A much-photographed house on stilts that was surrounded by water since around 2004 has fallen into Gardiner’s Bay.
The pilings holding the abandoned house, perched off the end of Mulford Lane on Napeague, snapped on Saturday night, dropping it into the frozen water.
“It’s the end of an era for sure,” said Nancy Atlas, whose family owns a house on the street. She said a neighbor told her when it happened.
A steady stream of people stopped by on Sunday and throughout the week to see it for themselves, and on social media many lamented the loss of the iconic structure that was a kind of local landmark.
The owner of the property — .0056 acre at what was once 163 Mulford Lane — is listed in town records as Gary Ryan, with Brooklyn and Manhattan addresses. Mr. Ryan pays taxes on the property, which is classified as vacant.
“When your property goes underwater it no longer exists in the eyes of the law,” said Jim Grimes, a deputy clerk of the East Hampton Town Trustees. The trustees own much of the underwater land in East Hampton Town, but not in this particular spot.
The beach there used to be significantly wider, said John Aldred, the trustees’ other deputy clerk, but erosion has been an ongoing problem.
“That house used to be the second house in, not the first,” Mr. Grimes said, adding that the beach has been “losing ground for quite a while.”
In 2001, after the town building inspector notified the owners of 159 Mulford Lane, just west of number 163, that the building on the property was unsafe and “in immediate danger of failure or collapse,” the town had the house there demolished and removed at the owners’ expense, according to town records. The cost at the time was $3,950.
Two years later, the owners donated the watery property to the town and the debt for demolition was forgiven.
As for #163, Mr. Grimes said that at one point, Mr. Ryan attempted to sell the property to the town, but the deal fell through.
It is unlikely the property has been insured in the two decades it has spent submerged.
“It’s sad that this was not addressed earlier,” Mr. Grimes said. “Once the ice melts, it’s going to become a hazard.”
There are questions about ownership and who would be responsible for the cleanup now that the building is in the water. In several locations in town, he said, the trustees sold to the mean high water mark, meaning property owners were deeded the land along with the beaches. This appears to be the case here, he added.
“The town or state is likely going to get stuck with the bill,” Mr. Grimes guessed, since that is the case with abandoned boats that sometimes become a problem in town-owned marinas.
While erosion is certainly the culprit when it comes to the loss of the beach, in the case of the house, high winds and a northeaster are more likely to be what finally “took it out,” said Mr. Aldred.
An ongoing effort by residents of the area to curtail erosion has had “inconclusive results,” according to Mr. Aldred. Trustees approved a plan back in 2020 to drive well pipes down into the sand. The pipes would draw water in and dry the beach out.
It’s possible that ongoing efforts to reopen the east channel in Napeague Harbor could assist in rebuilding the beach there, Mr. Grimes said. (A story on this effort appears elsewhere in today’s paper.) Re-establishing the east channel and making the existing west channel a dreen, or drainage tube, would create spoils that could be used on the beach near Mulford Avenue.
With Reporting by David E. Rattray
