Amagansett House On Stilts, Surrounded By Water, Is Still Loved

The “it” in question was a shack on stilts, slightly to the west of the house tour stop, and clearly in the water.

Visitors to an elegantly remodeled home on Cranberry Hole Road in Amagansett on a recent East Hampton Historical Society tour wanted to know, as they took in the view of the bay and of the shack on stilts through the window, “What is that and who owns it?”

Even at a distance, it was obvious that the shack was in disrepair—askew on pilings, abandoned.

But not, apparently, unloved. When asked later if she knew what was up with the obviously unoccupied house, Kimberly Shaw, East Hampton Town’s director of natural resources, said she had noticed something different about the little house while driving through Lazy Point. While the shack was “not habitable,” having been completely surrounded by water since about 2004, there was a hole in its roof that had at some recent point been repaired.

Someone passionate about the structure might have fixed it, Ms. Shaw suggested, adding that she had heard it was regarded in the area with a kind of affection.

“Don’t call it a shack,” said builder Billy Kalbacher, whose sister, Paula Kalbacher Easevoli, and her husband, John Easevoli, used to call the little house their home.

The building originally sat on a beach at a time when Mulford Lane was a fishing community. “I mean a real fishing community, when guys from the city, the Bronx, Brooklyn came out with their cronies, 1948, 1950, and they all built shacks on the beach,” Mr. Kalbacher said.

Actually, there were two kinds of houses: those that were or would soon become renovated homes—as was true of the home his sister and his brother-in-law John, a carpenter, built and refurbished before they moved to Napeague about 1966 or 1967. And then there were shacks kept as summer bungalows, though subsequent generations started winterizing them. The original owners from the city, Mr. Kalbacher noted, were all in construction, so the rigging was well done.

“The pilings put in are still holding,” Ms. Shaw noted separately, and appreciatively.

“Everyone knew everyone, and you’d just dump the kids outside to play … can I say this now?” Mr. Kalbacher said. Down the line, the Glennon family bought the house, holding on to it for years, but the beach was disappearing.

“It used to be 100 feet to the water, now the shack is in the water and about 30 feet from shore,” Mr. Kalbacher said.

It is Mr. Kalbacher’s dream, he said, to make a coffee table book of pictures of the house taken over decades. “I love it, I know all about it, I built it,” he said.

Who owns it now? Mr. Kalbacher said he thought it was the town, but Ms. Shaw said that it is not so, “if you can believe it.”

The property is listed in the East Hampton Town assessor’s office as 163 Mulford Lane, and the owner as Gary Ryan, who could not be reached in New York City by phone or by mail.

Town records indicate that the property was owned by Betty S. Sullivan in 1978, when the pilings needed to be replaced, and that by February 1998 the town had concluded that, because the septic system no longer functioned, the “dwelling cannot be occupied until system is reinstalled & approved.”

A memo in 1999 reinforced that sentiment, and on October 17, 2000, officials asked the town engineer “to make structural inspection to determine if this parcel … should be condemned.”

Ms. Shaw agreed that the town “should probably move forward with a condemnation,” as it did with an adjacent house several years ago. She said the town tried to purchase it using money from the Emergency Watershed Protection Program, part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, but said “there were tax arrears issues, and the house is now sitting in state waters.”

The East Hampton Town tax receiver’s office indicated that $1,094 in property taxes were due for 2016, with an outstanding full-year bill for 2012, a half-year bill for 2013, and full-year bills for 2014 and 2015.

Whatever the value of the home, it may have some historic value. Tom Edmonds, the executive director of the Southampton Historical Museum, pointed out that old fishing shacks have always figured in community landscapes as markers of times gone by.

A painting of an old iconic boat house near Shinnecock Bay on Meadow Lane done by David Martine now has the dubious distinction of preserving that shack since it was flattened by Superstormn Sandy in 2012, leaving only “a pile of something next to the original piers with a plastic cover.”

“Hopefully,” Mr. Edmonds added, “the owner salvaged the timbers to use as a template for its reconstruction.”

One wonders what might be saved at 163 Mulford Lane.