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Port Washington’s early shoreline
BY CHRISTOPHER BAIN
Before the railroad came to Port Washington in 1898, the center of town was the shoreline. On the north end, local commerce centered around the Mill Pond and the Hotel Renwick (the same building currently occupied by Diwan). Commercial life stretched southward where several boatyards thrived near where Manhasset Bay Yacht Club is today. In between these points were fishing shacks, tidal mills, boat building and repair facilities, a fish market, a bicycle shop, steamship docks and the usual cast of characters that made up many small shore villages on Long Island.
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By 1872, the Civil War of the previous decade was just beginning to recede into memory, even though it had been (and remains today) the deadliest and most costly war in American history. A young man named Peter Hults, who had moved to Port with his brothers Issac, William and Jacob from City Island, had an idea. He would abandon his earlier attempts at oystering, and join his brothers in local construction work. It was in that year that Peter Hults built our town’s first hotel, The Port Washington Hotel, complete with its own dock, on the shore road across from the entrance of today’s Town Dock. [For today’s reference, as you face the road from the Town Dock’s entrance, it was located just to the left of the present home of Daniel Gale Realty.]
The Port Washington Hotel did a solid business for more than 20 years. In 1895 when Peter Hults died, it was sold to Charles Heubner who operated it as Heubner’s Hotel for a
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