Carl Fisher, the man who tried to turn Montauk into the Miami Beach of the north in the 1920s, built this house for himself. Interesting that most of the things he built in Montauk were in the Tudor style, but not his own place. We think the best descriptor for the house is “baronial,” with tons of exposed wood, Montauk stone fireplaces, and generously sized bedrooms. There’s even a separate five bedroom guest house. The property offers views to Lake Montauk and Fort Pond Bay but is not waterfront. (Back in the day, waterfront didn’t necessarily have the premium it does now. Fisher chose a very high spot for his house to maximize the views, and the Montauk Manor is similarly high up, but also not waterfront.)
Last week, regarding a post about Listowel, we asked on Facebook if people like dark interiors in a beach house. The consensus seemed to be no. Regarding Listowel, a Facebook poster quipped, “Edgar Allan Poe would have loved it!” We tend to think this will be a tough sell; while it’s a gorgeous house with a lot of land, it’s also not what most people want out of a Montauk house.
The house is represented by Greg, Matt, and Ryan Burns at Compass. Asking price is $9.5 million; the property was last on the market back in 2015 asking $1 million more. We do hope someone falls in love with place and buys it; it would be a shame to tear it down.
Carl Fisher, in case anyone doesn’t know, bought almost all of Montauk in 1925. For 10,000 acres, he paid $2.5 million (that’s about $315 million today). Fisher wanted the Gatsby crowd to think, “Miami Beach in the winter, Montauk in the summer.”
In addition to the 250-room Manor Hotel, which opened in June 1927, Fisher built a polo field, the Montauk Yacht Club, the Montauk Tennis Auditorium (now the Playhouse), the Surf Club with its enormous oceanside pools, the Beach Casino, and a boardwalk. He developed downtown Montauk into the town we know today (the seven-story office building in the downtown plaza he created was then the tallest building on Long Island). The Montauk Community Church he built still stands, and his pink sidewalks largely remain. For the maids, porters, and croupiers to work in his establishments, he built a section of town still known as Shepherds Neck, complete with grazing sheep.
Unfortunately, Fisher’s vision came more or less to an end with the crashing of the stock market in 1929. The Montauk Beach Development Company went into receivership in 1932 and by the mid 1930s, Fisher was virtually penniless. He died in 1939 of complications from alcoholism.
44 Foxboro Road, Montauk
