House Parade

A Group of Five Houses Parade to East Hampton Town Hall

By Dan Rattiner

Often, when someone gives somebody a gift, they tell the recipient to close their eyes and hold out their hand. Plop. Into the hand is set a small gift-wrapped box with a pink bow. Hope you like it, the giver says.

This past Saturday, Adelaide de Menil and her husband, Edmund Carpenter, gave a gift that was a little bigger than that. To give it, it was necessary to shut down the Montauk Highway from seven a.m. until six p.m. that day. Involved were dozens of police officers, trucks and workmen from the fire department, the cable company, the lighting company, the ambulance corps and numerous construction companies, headed up by Davis House Moving of Westhampton Beach.

As for the gift itself, it left the de Menil property on Further Lane exactly at seven a.m. on the dot that Saturday morning and it took all day to get to the recipient's property a mile away. It consisted of four wood-shingled historic houses and two wood-shingled historic barns, all of which had to be towed from the property of the giver to the property of the receiver, which was the front lawn of East Hampton Town Hall. There was no gift-wrap or bow on any of them. And some of them were three stories tall. But they all got there safe and without injury to anybody during the next eleven hours. Today, if you drive down the Montauk Highway in Pantigo passing town hall and look toward it, you will see these six beautiful, 300-year-old houses and barns safely sitting on the front lawn of that establishment.

From now on and far into the future, East Hampton Town Hall will greet the public with a collection of colonial era homes and barns, each a working part of town hall -- a supervisor's office, a meeting room, a councilmen's office and so on -- all brought to them by Adelaide de Menil and Ted Carpenter, who not only gave them the buildings, but paid to get them to where they were supposed to go and, in addition, donated two million dollars toward their future upkeep. To figure out how this all came about, you have to go back to the mid-1960s. East Hampton was then a rather poor backwater town with limited funds. But they needed a new town hall.

Land was cheap then. They bought a 40-acre site on the Montauk Highway in Pantigo, had a local architect design them a town hall and then took it out to the voters. It was small, but grandly set back on the property, with a horseshoe driveway to get up to it from the highway. It had a peaked roof and a cupola. And the town voted it down. The next year, the new town hall was presented once again to the voters, but pared down a bit. They had removed the cupola and lowered the roof. The townspeople voted it down again. Finally, they redesigned it with a really dumb-looking, flat roof. It was now a very nondescript building, grandly set back on the property with the horseshoe driveway to get to it, but half the price. The townspeople voted it through. And it was built and stands there to this day. It is a town hall, it leaks when it rains and it doesn't look like much, but it's what we've got.

Around the same time, a young married couple, Adelaide de Menil and her new husband, Ted Carpenter, purchased a 40-acre oceanfront parcel of land on Further Lane about two miles away. Adelaide is an heiress from a Texas oil company and an artist, and she and Ted could have built a big modern oceanfront home for themselves, but instead decided to collect small, old historic buildings. They would place them on their property. And, using breezeways, they would fashion a home out of them.

People did object to the Carpenters assembling this collection of seventeenth and eighteenth century homes, not because they were historic -- nobody cared about the history of this area then -- but because they were being taken out of the public arena to be assembled for the private use of two people.

The Carpenters saw it differently. All of the homes they were assembling were going to be torn down to make way for more modern structures. If they did nothing, these colonial homes would be gone forever. They had this vast acreage. They would save them, tow them to their property, use them as THEIR home and see to their upkeep. It was important to save them, is what they thought. Interestingly, I met Adelaide de Menil on the day she was moving the first of these houses. It was in October of 1973, and the offices for Dan's Papers were in a barn just behind what is now the Amaden Gay Agency, next door to the East Hampton Post Office. A man came running into our office. There's a truck towing a house down the Montauk Highway, he said. And so I ran out with a camera and found myself standing next to an attractive young woman taking time-lapse photography with a camera on a tripod of this house coming down the street. The camera would click a picture every thirty seconds.

"I'm making a documentary about the move," she said when I asked. It would be run fast-motion. You could watch the house make the two-mile move in just twenty minutes of film. That was Adelaide.

The house being moved was the Purple House, which had been next to the East Hampton Library and would have been demolished to make room for a bigger structure if she and Ted had not come along.

Half a dozen more houses from around town followed in the years immediately afterward. After that, the de Menils would occasionally get a call from somebody about a house. They saved a few more pieces of East Hampton's heritage in this fashion.

Fast forward to 2003. Ted and Adelaide have decided to downsize. Their kids are grown and out of the house. They haven't exactly put their property on the market, but they've let it be known that they will sell to the right buyer for the right price.

They get offers. But none of the offers include the buyer being willing to act as caretaker for the assemblage of old colonial homes on the property. In fact, everyone interested says that for the money being offered -- this sort of property today sells in the tens of millions of dollars -- they expect the sale to include the right for them to build what they please. And they definitely please. The Carpenters cannot find anyone to preserve the historic homes they have saved.

And so they get an idea. Why not return these homes to where they came from? It is nearly thirty-five years later and some of the sites have other structures on them now. But surely these houses could be kept an acre or two away, if necessary.

The first place they reach out to is the East Hampton Library on Main Street. Though many on the library board are delighted with the offer, in the end, the library declines. The Purple House will not be returned.

At this point, East Hampton Town Supervisor Bill McGintee steps into the picture. He calls the Carpenters. Since time is of the essence, why not get a house mover to bring the houses over to the big front lawn of East Hampton Town Hall? They could be kept there temporarily, until placements around town are found for the historic structures.

And then somebody, probably a prominent architect talking to either de Menil or McGintee, puts two and two together. The town, because of expansion, needs to build another building near to or attached to the crummy little town hall. Why not use these buildings as a great campus of new structures, attached by glass breezeways, right on the front lawn? And by the way, nobody is ever going to see what the cheapskate town built in 1963. The old town hall will become the "extension."

* * *

At seven a.m., with the sun just rising, I met up with three friends, Paul Jeffers, Jeff Tarr and Andy Sabin, at Mary's Marvelous, a new coffee shop with fresh pastries right on Main Street in Amagansett. We were two miles to the east of where the police were shutting down the highway. And as vehicles with flashing lights passed out front and a helicopter could be heard chattering overhead, we drank coffee and planned our strategy.

"I think we should try to cut across from Windmill Lane to Abraham's Path," one of us said. We were trying to figure out how to drive one of our cars to where we could see the houses passing, without being stopped by the police.

"I have a jeep," Andy said. "I can drive through farmland, across lawns, through anything."

In the end, we decided to go up Windmill Lane to Town Lane, turn west on Town, then left again at Spring Close Highway and take it to the end.

"We should be able to park in the parking lot of the Laundry Restaurant there," I said. "They don't open till five. Nobody will be there at this hour. We'll have a birdseye view of the start of the parade."

"Okay, let's move 'em out," Andy said.

Our plan worked perfectly. In ten minutes, we were parked in this lot, the front of our car facing out across the sidewalk to the actual closed off highway with all the policemen and workmen on it. Nobody noticed us, or really cared. The first of the houses -- the start of the parade -- was slowly moving through the dawn from the dirt driveway of the Sam Lester Farm out onto the Highway itself. A house on wheels. What a sight. We sat. After a while, we got out of the car and wandered out onto the sidewalk. Still, nobody bothered us.

Another house appeared. Then another. Overhead, this little helicopter circled. There were newsmen everywhere. There were linemen in their silver hardhats, moving company men in red hardhats, policemen, public officials, spectators -- even people walking their dogs. It was ten after seven. Several dogs, seeing these giant houses on rubber wheels coming down the road, began to bark at them madly. Nobody paid attention to them, either.

Emboldened, we now began to wander around, having various encounters with police officers (hey you, what are doing over there? Get behind that sidewalk), public officials (this is one of the greatest gifts to this town of all time) and Adelaide de Menil herself, who was dressed in a floor-length, black evening coat, and who indeed remembered how I had met her.

"I have a picture of the Purple House coming down the highway going east," I said. "Between it and the camera is a workman, clutching a traffic light to his chest, looking sideways as if to ask 'where does this go?'"

"I'd love to have a copy of that," she said. "I'd put it in our book documenting this move."

"I'll find it and send it to you," I said. I looked up and behind us. "I believe this is the very house you were moving that day we met," I said. "Only now it is going the other way."

A policeman came over. "You'll have to move on. We've got power lines coming down here now," he said.

We moved.

I ran into Victoria Cooper, one of our reporters. And we talked about Adelaide. "I sort of want to ask her -- where did you buy that outfit?"

As the day wore on, we drove back up Spring Close Highway and into town, then back down Hither Lane to Amy's Lane on the south, where we could walk through to the highway in front of Town Hall. There were big rectangles of yellow chalk marked off on the front lawn, indicating where each house should go.

"I wonder why they just marked the lawn off like that," Paul said. "Usually, they have foundations and everything ready when they move a house."

"Well, I guess they don't."

The houses had stopped in the middle of the highway about halfway to Town Hall, a quarter-mile from the finish line. And they just stood there, not moving. What could be wrong? I asked one of the police officers. He said he had no idea. We drove back to the parking lot at the Laundry. A few more houses were now appearing.

I learned that the Town had recently changed contractors and the foundations would be put in sometime in the next two months, after the houses arrived. Around noon, I spoke again to de Menil -- she was flitting around this entire project like some sort of Renaissance Queen -- and learned that the person up in the helicopter was not part of a network news team, but Adelaide's husband's son from a prior marriage.

She had done the stop action from a tripod going one way. He was doing digital video from a chopper going the other way, forty years later. There was a certain symmetry to all this.

I wondered if, sometime during the night in the next few months, a burglar with a heavy rope and a Dodge Ram could steal one of these buildings off the front lawn without being noticed. They were just sitting there, after all.

It was such a beautiful, sunny day now. I ran into Cindy Davis, the wife of the contractor hired to pull these five houses down the highway. She was with her two daughters, who looked about eight and five. Each wore a DAVIS HOUSE MOVING baseball cap and DAVIS HOUSE MOVING t-shirt. Behind them, engines were roaring, people were shouting, plywood was banging, bulldozers were rushing around and houses were inching along. Some of the houses were being led on a leash held by a man walking backwards. They had hydraulic motors strapped to the fronts of them, with thick tubes leading down to the hydraulic wheels. One of the biggest houses I saw had 32 wheels under it. The man walking backwards had a look of great concentration on his face, as indeed he should.

"Do you think you've got a cool dad?" I asked the kids.

They nodded vigorously.

"People call us up all the time," Mrs. Davis said, "and they ask are we REALLY in the house moving business? We really move houses? It is so hard to believe."

I looked at all these houses slowly moving one way and another, catching up to the one in front that had stopped. House moving on the East End is a big business and Davis is the biggest of them. But I don't think he had ever moved more than one at one time, much less six. What if one of the houses crashed into another along the way and fell off into the road with a splat? Just one mistake and he'd be ruined. Like Imus. Big risk to be taking here.

What the holdup was, I found out, were the power lines to the Suffolk County National Bank branch that crossed the highway midway to the destination and were too low for the houses to pass under. They were going to cut the power to the bank at the very last minute, only for a minute. It was one thing for a house to be without power. But a bank? Get those houses lined up. When they are lined up, the houses cross over one right after the other fast. Then they put the line back up. Can't hold up all those people who need to make deposits and withdrawls.

At six p.m., the houses had crossed in front of the bank and were being moved smartly across the Town Hall front lawn. Tom Twomey, who used to be head of the library, was there. His wife, Judy Hope, who used to be a Town Supervisor, was there. There was Christoff de Menil, Adelaide's sister, and various other officials and notables. And the houses were being set right over the yellow lines showing where they went.

Finally, the police re-opened the Montauk Highway to traffic, and it came thundering through, people gawking at the big mess of old buildings on the front lawn of town hall.

For all the world, it looked like Mad Saltboxes were attacking Town Hall, as well they should.

We drove wearily home.