Imagine driving up a meandering dirt driveway lined with ornamental trees, a horse-riding track on your left, a watchtower home to a fancier of pigeons on your right, greenhouses stocked with tropical plants, and a private zoo replete with gazelles and peacocks, all surrounding a Spanish-Moor-styled estate. Does this sound like Montauk?
While contemporary estates in the area boast ocean vistas, private tennis courts, and heated pools, Andrew J. Thomas’s estate, built in the late 1920s, overlooked Fort Pond Bay and featured more eclectic details characteristic of the opulence of the “Roaring Twenties.”
Andrew J. Thomas (1875-1965) was a self-taught architect from New York City known for designing low-cost apartment complexes that integrated gardens and green spaces. He worked for the Rockefeller Foundation in New York and was later appointed the New York State Architect. Throughout his career, he designed garden apartments that revitalized tenements throughout New York City.
Thomas was a regular visitor to Montauk as early as the 1890s, and in 1927, he purchased 13 acres bordered by Fleming and Flamingo Roads from the Montauk Beach Development Corporation. Two years later, he purchased additional land, bringing the total to around 20 acres.
Thomas must have enjoyed designing the property for himself, cultivating many components reminiscent of mansions on Long Island’s Gold Coast.
The estate buildings and grounds were documented in 1929 by George H. Van Anda, a photographer based in New York City specializing in architectural photography. An album of 31 silver gelatin prints preserved in the Montauk Library Archives is now available on New York Heritage Digital Collections. A digital display of the album is also on view in the library’s local history exhibit center.
In 1936, artist Elbert McGran Jackson (1896–1962) purchased the estate from Thomas and began to make considerable alterations and repairs.
Jackson was a commercial artist and illustrator, well known for his illustrations featured on the covers of the Saturday Evening Post. Jackson designed and silk-screened fabrics, draperies, screens, and wall coverings for high-end clients in New York City. He set up a silkscreen fabric printing factory in the greenhouses of the former Thomas estate.
By the 1950s, the estate had fallen into disrepair. “By far the most evocative building in Montauk that can qualify for ruin-contemplation is the Jackson Estate,” wrote Alastair Gordon in the East Hampton Star on May 30, 1985.
“Entering the grounds of the Estate is like entering a forgotten world, far from the rapidly changing landscape of contemporary Montauk. Everything is still–waiting, growing, eroding–a secret jungle hideaway.”
The estate was later purchased by Beech Hollow Associates, which subdivided the 25.5-acre land into 15 house lots, leaving the surrounding 13 acres of forest as a reserve. Today, the area is known as Beech Hollow Court.
While the buildings were razed, remnants of the lost estate can still be found in the old stone wall on Fleming Road. Perhaps, some of the ornamental trees have outlived both Thomas and Jackson, and are now shrouded in the overgrowth of the woodland preserves.
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