, and seating for thousands of Montauk Manor guests and their friends. It was — like the manor, the Protestant and Catholic churches, the school, the golf club, surf club, yacht club, polo fields, and many other local landmarks — a material manifestation of Carl Fisher’s plan to abracadabra the easternmost point of Long Island into a fancy “Miami Beach of the North.”
From the East Hampton Star, August 16, 1929:
The new Tennis Auditorium at Montauk will be opened to the general public for the first time on Friday, August 30, when Rene des Vos, Belgian heavyweight in the million dollar stable of Tony Biddle, of Philadelphia, meets Babe McCorgary for the benefit fund of prominent Catholics at Montauk, who are interested in erecting a Catholic church there.
The mayor of New York, Jimmy Walker, has been invited and he will undoubtedly be present … Anytime that the New York mayor goes anywhere the crowd follows, and it is not presuming too much to say that a crowd of several thousand will follow Jimmy the Mayor to the Montauk Tennis auditorium, on August 30.
Arrangements are being made to accommodate 2.500 in the auditorium the night of the bouts and an early rush for tickets is predicted.
The auditorium endured any number of blows – the stock market crash not long after it opened, the 1938 hurricane, which damaged the roof – but was still used for recreational purposes by the Navy during World Ward War II. Not for the first time, it fell into disuse after that, then reopened in the late 1950s as a summer stock theater – “the Montauk Manor Playhouse” – and then for a brief time in the 1960s as a seasonal movie theater.
Over the years that passed afterward, the building came to be known primarily as “the dilapidated Montauk Playhouse.”
The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places as a landmark in 1988. In the 1990s, after unsuccessfully proposing to develop the property for an affordable housing development, the owner donated it to East Hampton Town, which handed the reins to the Montauk Playhouse Advisory Committee and in turn the Montauk Playhouse Community Center Foundation.
From the East Hampton Star, May 4, 2006:
“Goodbye, ‘dilapidated Montauk Playhouse.’ … Welcome, public day care. … Welcome, airy new digs for adult care … and adult nutrition,” the editorial said.
“Congratulations, and thanks, to the champions of the new center … who mowed down an apparently endless series of obstacles like so many blades of grass. … Everyone who can should check out the center at its official opening on Sunday.”
“Visitors … will see – in addition to cheerful, well-lighted rooms for young children and older adults – a very large space that has not yet been converted to use, but that will someday serve the broad middle part of the population as well as those bracketing it.”
“If all goes as planned, when the second phase of the reconstruction has been completed, the large empty space will house an atrium, a 240-seat theater, a swimming pool, and rooms for community programs.”
Millions of dollars of fundraising and donations, and some 20 years later, much of that “someday” prophecy has come true.
From the East Hampton Press, July 9, 2025:
“There is water in the pool,” the foundation’s newly elected president of its board of directors, Jennifer Carney Iacono, told members of the Montauk Citizens Advisory Committee this week, a milestone she celebrated some 26 years after the foundation was formed with a vision of renovating the playhouse — which was built in the 1920s by Carl Fisher as an indoor tennis facility — and creating a community swimming pool.
The renovation project has included the restoration of a portion of the original glass roof the playhouse was built with, allowing natural sunlight to flood down onto the two swimming pools below.
A ceremonial ribbon-cutting and community celebration, with refreshments and guest speakers, will be held Friday, August 15, from 2 to 4 p.m. at the Montauk Playhouse Community Center. The address is 240 Edgemere Street in Montauk.
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