Sometime in late 1961, I learned that a new house was to be built across the street from my family’s home on Ocean Avenue in East Hampton Village. I believe my father, Robert Reutershan, brokered the sale of a parcel that had been subdivided from the massive Maidstone Hall estate, on the corner of Terbell and Ocean, to a New York lawyer, Sy Chalif.
Growing up in a real estate family and having already lived in several 18th and 19th-century East Hampton houses, I was excited to see what would develop.
What developed was Julian and Barbara Neski’s modernist 1964 Chalif House, described so well by Alastair Gordon in the Aug. 28 issue, and for me triggering a flood of memories.
At that time very little new construction was happening in this area of town. To a young boy, what could be more interesting and fun than heavy equipment, climbing mountains of soil, and launching bombs of dirt at imagined attacking enemies?
Terbell Lane was a funny little street. On the north corner of its entrance was a small vacant lot thickly overgrown with spindly, prickly honey locust trees. Having felt the thorns on several occasions, it was a property hard to forget. Farther in on the right was the entrance to the architect Walter Brady’s Maidstone Hall, formerly the Terbell House, then a 10-plus-acre estate featuring a huge white mansion and numerous outbuildings, including a small structure on its southern edge that probably housed various servants in earlier days.
At that time, this small house was occupied by a grandfather of one of my Most Holy Trinity schoolmates, a local man who served as the caretaker of the estate. Every fall, a large open trailer would be pulled into the driveway, full to the brim with locally dredged scallops. For hours without end, he, like many other local men and women, would shuck countless quarts of bay scallops — many of which ended up on our dining table.
Across the eastern end of the property were many acres of tall grass — probably the location of the home’s original horse paddocks. Beyond to the east and overlooking Hook Pond was another large home, abandoned and ransacked by vandals. At the north end of Terbell was another house also backing onto Hook Pond. I remember it was local knowledge that its owner would pay a $1 “bounty” for each snapping turtle head delivered to his door. Sadly, I never caught one to claim such a princely sum.
From the start, I knew it was not to be an ordinary house. During construction sometime in 1962-63, my siblings and I first met Sy and Ronnie Chalif and their young son, John. Sixty years later, I have vivid memories of this lovely family. Sy was a soft-spoken, thoughtful, intelligent man. Ronnie was a creative artist. She was then experimenting in Op Art — producing wonderful geometric paintings. I remember her taking the time to explain to me both her art and the current movements in modern art that she was then practicing. Ronnie was also an incredible cook. To this day, one of my family’s treasured “receipts” is “Ronnie Chalif’s Quiche,” a delicacy that’s been faithfully served over the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays for the past half-century.
Soon after settling in, Sy decided that young John needed his own house. At the rear of the property was an overgrown strip separating the property from the abandoned mansion to the east. A suitable tree was identified and work on a spacious tree house commenced. I believe that there were still wood scraps left over from the main houses’ construction, and these were supplemented with new materials from the East Hampton Lumber Yard. Over many weekends I helped to plan and saw and nail until it was finished. To youngsters, the tree house far surpassed the Neski masterpiece.
There are so many stories of the Chalifs and my family and all the times spent in and around this wonderful home. From numerous childhood adventures across countless winter-abandoned estates, to Ronnie’s afternoon snacks, to regular babysitting duties, it was a wonderful time fondly remembered.
My first home was the 18th-century Hiram Sanford House at 13 Egypt Lane, which now shares its half-acre lot with a recent modernist container home designed by Tom Morbitzer of Ammor Architecture. We soon moved to the 1910 Edward Gay House at 38 Hunting Lane, which my mother later confided to me was haunted by an eccentric “electro shock” doctor who died sometime before the war. This house, too, has been extensively renovated. My father and mother subdivided the architect James L’Hommedieu’s Brown House estate on Ocean Avenue and remodeled its carriage house using a local architectural icon, Alfred Scheffer. Later we lived in the Woodhouse mansion Greycroft at 63 Hunting Lane, which was restored by Robert A.M. Stern in the late 1980s.
For the past 40 years, I have been very active in the planning, development, or redevelopment of numerous iconic buildings. Working in the historic centers of London and Washington, D.C., the requirement to acknowledge, respect, and preserve the important elements of a historic site has always been close at hand and to my heart. I have been fortunate to have collaborated with some of the world’s best architects and architectural practices, including Bruce Graham and David Childs of SOM, Gene Kohn, Bill Pedersen, and Arthur May of Kohn Pedersen Fox, Jim Freed and Charles Young of Pei Cobb Freed, Gyo Obata of HOK, Cesar Pelli, Arthur Cotton Moore, and the renowned engineer Leslie Robertson.
My relationship with these and other great minds can be adequately described as “learning at the feet of masters.” Much of the knowledge and understanding imparted by them and their talented teams of associates and consultants has focused on how to and how not to redevelop properties of great historic value.
Over the years, it has become increasingly clear to me that art and architecture constitute the pinnacle of human endeavor. Throughout history, great civilizations and their citizens have left their mark through creating, decorating, and refurbishing the centers of mankind. Like many of the great metropolitan cities, East Hampton has again become one of the world’s centers for the contemporary expression of some of mankind’s greatest talents.
The Neskis’ Chalif House falls within this category. Even as a youngster, I realized the importance of this unusual but brilliant reconfiguration of earlier East Hampton building forms. My brain at that time was being rapidly transformed by the changes to postwar mankind’s world and worldview. The passage of time has only served to reinforce and expand these earliest thoughts.
A friend from Coach Kiernan’s Boys Club, Stephen Scull, would often invite me to his parents’ house on Georgica Lane for lunch and a swim in their pool. I was taken then by his family’s collection of work by Warhol, Lichtenstein, Johns, Twombly, and Rauschenberg. These artworks seemed to an 11-year-old East Hampton kid to be somewhat odd but were, nevertheless, like Ronnie Chalif’s Op Art, strangely captivating. In 1963, the Neskis’ Chalif House, like these artworks, was an almost unrecognized precursor of new and gigantic waves that were soon to engulf the worlds of art and architecture.
Today, while the Chalif House sits in the middle of the Ocean Avenue Historic District, it enjoys no extraordinary historic protection. This is because of its status as a “non-contributing building.” Historic districts typically focus on a “period of significance,” usually within a fairly tight time frame, and then usually only on those structures best exemplifying that particular stylistic period.
Given East Hampton’s ongoing loss of significant modernist buildings, as cited by Alastair Gordon and others, perhaps it is time to rethink the need to protect these irreplaceable cultural assets. Perhaps the village and town should commission Mr. Gordon to prepare a detailed report that could become the underpinning of a modernist overlay district encompassing all or most of the remaining culturally significant properties.
Why, you ask?
Simply put, so that in another hundred years, another old codger like me can reminisce about his childhood growing up among the important cultural symbols of another age then passed.
Chris Reutershan lives in Bel Air, Md.