Windmill Joins a List of Condemned Buildings at Stony Brook Southampton Campus

The historic windmill, long a centerpiece of the former Southampton College campus in Shinnecock Hills, has joined a growing roster of other buildings there that are sporting large red X’s, indicating that they have been condemned.

State Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. said this week he had been informed by an official at Stony Brook University, which has owned the campus since 2006, that state fire marshals, who were there for routine inspections, had declared the windmill unsafe for occupancy. The reason? Damage from termites, Thiele said.

The windmill joins a number of dormitories and other buildings, including Southampton Hall, that have been either condemned or had access to them curtailed.

In February, Thiele lambasted Stony Brook for allowing the campus to slide into a state of disrepair ever since Matthew Whelan, the university’s former vice president for strategic initiatives, who had been charged with developing programs and increasing enrollment, left in 2020 to become president of Caldwell University in New Jersey.

Under Whelan’s leadership, programs in health and marine sciences, and the fine arts program under Robert Reeves, led to a resurgence in enrollment, to about 800 students.

But after Whelan’s departure and the COVID-19 pandemic, things slid downhill quickly.

Last winter, Thiele charged that Stony Brook had become “the biggest slumlord” on the East End. This week, he went a step further.

“I apologize for calling SBU a slumlord,” he said. “As it turns out, that is an insult to slumlords.”

Thiele said allowing the windmill, which has been at the site of the college since it was moved there from Southampton Village in 1888, is “another glaring example of SBU’s neglect” and lack of interest in the campus.

“SBU is indifferent to the historic landmarks with which it has been entrusted,” Thiele said. “SBU has no plan for the campus and no plans to make plans.”

Stony Brook’s long-term plans for the 80-acre campus are to transform at least a portion of it into a new home for Stony Brook Southampton Hospital. But the recent announcement that Robert Chaloner, the hospital’s chief administrative officer, who was expected to lead fundraising efforts for the project, had accepted a new job at a medical center in Wisconsin, meant that even those plans are stalled, Thiele said.

The windmill, one of three in Southampton Village, was moved to Shinnecock by Janet Hoyt, whose husband, William Hoyt, opened the Shinnecock Inn at the site. It became associated with the identity of Southampton College when that branch of Long Island University opened.

In 2020, citing the deteriorating condition of the windmill, a group sought to have it moved back to its original location, on Windmill Lane, in the village, so that it could be restored and eligible for designation as a National Historic Landmark.

Thiele and other former Southampton College students opposed that move, saying the windmill should remain on the campus and pointing to the fact that playwright Tennessee Williams lived there in 1957 when he wrote the play “The Day on Which a Man Dies,” which was about his friend, the painter Jackson Pollock.

On Monday, in an unattributed statement issued through its media relations department, Stony Brook said the windmill was “a treasured historic symbol of the community” and that the university, mindful of the safety of the community and its students, would “restore the windmill’s structural stability with all deliberate speed.”