Leisuramas were small, cookie-cutter vacation homes built in the Culloden Shores subdivision of Montauk in the early 1960s. They were designed to be affordable and came conveniently pre-furnished from top to bottom. “All you need is a key and a six-pack,” Frank Tuma, who managed their construction, was rumored to have said. The marketing of… Read more »
Everything about this photo is perfect, from the fringe on the awning to the automobiles to the freestanding phone booth. The year was 1960, a slice of an era that was nearly as cool as these sunglasses. Note the lattice-y gridwork in the background behind the phone booth and the flag. For decades that grid… Read more »
“Sportfishing, even for the biggest fish, was not just a man’s sport,” Bill Akin wrote in The Golden Age of Montauk Sportfishing. “Women had always been part of the picture.” Women – particularly the partners of wealthy sportfishermen – boated some impressively large specimens. One was Chisie Farrington, the wife of the sports journalist and… Read more »
Montauk’s first Blessing of the Fleet – born as the “Blessing of the Boats” – was in 1956 and the brainchild of Vinnie Grimes, a charter boat captain and Navy veteran who’d seen Portuguese tuna fishermen blessing their boats before they headed out to sea on the West Coast. “It is an old European custom… Read more »
The house that used to stand on Sandpiper Hill, an oceanfront estate just west of Ditch Plains, was built for a Wall Street broker named Walter P. McCaffray in 1928, during the same gilded age that enticed Carl Fisher to stick shovels into the wild Montauk landscape. In fact, Fisher’s architect, Richard B. Webb, also… Read more »
An earlier version of this post was published on August 30, 2023. It has been updated with additional images and information to reflect the passing of Maria-Louise Sidoroff, Ph.D., on May 9, 2024 at the age of 87. Maria-Louise Sidoroff, Ph.D., an anthropologist, was working as a waitress at Gosman’s Restaurant, whose owners she was… Read more »
Before Frank Tuma Sr. bought the Montauk Tavern 90 years ago, it was run as a sweet shop that “pulled off a clandestine existence during the Prohibition beginning in 1927” — at least according to a story in Dan’s Papers. “The speakeasy survived six years until 1933 when the ban of spirits was finally lifted,… Read more »
Happy Mother’s … Clockwise from top left: Karen and Patty Urvalek, Barbara and Abbey Friedman, Lili (right) and Abby Monahan, Jane and Jennine Liebell, Connie and Cheryl Keller, and Virginia and Robin Veltri. The photos were taken in 1991 at a Montauk Girl Scouts event at the firehouse. | Jane Liebell Collection, Montauk Library Archives… Read more »
What a difference 32 years makes! Here are some photographs that were meant to be buried in a time capsule in 1992. Middle-school Montauk Girl Scouts were equipped with disposable cameras to record what Montauk looked like at the time, said Jane Liebell, who led the group: Top: Rita’s Stables, left, and the Blue Marlin…. Read more »
This photograph, from the Montauk Library’s Harry Bruno Collection, is labeled “Doolittle up a tree, Montauk, Sept. 1954.” Doolittle refers to General James H. Doolittle, a “fearless pilot [who] repeatedly risked his life to test the flight characteristics and limitations of experimental aircraft,” according to an article in Air & Space Forces magazine. As a… Read more »