The Last Refuge

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MY FATHER BUILT this cottage at the tip of Oak Point on the Little Peconic Bay in the Town of Southampton, Long Island, in the mid-1940s when there was nobody else around to build anything. They were all still at war, most of the young guys anyway, and the older guys were either too poor or too scared of the future—or too damaged by the Depression—to take a chance. But my dad had vision before people called it that, and he bought this nine-tenths of an acre parcel right at the edge of the bay. Waterfront, they call it now. Then it was called stupid and expensive, even though it only cost about $560 a lot.

The price of this kind of property has gone up a lot since then.

He built the house himself, a little at a time, without a mortgage. The first year he dug the foundation with a pick and shovel, laid up cinder block and put on the first floor deck. Then he built the rest of the house room by room as he got the money, and the building materials, most of which he scrounged out of local dumps and empty lots and the handful of construction projects that were going on at the time around the city and out on the Island.

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