Fowler Estate Sells For $15.8 Million

Eight-figure transactions have continued in the past couple of weeks, especially in the Village of Southampton. Topping that short list is 83 Fowler Street at $15.8 million. We’re told that the property has “incredible potential for ideal positioning of a swimming pool, pool house, and tennis court” and that it is “a sound investment for this prime village location.”

You know you’re in a hot real estate area when almost $16 million is only an “investment” in “potential.” However, a big plus here is the property on Fowler Street is 4.4 acres south of the highway. The 5,390-square-foot house has 3 bedrooms and 6 bathrooms, and there is a fireplace. The seller is Margaret H. Fowler, who, obviously, has a street named after the family. In fact, there are also a Fowler’s Beach and Fowler Farms. The family has been farming that neck of the woods for generations—but that may not be the potential the new investor is looking for. The buyer is listed rather blandly as 83 Fowler LLC.

Not quite as impressive is $14,500,000 but it’s still a lot of dough, and that is what was just paid for 1990 Meadow Lane. The former owner was the Janet Salz 2009 Trust, which we wrote about a few weeks ago. The house is 7,448 square feet on 8.3 acres with 3,300 feet of direct oceanfront. There is a 360-degree unobstructed view of the ocean and Shinnecock Bay, and there are 5 bedrooms, 5 full and 2 half-baths, a formal dining room, a library elevator and a three-car garage. And, of course, an in-ground pool.

Sam Salz was born in Vienna in March 1894. He served in the Austrian army during World War I, then went to Paris to become a great painter like Picasso, Chagall and Matisse. That didn’t work out as planned, but Mr. Salz did the next best thing—he befriended these artists and mounted exhibitions of their work. By 1923, he was a successful art dealer in Cologne. Fifteen years later, with Nazism expanding, he moved to New York, where he continued to sell the works of European painters whose prices kept going up, especially in the 1960s and ’70s. His clients included the Rockefeller family and film stars like Edward G. Robinson. Mr. Salz was 87 when he died in March 1981. By that time he had two sons from a previous marriage and was married to Janet Reisner Traeger-Salz, who continued his art dealership company. She died, also in March, in 2015 at age 98, and the heirs began preparing to put the Southampton manse on the market.

That December, the stepsons, Marc and Andre Salz, sued the widow’s estate, alleging that Ms. Traeger-Salz took at least three paintings—a Claude Monet, a Pierre-Auguste Renoir and an Edgar Degas—from their father’s estate and sold them for millions of dollars, pocketing the profits instead of sharing them with the estate—meaning, of course, Marc and Andre.

Another Southampton Village property, 63 Meadowmere Place, almost made the eight-figure cut, selling for $9,750,000. And a tip of the hat to the Village of East Hampton, which just saw 59 Hither Lane achieve that milestone, at $10,555,000.