Traffic has been heavy for February on Lazy Point Road after word got out that a much-photographed house on pilings had at long last collapsed into the bay.
Fallen houses have always drawn crowds. There is something in the way a thing of such apparent permanence succumbs that stirs doubts about our own misplaced sense of immortality. Memory, too, is fleeting; the Mulford Lane house now at rest amid the salt ice is not the first to have fallen there.
Long before social media and especially the Montauk photographer James Katsipis made the house famous, another one out on Mulford Lane, became undermined by erosion and was removed by the Town of East Hampton.
It was the winter of 2000-1 when Don Sharkey, the town building inspector, said that the house at 159 Mulford Lane, by then over water even at low tide, had to come down. Its owners, Barbara and Gerry Preiser, balked so the town board voted to hire someone to do the work and bill the Preisers for the job after the fact.
There was already bad blood: A year earlier, the town cited the couple for having work done on the house without permits and for not having a certificate of occupancy. The town sued after the Preisers refused to pay the roughly $4,000 cost of demolition. In turn, the Preisers sued the town, seeking damages for the loss of their house even though it had been uninhabitable.
The parties settled about nine months later, with the town accepting the now-mostly underwater property as a gift and absolving the Preisers of the demo cost and about $3,600 in back taxes they owed. That parcel now is bay bottom, too, well more than 100 feet from the shore. In a northerly wind, waves break on the next two houses landward.
Mulford Lane is part of a private subdivision and in theory open only to its residents. That had not stopped curious drivers from heading down to have a look. Instagram comments this week have lamented the loss of an icon, but it, too, will be forgotten soon enough.