The Disappearing Boathouse

Rails still in place, MB is on the cradle to be pulled up to the boathouse. Photo taken before Judge Medina's mother, who lived in the house next door, passed away in 1954. Thereafter the attic was converted into living space with 2 BRs and 1 bath, and dormer windows.Point House next door still had one remaining 3-story cottage, whereas it once had two but one cottage destroyed in '38 hurricane.

By Michelle Trauring

For centuries, the lifeblood of Southampton Town has flowed through its waterways.

Dating back to 1640, the region’s earliest economic ventures were interwoven with the sea, its shores and harvestable life — and with that came a need to navigate them. A busy working waterfront soon brimmed with activity, from catching finfish and shellfish to rum running and trade, and eventually boating for fun.

But fishermen and recreational boaters alike needed convenient places to park.

Up and down creeks and canals, they began to build working boathouses — structures where they could store their vessels, repair and maintain them, and if there was a second story, even socialize upstairs.

West of the Shinnecock Canal, they dotted the shorelines, until the Hurricane of 1938 wiped many of them out. Some were rebuilt, but judging by the number left today, the majority were not. Of those, many have fallen into disrepair or are unusable — and a piece of the East End waterfront history is slowly disappearing with them.

“The thing is that there just aren’t very many of them,” says Aram Terchunian of First Coastal Corporation, a Westhampton Beach consulting firm that has helped rebuild and obtain permits to repair boathouses. “They’re like lighthouses — they’re just few and far between — and to my knowledge, there haven’t been any new ones built, literally, in the last couple of decades.”

“The best way to describe them is as ‘legacy structures,’” he adds, “and many of them have a very charming legacy, if you will.”

The world’s largest collection of boathouses lives in the northern region of Norway, where they are called “naust,” derived from the Old Norse word “naverstað.” Many of these stone and timber structures date back hundreds of years, and some of them originally harbored Viking longboats. Open to the sea, their floors would be a simple continuation of the beach sand, or they might be dug down to allow for a boat to sail directly into the shelter.

In Philadelphia, Boathouse Row — a stretch of 15 boathouses — is on the National Register of Historic Places. All along the Mississippi River, boathouses pepper the shoreline, hearkening back to the days of Mark Twain and steamboats. And across upstate New York, boathouses are an institution, circling lakes nestled in the Adirondack Mountains and along the western border of the state.

But on the East End, where they were once ubiquitous, boathouses are an endangered species — strictly preexisting, nonconforming structures, built long before zoning codes and tidal wetland regulations were put into place that ban construction up against the waterfront. And for that reason, it is “very hard, extremely hard” to bring them back to life, Terchunian says.

“It’s like everything else in the world: If it’s important, you’ve gotta take care of it,” he says, “because somebody might tell you, ‘You can’t have it again.’”

In January, Robert Murray, a licensed associate real estate broker with Corcoran, sold a six-bedroom, seven-bath beach house in Quiogue — with views overlooking Quantuck Bay from nearly every room — for just over $7.3 million. But what was most interesting about this property at 541 Main Street, which was co-listed with his wife and daughter, Meredith and Amanda Murray, is that it came with one of the few operational boathouses left in the area, he says.

“But it does sit on a very shallow bay, so you’re going to get some small boats that could be in there,” Murray says. “No big boats.”

In Quogue, the boathouse across from the home at 122 Dune Road is no longer in use, and neither is the one at 32 Beach Lane on Ogden Pond, Murray says, whereas the boathouse at 81 Dune Road has been completely redone since the property sold in 2011 and is operational, as is the one at 14 Cricket Path in Remsenburg, he reports.

Murray remembers two boathouses in particular from his childhood — the first at 55 Dune Road in Quogue, which was owned by a commercial fisherman who would rent out snapper poles in the 1950s, he says. The other was at 18 Shinnecock Road in East Quogue, where he would watch the owner work on his boat. In the years since, the latter boathouse has been turned into a guest house or workshop, he says.

“They’re changing from boathouses to garages to clubhouses to just decorative boathouses,” he says. “They’re just disappearing because the water depth is getting shallower, but anybody with an affection for boathouses is trying to keep the character of them. I haven’t seen any of them change in terms of looks.”

On the banks of Quantuck Bay, the estate at 66 Seafield Lane in Westhampton Beach was once known as the Atwater Estate — and its boathouse was the birthplace of the “SS” class sailboat in 1908, Murray says. This class of boat, designed specifically for the shallow waters of Shinnecock and Quantuck bays, is still sailed in these waters and is the oldest one-design class in the country that is still sailed in competition. But that boathouse has since been turned into a pool house.

“That was a very large boathouse that could accommodate a 63-foot boat at one point,” Murray says. “No longer.”

Murray married into the Medina family and inherited a boathouse in the process. Located at 1 Apaucuck Point in Westhampton, as part of the Judge Medina estate, the approximately 30-foot-by-40-foot building was destroyed during the Hurricane of 1938 and rebuilt a year later as a working boathouse, he says, “where boats were pulled out of the water on iron rails and rolled into the boathouse to be stored for the winter.”

“There was a potbelly stove in the boathouse so that the caretaker, Captain Fred, could work on painting and repairing the boats for the next season,” he says.

Decades later, by 2010, the potbelly stove was no longer and the stored boats consisted of a rowing shell and some surfboards, Murray says. “The atmosphere and smell of the boathouse is still very much a part of the boathouse, but it now has become a ‘party house!’”

Three years later, the family sold and the new owners have kept it “pretty much the same way, using it as a workshop,” Murray says. While the rails are gone, it still has all of its old bones, complete with a trap door to let the water out when it floods — keeping with the tradition of these largely west-of-the-canal features, he says.

“What’s unique about west of the canal is we have canals. We have waterways that go down creeks — or what I call ‘cricks,’” Murray says with a laugh. “If you’re in Southampton, they don’t have that. There’s the open bay, but you don’t usually build a boathouse on an open bay. You want some protection. East of the canal, there just aren’t that many locations where you would put a boathouse.”

A major exception is the Tupper Boathouse, a free-standing icon of marine history that Southampton Town purchased for $3.15 million in 2003. Originally constructed by father and son Frank and Edwin “Ned” Tupper between 1929 and 1931, the building was sold in 1959 and transformed by various owners into a series of unique social destinations — the last of which was Conscience Point Inn, where publicist Lizzie Grubman famously backed her SUV into a crowd of 16 people outside the boathouse.

After the town stepped in, the Tupper Boathouse was renovated starting in 2020 using $450,000 in Superstorm Sandy disaster relief funding — joining the roster of surviving boathouses on the East End, many of which are vestiges of another time.

“It started as, ‘We need this to survive. We need it for our economy, for our business, for our livelihood,’” Terchunian says of the boathouses, “and then it became architectural, the same way windmills did — or it became more residential, let’s put it that way.”

With the rise of private boathouses, working boathouses faded, he explained, and the reason was simple: The Long Island Rail Road arrived in Southampton Town in the late 19th century.

“They didn’t have to get their product by water anymore,” Terchunian says. “So beginning in the 1890s, when the railroad came through Manorville, you start to see these things disappear, and they go into disrepair because they’re not being used.”

But despite the railway revolution, shallower canals and bays, and the sheer upkeep boathouses require, some homeowners refuse to part ways with them — which is wise, whether they’re “boat people” or not, Murray says.

“There’s a lot of nostalgia involved with it, definitely,” he says. “It’s a structure that once you take one down, you’re never going to be able to build it again.”

By Michelle Trauring

For centuries, the lifeblood of Southampton Town has flowed through its waterways.

Dating back to 1640, the region’s earliest economic ventures were interwoven with the sea, its shores and harvestable life — and with that came a need to navigate them. A busy working waterfront soon brimmed with activity, from catching finfish and shellfish to rum running and trade, and eventually boating for fun.

But fishermen and recreational boaters alike needed convenient places to park.

Up and down creeks and canals, they began to build working boathouses — structures where they could store their vessels, repair and maintain them, and if there was a second story, even socialize upstairs.

West of the Shinnecock Canal, they dotted the shorelines, until the Hurricane of 1938 wiped many of them out. Some were rebuilt, but judging by the number left today, the majority were not. Of those, many have fallen into disrepair or are unusable — and a piece of the East End waterfront history is slowly disappearing with them.

“The thing is that there just aren’t very many of them,” says Aram Terchunian of First Coastal Corporation, a Westhampton Beach consulting firm that has helped rebuild and obtain permits to repair boathouses. “They’re like lighthouses — they’re just few and far between — and to my knowledge, there haven’t been any new ones built, literally, in the last couple of decades.”

“The best way to describe them is as ‘legacy structures,’” he adds, “and many of them have a very charming legacy, if you will.”

The world’s largest collection of boathouses lives in the northern region of Norway, where they are called “naust,” derived from the Old Norse word “naverstað.” Many of these stone and timber structures date back hundreds of years, and some of them originally harbored Viking longboats. Open to the sea, their floors would be a simple continuation of the beach sand, or they might be dug down to allow for a boat to sail directly into the shelter.

In Philadelphia, Boathouse Row — a stretch of 15 boathouses — is on the National Register of Historic Places. All along the Mississippi River, boathouses pepper the shoreline, hearkening back to the days of Mark Twain and steamboats. And across upstate New York, boathouses are an institution, circling lakes nestled in the Adirondack Mountains and along the western border of the state.

But on the East End, where they were once ubiquitous, boathouses are an endangered species — strictly preexisting, nonconforming structures, built long before zoning codes and tidal wetland regulations were put into place that ban construction up against the waterfront. And for that reason, it is “very hard, extremely hard” to bring them back to life, Terchunian says.

“It’s like everything else in the world: If it’s important, you’ve gotta take care of it,” he says, “because somebody might tell you, ‘You can’t have it again.’”

In January, Robert Murray, a licensed associate real estate broker with Corcoran, sold a six-bedroom, seven-bath beach house in Quiogue — with views overlooking Quantuck Bay from nearly every room — for just over $7.3 million. But what was most interesting about this property at 541 Main Street, which was co-listed with his wife and daughter, Meredith and Amanda Murray, is that it came with one of the few operational boathouses left in the area, he says.

“But it does sit on a very shallow bay, so you’re going to get some small boats that could be in there,” Murray says. “No big boats.”

In Quogue, the boathouse across from the home at 122 Dune Road is no longer in use, and neither is the one at 32 Beach Lane on Ogden Pond, Murray says, whereas the boathouse at 81 Dune Road has been completely redone since the property sold in 2011 and is operational, as is the one at 14 Cricket Path in Remsenburg, he reports.

Murray remembers two boathouses in particular from his childhood — the first at 55 Dune Road in Quogue, which was owned by a commercial fisherman who would rent out snapper poles in the 1950s, he says. The other was at 18 Shinnecock Road in East Quogue, where he would watch the owner work on his boat. In the years since, the latter boathouse has been turned into a guest house or workshop, he says.

“They’re changing from boathouses to garages to clubhouses to just decorative boathouses,” he says. “They’re just disappearing because the water depth is getting shallower, but anybody with an affection for boathouses is trying to keep the character of them. I haven’t seen any of them change in terms of looks.”

On the banks of Quantuck Bay, the estate at 66 Seafield Lane in Westhampton Beach was once known as the Atwater Estate — and its boathouse was the birthplace of the “SS” class sailboat in 1908, Murray says. This class of boat, designed specifically for the shallow waters of Shinnecock and Quantuck bays, is still sailed in these waters and is the oldest one-design class in the country that is still sailed in competition. But that boathouse has since been turned into a pool house.

“That was a very large boathouse that could accommodate a 63-foot boat at one point,” Murray says. “No longer.”

Murray married into the Medina family and inherited a boathouse in the process. Located at 1 Apaucuck Point in Westhampton, as part of the Judge Medina estate, the approximately 30-foot-by-40-foot building was destroyed during the Hurricane of 1938 and rebuilt a year later as a working boathouse, he says, “where boats were pulled out of the water on iron rails and rolled into the boathouse to be stored for the winter.”

“There was a potbelly stove in the boathouse so that the caretaker, Captain Fred, could work on painting and repairing the boats for the next season,” he says.

Decades later, by 2010, the potbelly stove was no longer and the stored boats consisted of a rowing shell and some surfboards, Murray says. “The atmosphere and smell of the boathouse is still very much a part of the boathouse, but it now has become a ‘party house!’”

Three years later, the family sold and the new owners have kept it “pretty much the same way, using it as a workshop,” Murray says. While the rails are gone, it still has all of its old bones, complete with a trap door to let the water out when it floods — keeping with the tradition of these largely west-of-the-canal features, he says.

“What’s unique about west of the canal is we have canals. We have waterways that go down creeks — or what I call ‘cricks,’” Murray says with a laugh. “If you’re in Southampton, they don’t have that. There’s the open bay, but you don’t usually build a boathouse on an open bay. You want some protection. East of the canal, there just aren’t that many locations where you would put a boathouse.”

A major exception is the Tupper Boathouse, a free-standing icon of marine history that Southampton Town purchased for $3.15 million in 2003. Originally constructed by father and son Frank and Edwin “Ned” Tupper between 1929 and 1931, the building was sold in 1959 and transformed by various owners into a series of unique social destinations — the last of which was Conscience Point Inn, where publicist Lizzie Grubman famously backed her SUV into a crowd of 16 people outside the boathouse.

After the town stepped in, the Tupper Boathouse was renovated starting in 2020 using $450,000 in Superstorm Sandy disaster relief funding — joining the roster of surviving boathouses on the East End, many of which are vestiges of another time.

“It started as, ‘We need this to survive. We need it for our economy, for our business, for our livelihood,’” Terchunian says of the boathouses, “and then it became architectural, the same way windmills did — or it became more residential, let’s put it that way.”

With the rise of private boathouses, working boathouses faded, he explained, and the reason was simple: The Long Island Rail Road arrived in Southampton Town in the late 19th century.

“They didn’t have to get their product by water anymore,” Terchunian says. “So beginning in the 1890s, when the railroad came through Manorville, you start to see these things disappear, and they go into disrepair because they’re not being used.”

But despite the railway revolution, shallower canals and bays, and the sheer upkeep boathouses require, some homeowners refuse to part ways with them — which is wise, whether they’re “boat people” or not, Murray says.

“There’s a lot of nostalgia involved with it, definitely,” he says. “It’s a structure that once you take one down, you’re never going to be able to build it again.”

By Michelle Trauring

For centuries, the lifeblood of Southampton Town has flowed through its waterways.

Dating back to 1640, the region’s earliest economic ventures were interwoven with the sea, its shores and harvestable life — and with that came a need to navigate them. A busy working waterfront soon brimmed with activity, from catching finfish and shellfish to rum running and trade, and eventually boating for fun.

But fishermen and recreational boaters alike needed convenient places to park.

Up and down creeks and canals, they began to build working boathouses — structures where they could store their vessels, repair and maintain them, and if there was a second story, even socialize upstairs.

West of the Shinnecock Canal, they dotted the shorelines, until the Hurricane of 1938 wiped many of them out. Some were rebuilt, but judging by the number left today, the majority were not. Of those, many have fallen into disrepair or are unusable — and a piece of the East End waterfront history is slowly disappearing with them.

“The thing is that there just aren’t very many of them,” says Aram Terchunian of First Coastal Corporation, a Westhampton Beach consulting firm that has helped rebuild and obtain permits to repair boathouses. “They’re like lighthouses — they’re just few and far between — and to my knowledge, there haven’t been any new ones built, literally, in the last couple of decades.”

“The best way to describe them is as ‘legacy structures,’” he adds, “and many of them have a very charming legacy, if you will.”

The world’s largest collection of boathouses lives in the northern region of Norway, where they are called “naust,” derived from the Old Norse word “naverstað.” Many of these stone and timber structures date back hundreds of years, and some of them originally harbored Viking longboats. Open to the sea, their floors would be a simple continuation of the beach sand, or they might be dug down to allow for a boat to sail directly into the shelter.

In Philadelphia, Boathouse Row — a stretch of 15 boathouses — is on the National Register of Historic Places. All along the Mississippi River, boathouses pepper the shoreline, hearkening back to the days of Mark Twain and steamboats. And across upstate New York, boathouses are an institution, circling lakes nestled in the Adirondack Mountains and along the western border of the state.

But on the East End, where they were once ubiquitous, boathouses are an endangered species — strictly preexisting, nonconforming structures, built long before zoning codes and tidal wetland regulations were put into place that ban construction up against the waterfront. And for that reason, it is “very hard, extremely hard” to bring them back to life, Terchunian says.

“It’s like everything else in the world: If it’s important, you’ve gotta take care of it,” he says, “because somebody might tell you, ‘You can’t have it again.’”

In January, Robert Murray, a licensed associate real estate broker with Corcoran, sold a six-bedroom, seven-bath beach house in Quiogue — with views overlooking Quantuck Bay from nearly every room — for just over $7.3 million. But what was most interesting about this property at 541 Main Street, which was co-listed with his wife and daughter, Meredith and Amanda Murray, is that it came with one of the few operational boathouses left in the area, he says.

“But it does sit on a very shallow bay, so you’re going to get some small boats that could be in there,” Murray says. “No big boats.”

In Quogue, the boathouse across from the home at 122 Dune Road is no longer in use, and neither is the one at 32 Beach Lane on Ogden Pond, Murray says, whereas the boathouse at 81 Dune Road has been completely redone since the property sold in 2011 and is operational, as is the one at 14 Cricket Path in Remsenburg, he reports.

Murray remembers two boathouses in particular from his childhood — the first at 55 Dune Road in Quogue, which was owned by a commercial fisherman who would rent out snapper poles in the 1950s, he says. The other was at 18 Shinnecock Road in East Quogue, where he would watch the owner work on his boat. In the years since, the latter boathouse has been turned into a guest house or workshop, he says.

“They’re changing from boathouses to garages to clubhouses to just decorative boathouses,” he says. “They’re just disappearing because the water depth is getting shallower, but anybody with an affection for boathouses is trying to keep the character of them. I haven’t seen any of them change in terms of looks.”

On the banks of Quantuck Bay, the estate at 66 Seafield Lane in Westhampton Beach was once known as the Atwater Estate — and its boathouse was the birthplace of the “SS” class sailboat in 1908, Murray says. This class of boat, designed specifically for the shallow waters of Shinnecock and Quantuck bays, is still sailed in these waters and is the oldest one-design class in the country that is still sailed in competition. But that boathouse has since been turned into a pool house.

“That was a very large boathouse that could accommodate a 63-foot boat at one point,” Murray says. “No longer.”

Murray married into the Medina family and inherited a boathouse in the process. Located at 1 Apaucuck Point in Westhampton, as part of the Judge Medina estate, the approximately 30-foot-by-40-foot building was destroyed during the Hurricane of 1938 and rebuilt a year later as a working boathouse, he says, “where boats were pulled out of the water on iron rails and rolled into the boathouse to be stored for the winter.”

“There was a potbelly stove in the boathouse so that the caretaker, Captain Fred, could work on painting and repairing the boats for the next season,” he says.

Decades later, by 2010, the potbelly stove was no longer and the stored boats consisted of a rowing shell and some surfboards, Murray says. “The atmosphere and smell of the boathouse is still very much a part of the boathouse, but it now has become a ‘party house!’”

Three years later, the family sold and the new owners have kept it “pretty much the same way, using it as a workshop,” Murray says. While the rails are gone, it still has all of its old bones, complete with a trap door to let the water out when it floods — keeping with the tradition of these largely west-of-the-canal features, he says.

“What’s unique about west of the canal is we have canals. We have waterways that go down creeks — or what I call ‘cricks,’” Murray says with a laugh. “If you’re in Southampton, they don’t have that. There’s the open bay, but you don’t usually build a boathouse on an open bay. You want some protection. East of the canal, there just aren’t that many locations where you would put a boathouse.”

A major exception is the Tupper Boathouse, a free-standing icon of marine history that Southampton Town purchased for $3.15 million in 2003. Originally constructed by father and son Frank and Edwin “Ned” Tupper between 1929 and 1931, the building was sold in 1959 and transformed by various owners into a series of unique social destinations — the last of which was Conscience Point Inn, where publicist Lizzie Grubman famously backed her SUV into a crowd of 16 people outside the boathouse.

After the town stepped in, the Tupper Boathouse was renovated starting in 2020 using $450,000 in Superstorm Sandy disaster relief funding — joining the roster of surviving boathouses on the East End, many of which are vestiges of another time.

“It started as, ‘We need this to survive. We need it for our economy, for our business, for our livelihood,’” Terchunian says of the boathouses, “and then it became architectural, the same way windmills did — or it became more residential, let’s put it that way.”

With the rise of private boathouses, working boathouses faded, he explained, and the reason was simple: The Long Island Rail Road arrived in Southampton Town in the late 19th century.

“They didn’t have to get their product by water anymore,” Terchunian says. “So beginning in the 1890s, when the railroad came through Manorville, you start to see these things disappear, and they go into disrepair because they’re not being used.”

But despite the railway revolution, shallower canals and bays, and the sheer upkeep boathouses require, some homeowners refuse to part ways with them — which is wise, whether they’re “boat people” or not, Murray says.

“There’s a lot of nostalgia involved with it, definitely,” he says. “It’s a structure that once you take one down, you’re never going to be able to build it again.”

By Michelle Trauring

For centuries, the lifeblood of Southampton Town has flowed through its waterways.

Dating back to 1640, the region’s earliest economic ventures were interwoven with the sea, its shores and harvestable life — and with that came a need to navigate them. A busy working waterfront soon brimmed with activity, from catching finfish and shellfish to rum running and trade, and eventually boating for fun.

But fishermen and recreational boaters alike needed convenient places to park.

Up and down creeks and canals, they began to build working boathouses — structures where they could store their vessels, repair and maintain them, and if there was a second story, even socialize upstairs.

West of the Shinnecock Canal, they dotted the shorelines, until the Hurricane of 1938 wiped many of them out. Some were rebuilt, but judging by the number left today, the majority were not. Of those, many have fallen into disrepair or are unusable — and a piece of the East End waterfront history is slowly disappearing with them.

“The thing is that there just aren’t very many of them,” says Aram Terchunian of First Coastal Corporation, a Westhampton Beach consulting firm that has helped rebuild and obtain permits to repair boathouses. “They’re like lighthouses — they’re just few and far between — and to my knowledge, there haven’t been any new ones built, literally, in the last couple of decades.”

“The best way to describe them is as ‘legacy structures,’” he adds, “and many of them have a very charming legacy, if you will.”

The world’s largest collection of boathouses lives in the northern region of Norway, where they are called “naust,” derived from the Old Norse word “naverstað.” Many of these stone and timber structures date back hundreds of years, and some of them originally harbored Viking longboats. Open to the sea, their floors would be a simple continuation of the beach sand, or they might be dug down to allow for a boat to sail directly into the shelter.

In Philadelphia, Boathouse Row — a stretch of 15 boathouses — is on the National Register of Historic Places. All along the Mississippi River, boathouses pepper the shoreline, hearkening back to the days of Mark Twain and steamboats. And across upstate New York, boathouses are an institution, circling lakes nestled in the Adirondack Mountains and along the western border of the state.

But on the East End, where they were once ubiquitous, boathouses are an endangered species — strictly preexisting, nonconforming structures, built long before zoning codes and tidal wetland regulations were put into place that ban construction up against the waterfront. And for that reason, it is “very hard, extremely hard” to bring them back to life, Terchunian says.

“It’s like everything else in the world: If it’s important, you’ve gotta take care of it,” he says, “because somebody might tell you, ‘You can’t have it again.’”

In January, Robert Murray, a licensed associate real estate broker with Corcoran, sold a six-bedroom, seven-bath beach house in Quiogue — with views overlooking Quantuck Bay from nearly every room — for just over $7.3 million. But what was most interesting about this property at 541 Main Street, which was co-listed with his wife and daughter, Meredith and Amanda Murray, is that it came with one of the few operational boathouses left in the area, he says.

“But it does sit on a very shallow bay, so you’re going to get some small boats that could be in there,” Murray says. “No big boats.”

In Quogue, the boathouse across from the home at 122 Dune Road is no longer in use, and neither is the one at 32 Beach Lane on Ogden Pond, Murray says, whereas the boathouse at 81 Dune Road has been completely redone since the property sold in 2011 and is operational, as is the one at 14 Cricket Path in Remsenburg, he reports.

Murray remembers two boathouses in particular from his childhood — the first at 55 Dune Road in Quogue, which was owned by a commercial fisherman who would rent out snapper poles in the 1950s, he says. The other was at 18 Shinnecock Road in East Quogue, where he would watch the owner work on his boat. In the years since, the latter boathouse has been turned into a guest house or workshop, he says.

“They’re changing from boathouses to garages to clubhouses to just decorative boathouses,” he says. “They’re just disappearing because the water depth is getting shallower, but anybody with an affection for boathouses is trying to keep the character of them. I haven’t seen any of them change in terms of looks.”

On the banks of Quantuck Bay, the estate at 66 Seafield Lane in Westhampton Beach was once known as the Atwater Estate — and its boathouse was the birthplace of the “SS” class sailboat in 1908, Murray says. This class of boat, designed specifically for the shallow waters of Shinnecock and Quantuck bays, is still sailed in these waters and is the oldest one-design class in the country that is still sailed in competition. But that boathouse has since been turned into a pool house.

“That was a very large boathouse that could accommodate a 63-foot boat at one point,” Murray says. “No longer.”

Murray married into the Medina family and inherited a boathouse in the process. Located at 1 Apaucuck Point in Westhampton, as part of the Judge Medina estate, the approximately 30-foot-by-40-foot building was destroyed during the Hurricane of 1938 and rebuilt a year later as a working boathouse, he says, “where boats were pulled out of the water on iron rails and rolled into the boathouse to be stored for the winter.”

“There was a potbelly stove in the boathouse so that the caretaker, Captain Fred, could work on painting and repairing the boats for the next season,” he says.

Decades later, by 2010, the potbelly stove was no longer and the stored boats consisted of a rowing shell and some surfboards, Murray says. “The atmosphere and smell of the boathouse is still very much a part of the boathouse, but it now has become a ‘party house!’”

Three years later, the family sold and the new owners have kept it “pretty much the same way, using it as a workshop,” Murray says. While the rails are gone, it still has all of its old bones, complete with a trap door to let the water out when it floods — keeping with the tradition of these largely west-of-the-canal features, he says.

“What’s unique about west of the canal is we have canals. We have waterways that go down creeks — or what I call ‘cricks,’” Murray says with a laugh. “If you’re in Southampton, they don’t have that. There’s the open bay, but you don’t usually build a boathouse on an open bay. You want some protection. East of the canal, there just aren’t that many locations where you would put a boathouse.”

A major exception is the Tupper Boathouse, a free-standing icon of marine history that Southampton Town purchased for $3.15 million in 2003. Originally constructed by father and son Frank and Edwin “Ned” Tupper between 1929 and 1931, the building was sold in 1959 and transformed by various owners into a series of unique social destinations — the last of which was Conscience Point Inn, where publicist Lizzie Grubman famously backed her SUV into a crowd of 16 people outside the boathouse.

After the town stepped in, the Tupper Boathouse was renovated starting in 2020 using $450,000 in Superstorm Sandy disaster relief funding — joining the roster of surviving boathouses on the East End, many of which are vestiges of another time.

“It started as, ‘We need this to survive. We need it for our economy, for our business, for our livelihood,’” Terchunian says of the boathouses, “and then it became architectural, the same way windmills did — or it became more residential, let’s put it that way.”

With the rise of private boathouses, working boathouses faded, he explained, and the reason was simple: The Long Island Rail Road arrived in Southampton Town in the late 19th century.

“They didn’t have to get their product by water anymore,” Terchunian says. “So beginning in the 1890s, when the railroad came through Manorville, you start to see these things disappear, and they go into disrepair because they’re not being used.”

But despite the railway revolution, shallower canals and bays, and the sheer upkeep boathouses require, some homeowners refuse to part ways with them — which is wise, whether they’re “boat people” or not, Murray says.

“There’s a lot of nostalgia involved with it, definitely,” he says. “It’s a structure that once you take one down, you’re never going to be able to build it again.”

By Michelle Trauring

For centuries, the lifeblood of Southampton Town has flowed through its waterways.

Dating back to 1640, the region’s earliest economic ventures were interwoven with the sea, its shores and harvestable life — and with that came a need to navigate them. A busy working waterfront soon brimmed with activity, from catching finfish and shellfish to rum running and trade, and eventually boating for fun.

But fishermen and recreational boaters alike needed convenient places to park.

Up and down creeks and canals, they began to build working boathouses — structures where they could store their vessels, repair and maintain them, and if there was a second story, even socialize upstairs.

West of the Shinnecock Canal, they dotted the shorelines, until the Hurricane of 1938 wiped many of them out. Some were rebuilt, but judging by the number left today, the majority were not. Of those, many have fallen into disrepair or are unusable — and a piece of the East End waterfront history is slowly disappearing with them.

“The thing is that there just aren’t very many of them,” says Aram Terchunian of First Coastal Corporation, a Westhampton Beach consulting firm that has helped rebuild and obtain permits to repair boathouses. “They’re like lighthouses — they’re just few and far between — and to my knowledge, there haven’t been any new ones built, literally, in the last couple of decades.”

“The best way to describe them is as ‘legacy structures,’” he adds, “and many of them have a very charming legacy, if you will.”

The world’s largest collection of boathouses lives in the northern region of Norway, where they are called “naust,” derived from the Old Norse word “naverstað.” Many of these stone and timber structures date back hundreds of years, and some of them originally harbored Viking longboats. Open to the sea, their floors would be a simple continuation of the beach sand, or they might be dug down to allow for a boat to sail directly into the shelter.

In Philadelphia, Boathouse Row — a stretch of 15 boathouses — is on the National Register of Historic Places. All along the Mississippi River, boathouses pepper the shoreline, hearkening back to the days of Mark Twain and steamboats. And across upstate New York, boathouses are an institution, circling lakes nestled in the Adirondack Mountains and along the western border of the state.

But on the East End, where they were once ubiquitous, boathouses are an endangered species — strictly preexisting, nonconforming structures, built long before zoning codes and tidal wetland regulations were put into place that ban construction up against the waterfront. And for that reason, it is “very hard, extremely hard” to bring them back to life, Terchunian says.

“It’s like everything else in the world: If it’s important, you’ve gotta take care of it,” he says, “because somebody might tell you, ‘You can’t have it again.’”

In January, Robert Murray, a licensed associate real estate broker with Corcoran, sold a six-bedroom, seven-bath beach house in Quiogue — with views overlooking Quantuck Bay from nearly every room — for just over $7.3 million. But what was most interesting about this property at 541 Main Street, which was co-listed with his wife and daughter, Meredith and Amanda Murray, is that it came with one of the few operational boathouses left in the area, he says.

“But it does sit on a very shallow bay, so you’re going to get some small boats that could be in there,” Murray says. “No big boats.”

In Quogue, the boathouse across from the home at 122 Dune Road is no longer in use, and neither is the one at 32 Beach Lane on Ogden Pond, Murray says, whereas the boathouse at 81 Dune Road has been completely redone since the property sold in 2011 and is operational, as is the one at 14 Cricket Path in Remsenburg, he reports.

Murray remembers two boathouses in particular from his childhood — the first at 55 Dune Road in Quogue, which was owned by a commercial fisherman who would rent out snapper poles in the 1950s, he says. The other was at 18 Shinnecock Road in East Quogue, where he would watch the owner work on his boat. In the years since, the latter boathouse has been turned into a guest house or workshop, he says.

“They’re changing from boathouses to garages to clubhouses to just decorative boathouses,” he says. “They’re just disappearing because the water depth is getting shallower, but anybody with an affection for boathouses is trying to keep the character of them. I haven’t seen any of them change in terms of looks.”

On the banks of Quantuck Bay, the estate at 66 Seafield Lane in Westhampton Beach was once known as the Atwater Estate — and its boathouse was the birthplace of the “SS” class sailboat in 1908, Murray says. This class of boat, designed specifically for the shallow waters of Shinnecock and Quantuck bays, is still sailed in these waters and is the oldest one-design class in the country that is still sailed in competition. But that boathouse has since been turned into a pool house.

“That was a very large boathouse that could accommodate a 63-foot boat at one point,” Murray says. “No longer.”

Murray married into the Medina family and inherited a boathouse in the process. Located at 1 Apaucuck Point in Westhampton, as part of the Judge Medina estate, the approximately 30-foot-by-40-foot building was destroyed during the Hurricane of 1938 and rebuilt a year later as a working boathouse, he says, “where boats were pulled out of the water on iron rails and rolled into the boathouse to be stored for the winter.”

“There was a potbelly stove in the boathouse so that the caretaker, Captain Fred, could work on painting and repairing the boats for the next season,” he says.

Decades later, by 2010, the potbelly stove was no longer and the stored boats consisted of a rowing shell and some surfboards, Murray says. “The atmosphere and smell of the boathouse is still very much a part of the boathouse, but it now has become a ‘party house!’”

Three years later, the family sold and the new owners have kept it “pretty much the same way, using it as a workshop,” Murray says. While the rails are gone, it still has all of its old bones, complete with a trap door to let the water out when it floods — keeping with the tradition of these largely west-of-the-canal features, he says.

“What’s unique about west of the canal is we have canals. We have waterways that go down creeks — or what I call ‘cricks,’” Murray says with a laugh. “If you’re in Southampton, they don’t have that. There’s the open bay, but you don’t usually build a boathouse on an open bay. You want some protection. East of the canal, there just aren’t that many locations where you would put a boathouse.”

A major exception is the Tupper Boathouse, a free-standing icon of marine history that Southampton Town purchased for $3.15 million in 2003. Originally constructed by father and son Frank and Edwin “Ned” Tupper between 1929 and 1931, the building was sold in 1959 and transformed by various owners into a series of unique social destinations — the last of which was Conscience Point Inn, where publicist Lizzie Grubman famously backed her SUV into a crowd of 16 people outside the boathouse.

After the town stepped in, the Tupper Boathouse was renovated starting in 2020 using $450,000 in Superstorm Sandy disaster relief funding — joining the roster of surviving boathouses on the East End, many of which are vestiges of another time.

“It started as, ‘We need this to survive. We need it for our economy, for our business, for our livelihood,’” Terchunian says of the boathouses, “and then it became architectural, the same way windmills did — or it became more residential, let’s put it that way.”

With the rise of private boathouses, working boathouses faded, he explained, and the reason was simple: The Long Island Rail Road arrived in Southampton Town in the late 19th century.

“They didn’t have to get their product by water anymore,” Terchunian says. “So beginning in the 1890s, when the railroad came through Manorville, you start to see these things disappear, and they go into disrepair because they’re not being used.”

But despite the railway revolution, shallower canals and bays, and the sheer upkeep boathouses require, some homeowners refuse to part ways with them — which is wise, whether they’re “boat people” or not, Murray says.

“There’s a lot of nostalgia involved with it, definitely,” he says. “It’s a structure that once you take one down, you’re never going to be able to build it again.”

By Michelle Trauring

For centuries, the lifeblood of Southampton Town has flowed through its waterways.

Dating back to 1640, the region’s earliest economic ventures were interwoven with the sea, its shores and harvestable life — and with that came a need to navigate them. A busy working waterfront soon brimmed with activity, from catching finfish and shellfish to rum running and trade, and eventually boating for fun.

But fishermen and recreational boaters alike needed convenient places to park.

Up and down creeks and canals, they began to build working boathouses — structures where they could store their vessels, repair and maintain them, and if there was a second story, even socialize upstairs.

West of the Shinnecock Canal, they dotted the shorelines, until the Hurricane of 1938 wiped many of them out. Some were rebuilt, but judging by the number left today, the majority were not. Of those, many have fallen into disrepair or are unusable — and a piece of the East End waterfront history is slowly disappearing with them.

“The thing is that there just aren’t very many of them,” says Aram Terchunian of First Coastal Corporation, a Westhampton Beach consulting firm that has helped rebuild and obtain permits to repair boathouses. “They’re like lighthouses — they’re just few and far between — and to my knowledge, there haven’t been any new ones built, literally, in the last couple of decades.”

“The best way to describe them is as ‘legacy structures,’” he adds, “and many of them have a very charming legacy, if you will.”

The world’s largest collection of boathouses lives in the northern region of Norway, where they are called “naust,” derived from the Old Norse word “naverstað.” Many of these stone and timber structures date back hundreds of years, and some of them originally harbored Viking longboats. Open to the sea, their floors would be a simple continuation of the beach sand, or they might be dug down to allow for a boat to sail directly into the shelter.

In Philadelphia, Boathouse Row — a stretch of 15 boathouses — is on the National Register of Historic Places. All along the Mississippi River, boathouses pepper the shoreline, hearkening back to the days of Mark Twain and steamboats. And across upstate New York, boathouses are an institution, circling lakes nestled in the Adirondack Mountains and along the western border of the state.

But on the East End, where they were once ubiquitous, boathouses are an endangered species — strictly preexisting, nonconforming structures, built long before zoning codes and tidal wetland regulations were put into place that ban construction up against the waterfront. And for that reason, it is “very hard, extremely hard” to bring them back to life, Terchunian says.

“It’s like everything else in the world: If it’s important, you’ve gotta take care of it,” he says, “because somebody might tell you, ‘You can’t have it again.’”

In January, Robert Murray, a licensed associate real estate broker with Corcoran, sold a six-bedroom, seven-bath beach house in Quiogue — with views overlooking Quantuck Bay from nearly every room — for just over $7.3 million. But what was most interesting about this property at 541 Main Street, which was co-listed with his wife and daughter, Meredith and Amanda Murray, is that it came with one of the few operational boathouses left in the area, he says.

“But it does sit on a very shallow bay, so you’re going to get some small boats that could be in there,” Murray says. “No big boats.”

In Quogue, the boathouse across from the home at 122 Dune Road is no longer in use, and neither is the one at 32 Beach Lane on Ogden Pond, Murray says, whereas the boathouse at 81 Dune Road has been completely redone since the property sold in 2011 and is operational, as is the one at 14 Cricket Path in Remsenburg, he reports.

Murray remembers two boathouses in particular from his childhood — the first at 55 Dune Road in Quogue, which was owned by a commercial fisherman who would rent out snapper poles in the 1950s, he says. The other was at 18 Shinnecock Road in East Quogue, where he would watch the owner work on his boat. In the years since, the latter boathouse has been turned into a guest house or workshop, he says.

“They’re changing from boathouses to garages to clubhouses to just decorative boathouses,” he says. “They’re just disappearing because the water depth is getting shallower, but anybody with an affection for boathouses is trying to keep the character of them. I haven’t seen any of them change in terms of looks.”

On the banks of Quantuck Bay, the estate at 66 Seafield Lane in Westhampton Beach was once known as the Atwater Estate — and its boathouse was the birthplace of the “SS” class sailboat in 1908, Murray says. This class of boat, designed specifically for the shallow waters of Shinnecock and Quantuck bays, is still sailed in these waters and is the oldest one-design class in the country that is still sailed in competition. But that boathouse has since been turned into a pool house.

“That was a very large boathouse that could accommodate a 63-foot boat at one point,” Murray says. “No longer.”

Murray married into the Medina family and inherited a boathouse in the process. Located at 1 Apaucuck Point in Westhampton, as part of the Judge Medina estate, the approximately 30-foot-by-40-foot building was destroyed during the Hurricane of 1938 and rebuilt a year later as a working boathouse, he says, “where boats were pulled out of the water on iron rails and rolled into the boathouse to be stored for the winter.”

“There was a potbelly stove in the boathouse so that the caretaker, Captain Fred, could work on painting and repairing the boats for the next season,” he says.

Decades later, by 2010, the potbelly stove was no longer and the stored boats consisted of a rowing shell and some surfboards, Murray says. “The atmosphere and smell of the boathouse is still very much a part of the boathouse, but it now has become a ‘party house!’”

Three years later, the family sold and the new owners have kept it “pretty much the same way, using it as a workshop,” Murray says. While the rails are gone, it still has all of its old bones, complete with a trap door to let the water out when it floods — keeping with the tradition of these largely west-of-the-canal features, he says.

“What’s unique about west of the canal is we have canals. We have waterways that go down creeks — or what I call ‘cricks,’” Murray says with a laugh. “If you’re in Southampton, they don’t have that. There’s the open bay, but you don’t usually build a boathouse on an open bay. You want some protection. East of the canal, there just aren’t that many locations where you would put a boathouse.”

A major exception is the Tupper Boathouse, a free-standing icon of marine history that Southampton Town purchased for $3.15 million in 2003. Originally constructed by father and son Frank and Edwin “Ned” Tupper between 1929 and 1931, the building was sold in 1959 and transformed by various owners into a series of unique social destinations — the last of which was Conscience Point Inn, where publicist Lizzie Grubman famously backed her SUV into a crowd of 16 people outside the boathouse.

After the town stepped in, the Tupper Boathouse was renovated starting in 2020 using $450,000 in Superstorm Sandy disaster relief funding — joining the roster of surviving boathouses on the East End, many of which are vestiges of another time.

“It started as, ‘We need this to survive. We need it for our economy, for our business, for our livelihood,’” Terchunian says of the boathouses, “and then it became architectural, the same way windmills did — or it became more residential, let’s put it that way.”

With the rise of private boathouses, working boathouses faded, he explained, and the reason was simple: The Long Island Rail Road arrived in Southampton Town in the late 19th century.

“They didn’t have to get their product by water anymore,” Terchunian says. “So beginning in the 1890s, when the railroad came through Manorville, you start to see these things disappear, and they go into disrepair because they’re not being used.”

But despite the railway revolution, shallower canals and bays, and the sheer upkeep boathouses require, some homeowners refuse to part ways with them — which is wise, whether they’re “boat people” or not, Murray says.

“There’s a lot of nostalgia involved with it, definitely,” he says. “It’s a structure that once you take one down, you’re never going to be able to build it again.”