Westhampton motel is history following demolition

Wrecking crews this week finished demolishing Westhampton’s Bailey’s Motel, a 16-room resort that was built in the early 1960s and has sat vacant for the past eight years, leaving the landscape strewn with wood, bricks and one mangled refrigerator.

The leveling of the dilapidated motel and a nearby two-story house, the latter of which some considered to be historic as it was built in the 1890s, were done to pave the way for future development of the 32-acre property, according to Wayne Bruyn, the lawyer representing 6 Pierrepont LLC of Brooklyn, the owner of the Montauk Highway parcel.

On Tuesday, Mr. Bruyn, who is with O’Shea, Marcincuk & Bruyn LLP in Southampton, said his client expects to seek permission in “a couple of months” from the Southampton Town Planning Board to subdivide the land into 32 buildable lots. The property, which is zoned for both motel and residential use, is bordered by Old Country Road to the north, Nadine Drive to the east and Seabreeze Avenue to the west.

“There’s been no attention paid to those buildings since the Baileys left in 2002,” Mr. Bruyn said, referring to the previous owners.

A large orange excavator began smashing the motel units into scrap wood last week. The permit to raze the motel building and nearby house was approved by the Southampton Town Building Department in November, according to town records. The motel units were built in the early 1960s, according to a historic profile focusing on the hamlets of Eastport, Speonk, Remsenburg and Westhampton, and available on the Southampton Town website.

Members of Southampton Town Landmarks and Historic Districts Board did not support the leveling of all structures on the motel property. In a letter dated January 7 and sent to Michael Benincasa, the chief building inspector with Southampton Town, the board urged officials to save the two-story house, which dates back to 1890, and an old stone foundation on the easternmost side of the property. The house was razed over the past two weeks, and the stone foundation could not been found on the property, which was still covered with demolition debris on Tuesday.

“These structures should be protected from further damage and should not be demolished,” stated the letter that was signed by Charles Bellows, the chairman of the Landmarks and Historic Districts Board.

The historic board had the opportunity to review the demolition permit application because the house on the motel property was more than 75 years old. Even so, the board’s recommendation is a non-binding review, meaning that “the owner of the property is not obligated” to follow its suggestion, according to Mr. Benincasa.

The demolition work started earlier this month and by last Thursday, January 7, all of the motel units had been razed. By Tuesday, the two-story house had been leveled and only a small shed was left standing toward the rear of the property. Debris and old mattresses littered the snow-covered property.

The history of the property can be traced back to the mid-1700s, when one of earliest families taking up residence in the Westhampton area, the Raynor family, built a homestead there. The old stone foundation on the eastern side of the motel property was one of the last remnants of that house, according to a copy of the letter that was sent to Mr. Benincasa.

Members of the Rogers family, another family that settled down in the Westhampton area, later came into possession of the land. The two-story home was built around 1890 by David Rogers, according to the same letter.

The Landmarks and Historic Districts Board is now working on creating hamlet heritage areas in Southampton Town. Members would have liked to rely on the stone foundation and two-story home in making their argument to create a historic district in Westhampton, according to Stephanie Davis, who sits on the board. She explained that the region will eventually be known as the Beaver Dam Historic Hamlet Heritage Area.

“The loss of the structures is going to reduce the value of a heritage area,” Ms. Davis said this week.

The Rogers family ran a boarding house out of the home from the 1890s until it lost the building due to financial troubles, according to Ms. Davis. Irving Bailey bought the property in the early 1940s and continued to run a motel there.

The Bailey family closed the motel in 2002 and sold the property to 6 Pierrepont LLC for $5.5 million the same year. The following year, KMT Enterprises, an arm of Pierrepont, applied to subdivide the property and create 32 lots. The company had originally wanted to cluster the proposed homes, leaving some of the land as open space.

That project was eventually put on hold and Southampton Town expressed interest in possibly buying the land using money from its Community Preservation Fund a number of years ago. The two sides almost came to an agreement in 2008, but the town ultimately backed away from making an offer, Mr. Bruyn said.

Mary Wilson, the manager of Southampton Town’s CPF, confirmed that the town was thinking about buying the land only to abandon those plans after the economy soured. “When the economy changed, we put a lot of projects on hold and that was one of them,” she said.

Once the town withdrew its offer, Pierrepont was “left with no other choice than to develop it,” Mr. Bruyn said.

Since that time, the buildings have fallen into disrepair. Southampton Town Code Enforcement slapped Pierrepont with building violations in 2005, 2006 and 2007, according to Cheryl Kraft, the town’s chief fire marshal. The buildings were unsecured and there were “unauthorized people” on the property, she said.

Footprints were often spotted in the snow on the Bailey’s Motel property before the structures were demolished, leaving officials concerned that squatters could have been living there. Those people could have started fires to keep themselves warm, Ms. Kraft said. In fact, a fire labeled later labeled as “suspicious” by the town damaged several storage sheds on the property in 2008.

“We don’t want to see any loss of life,” Ms. Kraft said.

The violations mandated that the property owners keep the structures secure, and the recent demolition of the buildings put the owners in compliance, according to Mr. Bruyn. And now that the buildings are history, Mr. Bruyn said his client is starting negotiations with others who are interested in redeveloping the property.