Laffalot Is No Laughing Matter

The fate of Laffalot, the former home of artist Zella de Milhau (1867-1954) in the Art Village, will be put to the test as Southampton's Landmarks and Historic Districts Board grapples with a recently filed demolition application.Under the delay of demolition law, any house 75 years of age or older is automatically referred to the LHDB for review, the basis of which involves research findings on the subject property. Oftentimes, members of the community send letters of support to the board in regard to the preservation of an endangered building. The board presents its findings and can recommend either saving a particular building or approving its demolition.The problem here is that the recommendation to save a structure of real significance without landmark status carries no weight in the Town of Southampton. It is only a recommendation, which may or may not influence an applicant's decision-making with regard to demolition. Southampton Town should really be ashamed of itself as it is so far behind the eight ball with respect to preserving the very structures that made it a world-class resort.

So why is a little house like Laffalot so important in the overall scheme of things? The Art Village, while small in size, is an enclave of critical importance in the history of the development of Shinnecock Hills and Southampton. From its beginning it was dubbed “a toy village for its intimate scale, plantings, street gutters of embedded beach stones, and gated gardens surrounding charming cottages. One hundred and twenty-five years later the influence of the Art Village still resonates in the world of American art and architecture.

In 1891 the first out-of-doors art school in the United States, the Shinnecock Summer School of Art, opened under the direction of renowned artist William Merritt Chase, and students, both professional and amateur, came from all parts of the country to study plein air painting. Upward of 100 to 150 students studied at the Art Village each summer. They boarded at the Art Club, a boardinghouse for women students, other boardinghouses around town, with local fishermen and farmers or in one of the 12 cottages in the Art Village itself.

The cottages, all distinctly different from one another, reflect the rural regional vernacular of the area. Antoinette De Forest Parsons, in the June 27, 1895, issue of the St. Paul Dispatch, portrays the cottages: "The outer walls, washed by rains, and polished by the sun, shine like satin. Inside the cottages are finished in wood of a dark tone, and red curtains in the diamond-paned windows, or swaying festoons of vines that clamber up to the roofs against the grey walls make almost the only spots of bright color.”

Janet Chase Hoyt, who was a founder of the Shinnecock Hills School of Art and the daughter of Salmon Chase, Lincoln's Secretary of the Treasury, originally owned Laffalot. She, along with Mrs. Henry Kirke Porter and Samuel Parrish, who donated the land for the school, also garnered support and financing from prominent society figures. The school influenced the popularity of American impressionist painting and contributed to making Southampton a popular resort destination.

Laffalot was later sold to Zella de Milhau, and in 1896, Katharine Cotheal Budd (1860-1951) known as "KCB," also an Art Village student and the first woman to become a licensed architect in New York, remodeled the cottage. De Milhau named the cottage Laffalot in honor of the name Chiola—she who laughs—which was given to her during her adoption ceremony as a daughter of the Shinnecocks.

Zella de Milhau, a force of nature, was a moving spirit at the Art Village, always in the thick of merrymaking, throwing parties for the enclave as well as arranging for various forms of entertainments. While Laffalot became the social epicenter of the Art Village, Zella also became involved in community causes. During World War I she drove an ambulance (donated by Southampton friends) on the front in France and was awarded the Croix de Guerre as well as the British War Service medal.

Laffalot represents the life of a personage who contributed colorfully to Southampton's history. The little cottage is also part of a greater whole, which remains intact. The Art Village as an entity is a cultural landscape, so totally distinct that it has received the town's honorary designation as a Hamlet Heritage Resource Area, which denotes a place of special character.

The potential excision of this cottage from the Art Village will represent not only a barbaric assault on the greater whole, but it will also reflect a complete lack of spine for a community claiming to possess pride of place.

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