MONTAUK ASSOCIATION
Above: Benson (left) and Sanger houses; Previous pages: The Seven Sisters
IN 1879, Arthur Benson, the millionaire developer of Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, bought most of Montauk from the East Hampton Town Trustees for $151,000. Two years later, Benson and his wealthy friends and business associates established the Montauk Association to create a select summer hunting and fishing retreat on the Atlantic bluff just east of Ditch Plain. The Montauk Association members included renowned ophthalmologist Dr. Cornelius Agnew, one of the founders of the Manhattan and Brooklyn Eye and Ear Hospitals; businessman Henry Sanger; banker Alfred Hoyt; attorneys Robert and Henry de Forest; merchant and financier Alexander E. Orr; and author William Loring Andrews, a trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and founding member of the Grolier Club. The Association hired landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. His 1881 site plan for the 100-acre enclave reveals the optimal placement of houses atop knolls at the highest point along the rolling landscape, to take advantage of the ocean views and the prevailing southwest breezes needed for summer cooling. The staggered arrangement of houses provided each with spacious surroundings and expansive views. The residences were interconnected via a sequence
of dirt paths that meandered through the natural terrain and allowed the moorland marshes and native vegetation to remain untouched. Olmsted’s intention at Montauk was to minimize transgressions into the natural landscape, a scheme clearly influenced by the design of his earlier masterpiece, New York’s Central Park. The young architectural firm of McKim, Mead & White was commissioned to design the houses, to be built on a ridge north of De Forest Road between 1882 and 1884. Seven houses, a centrally located clubhouse (destroyed by a fire in 1933), a laundry, and a large stable formed the original complex. Known locally as “the seven sisters,” the Montauk Association houses represent significant early examples of the Shingle style, which McKim, Mead & White had a hand in popularizing. Not only do the houses show an understanding of the Colonial idiom in their use of shingled and clapboard walls and gabled roofs, they also reveal a distilled relationship to their historic vernacular precursors in Montauk: First House, Second House, and Third House. Each of the firm’s plans for the original seven houses was unique, but the structures are unified as a grouping through the use of scale, massing, form, materials, and finishes.
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