In 'Port + Harbor,' Artist Sabina Streeter Advocates Preservation

“It has been said that, at its best, preservation engages the past in a conversation with the present over a mutual concern for the future.”

— William Murtagh, first “Keeper of the Records” for the National Register of Historic Places

Sabina Streeter has lived in Sag Harbor for a long time. Decades, in fact. And while there has always been some renovation and rebuilding going on around the village, what she has witnessed in the last decade or so has greatly alarmed her.

“In 2013 it started,” she recalled in a recent phone interview. “I saw one historic house gutted after another, and not a doorknob left.

“Where are the ghosts going?”

Streeter, an artist, had long been captivated by Sag Harbor’s residents from a century or more ago and had taken the opportunity to pay tribute to them by capturing their imagined likenesses in a series of portraits. In 2014, many of her portraits of the village’s former figures went on view in “Captains, Mates, and Widows,” an exhibition at the Sag Harbor Whaling and Historical Museum.

Then, she was asked to create a similar exhibition for Floyd Memorial Library in Greenport.

“But I kind of lost my mojo in that department,” Streeter confessed, “and I thought the more pressing point is the preservation of buildings.”

Which is why Streeter has now turned her sights to the state of the actual homes in which many former village residents once lived. In “Port + Harbor: Preservation, Not Speculation,” an exhibition running through February 4 at Floyd Memorial Library, Streeter is displaying new portraits of some of Greenport’s historic residents alongside starker works of Sag Harbor that offer a comparative architectural and historic profile of two maritime villages with a similar history that are possibly on the same — and not entirely optimistic — trajectory for the future.

Like her previous exhibitions focusing on past Sag Harbor residents, “Port + Harbor” includes Streeter’s depictions of well-known Greenport denizens of previous times. Among them are: Sarah Jackson Adams (1846-1937), a suffragette and president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union who commissioned the building of Greenport Auditorium; Grace Floyd (1854-1949), the founder of Floyd Memorial Library; Portuguese whaler Manuel Claudio (1839-1918) who, in 1870, established a saloon that still bears his name; and Margaret E. Ireland (d. 1962), a newspaper correspondent whose Greenport home is now the site of the Stirling Historical Society.

But because the preservation of old homes has become a more dire concern for Streeter in recent years, it is the focus of much of the new artwork she created for the library show. These are pieces that highlight a less romantic aspect of a port town’s success — specifically, what happens when big money moves in and starts changing the character of the place.

That’s a lot of what Streeter has witnessed time and time again in Sag Harbor. We’re talking overbuilding on small lots, whole cloth gutting of homes, and the rampant discarding of historic materials and architectural elements in favor of new building supplies.

“Original materials are much higher in quality. To get the same level of what stood for 250 years is very difficult,” Streeter said. “Another problem is there are no more craftsmen. It’s not lucrative and most people are just looking to flip the houses.”

The Floyd Memorial Library exhibition documents a tale of two villages — Greenport and Sag Harbor — through Streeter’s paintings, drawings, collages and photographs, sometimes using the same materials employed in construction and architecture, including vellum, blueprint and plywood. While Streeter does share those idealized portraits of past Greenport residents, she doesn’t shy away from presenting images of the not so pretty destruction of historic homes in Sag Harbor undergoing gut renovations.

“I walked around Sag Harbor and sketched construction sites in my frustration,” Streeter said. “Some of them are cruel images and look like ruins. Out of these sketches morphed paintings. I realized every site had a port-a-potty and a dumpster on it. There are cranes, wrecking balls, dumpsters and port-a-potties — the four horsemen of the apocalypse.”

Streeter first came to Sag Harbor in the 1980s, and in the early 1990s, set out to buy a home in the village. Like many who were attracted to the area in that era, she loved the idea of buying the kind of old, historic home that made Sag Harbor the walkable, human-scale village that it has always been.

“My house was pretty much authentic, with outbuildings,” she said of her property. “I understand that people don’t always want to live like that — this is my personal romantic eccentricism. At the time, people said to me, ‘If you want a pool, you cannot have a pool.’ That was fine. I wanted the barn and the neighbors close by with, no pool so it stays as is — historic.

“That’s what we all thought.”

But that mentality has shifted with time, and Streeter finds that an increasing number of new arrivals are looking to tear down what many originally found charming about the village in favor of building something new.

“The house next to me was left exposed for three months then it conveniently collapsed. It was probably built in the 1890s. It was small — really tiny — and I totally understand having to put in an addition,” Streeter said. “But now, it’s 12 feet away from me, and a spec house.

“Why does someone want be in the historic district if you don’t want to live in that scale? Or have neighbors close by?” she continued. “At the end of the day, these families destroyed the old houses and bent them to their wills and needs, with media rooms and other amenities. Then after COVID, the big development money came in.

“It resonates a lot,” Streeter added. “The issues Greenport is dealing with are not as extreme as Sag Harbor, but they are the same issues. Greenport is not where Sag Harbor is yet, but they have to not make the same mistakes we did.”

“Port + Harbor: Preservation, Not Speculation,” an exhibition by Sabina Streeter, remains on view through February 4, at Floyd Memorial Library, 539 First Street, Greenport. For details, visit floydmemoriallibrary.org.