Leon Lefkowitz always wanted to run a summer camp. Growing up in Hazleton, Pa., in the Poconos, the former Eagle Scout, who was a teacher and chairman of the history department at Valley Stream High School, had a vision. He would build a beautiful camp somewhere on Long Island — he just wasn’t exactly sure where. So, in 1963, together with his wife, Carmen, and their four children, he began scouting out locations.
No one knows how the couple made it out to Montauk. They did not have any obvious connections to the East End, but in 1963 they stood on the western shore of Fort Pond looking out across the bucolic lake at the then-abandoned Montauk Manor and decided that they had found their campground: four acres of vacant, pristine lakefront land nestled between what is now Carol Morrison Park to the east and another piece of vacant property owned by the Town of East Hampton to the west, making up an 11-acre peninsula into Fort Pond and the largest parcel on the lake.
While Leon had grown up in the country, Carmen Garofolo was a city girl. Her family had emigrated from Naples and Sicily in the early 20th century and Carmen was raised in Manhattan, primarily by her aunts, who were seamstresses. Carmen and Leon met in the library at Columbia University in the 1950s. They were soon married and moved their family to Westbury, where she became a speech pathologist in the school system and he taught history at Valley Stream.
With a loan of $2,000 toward the down payment from her aunts, the couple bought the Fort Pond property from George Androtti and set out to build their now-shared dream.
In 1965, Pathfinder Country Day Camp opened to 25 campers, becoming the first summer camp of its kind in Montauk (and possibly on the entire South Fork).
Over the next two decades they constructed a house for the family and accessory buildings to hold all the arts, crafts, balls, bats, kayaks, paddles, rafts, life preservers, go-karts, bows and arrows, BB guns, tables, chairs, movie projectors, and everything else needed to run a day camp. A building large enough to hold up to 150 young campers and staff when it rained. A basketball court, baseball field, and a playground. Eventually, an in-ground pool (chemicals, skimmers, changing rooms, first-aid kits) was added. For years Leon and Carmen would run back and forth on weekends between their home in Westbury and their dream in Montauk, working on “camp stuff.”
For more than 60 years, the couple, and then their daughter Nancy Burns and her husband, Gary, would continue to operate Montauk’s own version of Neverland on Fort Pond. In those early days, Leon and Carmen did it all. Leon would drive the bus through the neighborhoods of Montauk picking up campers. Carmen would make sandwiches for the campers and for many years taught them to how to swim in the lake. The camp initially employed 15 high school students as counselors. This year the camper count reached almost 350, and there were 65 people on staff, many of whom once had been campers there themselves.
Nancy had worked at Pathfinder since she was 14 years old. In 2006 she and her husband, Gary, bought out her family, and have continued to run the camp and honor the institution created by her parents. And an “institution” is what they built, on a level with Montauk’s most famous icons, but unless you had been a camper, you might not even have known where Pathfinder was — hidden down a small and rutted dirt road off Second House Road, and there were no signs advertising it. If you knew where it was, you were either a camper, working there, or friends with the four Lefkowitz kids. In my nearly 60 years of living in Montauk, driving down Second House Road hundreds if not thousands of times, it wasn’t until my granddaughter began attending the camp last year that I really learned where this jewel was located.
Over the decades, thousands of children, perhaps tens of thousands, played on the grounds. The children of famous (and sometimes anonymous) celebrities (Jerry Seinfeld, Robert De Niro, Ralph Lauren, Cynthia Nixon, Calvin Klein, Liev Schreiber, Naomi Watts) mixed in with locals and vacationers from New York and the entire East Coast. In those wonderfully dangerous, unregulated decades of the ‘60s and ‘70s, Pathfinder certainly kept its charges entertained. In addition to the five camp buildings, Leon thought it was a good idea to have a go-kart track built around the camp, and the kids would race the karts over the property, sans helmets. Fridays were for hamburgers, frankfurters, and ice cream. They would build huge bonfires and have fairs to raise money for the Montauk Fire Department and the Shriners Hospital.
For a couple of years, Leon had a shooting range on the property and the older campers were allowed to fire away with BB guns and bows and arrows. Dancers from the Shinnecock Nation and other tribes regularly came to Pathfinder to entertain the campers. An entire building was filled with every kind of art and craft imaginable. It was everything a kid could want in a perfect summer vacation.
Children left home with hair combed and parted, clothes neat and tidy, and returned grass-stained and happily caked in mud. And no one ever complained.
Carmen died in 1990, and Leon in 2015. Nancy and Gary have owned and operated Pathfinder for 20 years, continuing the traditions established by her parents. But now it’s their time to retire with their five dogs to Florida or Puerto Rico or some other tropical locale. Fortunately for all of Montauk, they resisted the temptation to sell to a developer and instead sold the property to the Town of East Hampton, which plans to license the operation and continue to offer a camp, hopefully for another 60 years, the way Leon and Carmen would have wanted it.
So, picture nearly 200 children of all ages, swirling around the campground, ricocheting like pinballs among the arts and crafts building, the basketball court, the playground, and the pool, swimming and kayaking in the lake while their teenage counselors try to manage the chaos. It’s a magical place to spend a sunny Friday afternoon in July, watching the swarm of children and hearing the chirping voices as they race back and forth across the camp. It is one of the last and most enduring pieces of “Old Montauk,” the Montauk that predates the invasion of the mansion-building billionaires and the electric bike blitz, a Montauk that is fading in our collective rearview mirror. It’s the vision that brought Leon and Carmen to Montauk six decades ago. A Montauk that will still remain but never be the same as when Leon and Carmen built their dream on the lake.
I emailed Nancy two weeks ago. The property had already been transferred to the town, which was in the process of soliciting bids to run a day camp for next year. Nancy and Gary and the five dogs were already gone, down to Florida and onto the rest of their lives. Nancy said it was “bittersweet,” which couldn’t have begun to describe the feeling of walking away from the Disney World created by her parents six decades ago and run by her for 20 years, where she had spent virtually her whole adult life.
I wanted to see it one more time, so I drove out to the camp last week to have a last look around. You could feel that fall was here, with winter coming up fast behind it. There wasn’t a soul on the property, and a stiff breeze blew through the trees with no one to watch it pass or listen to its dry raspy voice. As I walked the property, I could hear hamburgers sizzling on grills and kids splashing in pools and whistles blowing and kids laughing and shrieking with joy and the sounds of a dream that Leon and Carmen had built on the empty lake so long ago.
Michael Angiulo is a retired attorney living in East Hampton. His family has owned property in Montauk since 1968. He represented Leon and Carmen Lefkowitz in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and knew all of the Lefkowitz children.