Long before the latest influx of newcomers—before a reckless party boy named Joe Brewer set up a bachelor pad along the Fairway and a boastful doctor named Peter Hackett moved with his family to Larboard Court—Oak Beach was governed peaceably by the association, and neighbors let one another be. The presidency of the board collegially transferred over the years from Ira Haspel, an architect, to Connie Plaissay, a florist, to Gus Coletti, an insurance man, and they still meet regularly in the building that marks the community’s first organized effort to live beside something other than a boggy marsh. In 1894 a Presbyterian pastor named John Dietrich Long scored a fifty-year lease from the Long Island town of Babylon, which controlled Oak Beach, to build a religious retreat and cultural center on the public land. In a year’s time, the pastor’s flock constructed a building large enough to seat a thousand people. A year later, the town of Babylon sold a nine-year lease to the Oak Island Beach Association. The terms were a hundred dollars per year from each member of the association, whether a house was built there or not, plus five dollars a year for every house that was built. The town’s only requirement was the construction of at least twenty houses.
This same lease, renewed several times, is in effect today, and the Oak Island Beach Association continues to manage and oversee life there, collecting assessments, policing landscaping projects and renovations, maintaining the gatehouse, regulating speed bumps, mediating squabbles between neighbors, and above all, negotiating the terms of the lease every few decades with the town of Babylon. The lease is another reason, beyond the storms and the insects, why the situation at Oak Beach has always been precarious—not just naturally but bureaucratically, politically. Residents there may own their homes, but they don’t own the land. Every few decades, the lease comes close to expiring, the town makes noises about taking back the land, and the inhabitants grow anxious, as if they’re under siege.
No family of real means would ever own a home on land that could be pulled out from under them, so it stands to reason that the first summer people at Oak Beach would be hardy, self-sufficient, and decidedly middle class. In those early years, families came over from the mainland by rowboat, and later on a sidewheeler called the Oak Islander, manned for a time by an ill-tempered, white-mustached sea captain who people said once worked for the Vanderbilts. They walked on wooden planks over soggy marshes to get to their cottages. They cooked with kerosene and pumped from a cistern that collected rain, and they stored meat in barrels buried in cool sand beneath the house. Bathrooms were holes in the ground, garbage cans were holes on the beach. Their days were spent crabbing, clamming, and fluke fishing. At night, the Jones Beach aquacade would host a production of Billy Rose’s water ballet. The ride back to Oak Beach was along narrow, rutted roads with no means of illumination; headlights were useless in the mist. Instead, passengers stuck their heads out the windows, shouting out warnings to drivers when they feared an imminent collision.
It might have gone on this way forever—remote and romantic, intimate and a little precious—if not for Robert Moses. The master builder of New York, the ruthless visionary who brought parks, highways, and bridges to a bursting metropolis, also happened to be Oak Beach’s most famous summer resident. Moses rented a bungalow on the beach with a bay window that afforded him a perfect view of the construction of the causeway and state park that would bear his name. Jones Beach had been Moses’s first great triumph, fifteen miles west of Oak Beach. His second act, the construction of Ocean Parkway in 1933, changed the barrier islands forever. The corps of engineers dredged the ocean and filled in the islands and ran the new highway right through the middle.
Ocean Parkway brought the world to Oak Beach. Day-trippers, sightseers, Long Islanders, Manhattannites choking for fresh air, all drove across the bay on the Wantagh, the Meadowbrook, and the Robert Moses Causeway from Babylon, West Islip, Bellmore, Seaford, and Massapequa. They came with reels to fish from day boats at Captree Island for fluke, winter flounder, bluefish, mackerel, black sea bass, porgy, and weakfish. They came to plunder the bay for hard-shelled clams, steamers, quahogs, bay scallops, and blue-claw crabs and lobsters. They brought binoculars and hoped for sightings of the piping plover, the least tern, the roseate tern, the common tern, and the marsh hawk. They sunbathed on their pick of “locals only” beaches—Cedar Lookout, Cedar, West Gilgo, and the most popular, unsettled and raw, perfect for surfing: Gilgo Beach.
The people of Oak Beach might have slept peacefully behind their gate all through the tourism boom and Long Island’s subsequent great postwar middle-class explosion—Levittown, the first modern suburb, was a half-hour drive to the north—and all the teen rebellion and kitsch and car culture that came after that, if an old hotel called the Oak Beach Inn hadn’t been built right off the access road that led to their private community. In the seventies, a college dropout named Bob Matherson remade the Oak Beach Inn into the South Shore version of Studio 54. Matherson had grown up farther inland, in Rockville Centre, but he knew what the barrier beaches meant to Long Island’s youth. Throngs of partiers came to Oak Beach at all hours, jammed into convertibles, horns blaring, music playing. Drunks stumbled onto the little roads of Oak Beach—Anchor Way, the Bayou, Hawser Drive, the Fairway—and parked cars spilled down both sides of the access road, passing headlights affording views of parked cars with steamy windows. When the police tried to crack down, Matherson turned the Oak Beach Inn into a cause célèbre. Through the better part of the eighties, a SAVE THE OAK BEACH INN bumper sticker seemed to come standard with every Long Island car. Years later, people are still telling stories of seaplanes landing in the middle of the night with deliveries of cocaine.
With the onslaught of nightlife, the gate became less of a gesture toward civility and more of a necessity. It took until 1992 to get rid of the Oak Beach Inn, and by then the people of Oak Beach had fallen into the habit of measuring their lives as a series of indignities and threats. The dredging projects. The motorcyclists. The ramp for Jet Skis. The plans for condos, a twenty-four-room hotel, and wind turbines. The traffic, pollution, and mosquitoes. And, not least, the government. Old-timers mourned the loss of the old Coast Guard station, and they raged against the town of Babylon for not maintaining the roads, and against the Suffolk County civil servants for encouraging development. “At times, it would almost seem that a callous Bureaucracy has been Oak Beach’s principal enemy,” native son Ed Meade, Sr.—whose father had manned the Coast Guard station during the early years, and whose own birth took place, unexpectedly, in an Oak Beach bungalow—wrote in a brief reminiscence of the community, completed shortly before his death in 1983. Meade spoke for all his neighbors when he said he treasured the “sense of grace and purpose” of Oak Beach living.
In the early nineties, the town of Babylon raised the fee to about $3,800 per house. The new leases are set to expire in 2050—long enough for buyers to get mortgages but no guarantee that their grandchildren will be able to keep the homes. Some in town still called it a sweetheart deal. No matter what the people of Oak Beach do, they know their hold on paradise is temporary. The end will come at the hand of a jealous town government that will raise the rates on their land leases, or a gradually rising shoreline that could sink and flood the cottages, or a storm that might simply wash it all away.
The quintessential Oak Beach tale, or the one that neighbors seem to like the most, is a Norman Rockwell moment that comes across as almost too heartwarming to be true. It was at least true enough to merit mention in a sentimental piece by Newsday columnist Ed Lowe. It’s about Joey Scalise, a seven-year-old boy who spent all day fishing off a pier at his house on the water and didn’t catch a thing. When his father, Joe Sr., a schoolteacher who in the summer managed the lifeguard stations at Jones Beach, came home and saw his son brought low by disappointment, he turned around and drove across the bay to Babylon and bought a fish, then raced back to Oak Beach, swam up under the pier, and placed it on his son’s hook. It was too good a trick to do just once. Years l
ater, Joey, all grown up, noticed the boy next door having the same trouble on that pier. He got in the car and headed for the same market and did the same thing for the boy that his father had done for him. A white lie, passed down through generations, to shore up the pretense of an orderly world.
Behind the gate, families remained devoted to their vision of the simple life. Children, when they weren’t on the school bus to and from Babylon, spent whole days on the beach or at the association’s basketball and handball courts. If they tired of that, there was the menagerie of dogs, chickens, pigeons, and parakeets at the home of Gus Coletti, the insurance man and antique-car enthusiast who kept an impressive collection of fireworks in his garage on the Fairway. They were joined in 1990 by the Hacketts. Peter, a doctor; his wife, Barbara; and their three young children came to Oak Beach, it seemed, for the same reasons the old-timers loved the place. The son of a former administrator at Hempstead General Hospital, Hackett grew up in Point Lookout, a barrier-island community just west of Jones Beach. When he and his family arrived, he was in his mid-thirties, robust and exuberant—well over six feet tall and burly—and working steadily as an emergency-services surgeon. Many neighbors didn’t notice his left leg until summer, when he wore shorts. Even then they would look twice at the prosthesis’s flat, washed-out shade of yellow, so different from the doctor’s sunburned pink skin. While in medical school, Hackett told them, he was on the Northern State Parkway, helping a driver in trouble get off the road, when another car hit him, crushed his leg, and kept on going. He was in the hospital for a year, he said, and since then he’d used a prosthetic leg that never seemed to slow him down.
The Hacketts lived in a four-bedroom cottage on Larboard Court, a short walk from the Colettis and the Brennans. Peter and Barbara were lively and social, making friends with Michael Newman, who ran a large dairy business with his wife, Lisa, who joined a real estate brokerage run by another neighbor, Susie Hendricks. All those families around the hub of Larboard Court and Anchor Way were active on the board of the association. Affable almost to a fault, Hackett became the closest thing Oak Beach had to a kindly country doctor who made house calls. He could also be a braggart, puffing out his chest and playing the big shot in a way that invited resentment, an attitude that ran him into trouble professionally. For two years in the nineties, Hackett had served as the head of EMS for Suffolk County, leading the response to the crash of TWA Flight 800 off the shore of Montauk in 1996. A year after the disaster, Hackett resigned over what he called policy differences with his superiors. Newsday reported on disputes swirling around him, citing critics who painted him as “an erratic would-be hero who embellished his achievements and meddled with the volunteers’ work while neglecting his job as an administrator.” Hackett had claimed that hours after Flight 800 exploded, the Coast Guard flew him out to the wreckage and lowered him onto the deck of a yacht, where he swam through the fuel-slicked water to examine a body. The Coast Guard later denied that such a thing happened or would have been possible. In another incident, Hackett told his colleagues he’d been searching for survivors in the wreckage of a roof collapse in Bay Shore when, witnesses said, he was nowhere near the scene. Months before leaving his job, Hackett was lambasted one last time for interfering with the rescue of three men when he lowered himself into a frigid water tank that had collapsed at MacArthur Airport. Hackett said he rappelled down, while other witnesses said he climbed down a ladder. His actions were said to have caused some of those men to be injured, an accusation he continued to deny on his way out the door.
Pressured out by his superiors, Hackett took a job in Riverhead, Long Island, as director of emergency services at Central Suffolk Hospital. In 2000, in his mid-forties, Hackett had another health emergency: chest pains that turned out to be the effects of a congenital heart problem. To regulate his heartbeat, he had a pacemaker and cardioverter defibrillator implanted that effectively forced his retirement as an EMT.
Back at Oak Beach, with ample time on his hands, Hackett made it seem like he was always on call, driving around the neighborhood with a flashing red light affixed to his truck, monitoring the police scanner and rushing out whenever the speaker blurped out anything about a jumper on the Wantagh or a disabled vehicle on Ocean Parkway. As one of the only medical men in the neighborhood, he once was called upon to reattach a neighbor’s finger and treated a few others with chest pains or heart trouble. But as he had in his career, Hackett earned a reputation in the neighborhood for telling stories. He declared that the enormous kitchen island in his cottage on Larboard Court doubled as an examination table. He’d say he had a background in law enforcement. According to one neighbor, when Hackett heard that a certain teenager had smoked pot, he took him aside and said he worked for the DEA. He seemed almost too eager to resolve any given crisis, no matter how small. According to another neighbor, he heard about a bad case of poison ivy and showed up to offer the afflicted boy a syringe with a steroid, provoking the fury of the boy’s father.
In Oak Beach, Hackett seemed determined to be a very big fish in a very small pond. But as polarizing as he might have seemed to some, he fit in well among those in charge of the association. The Hacketts embraced the communal barrier-island life, celebrating every Fourth of July with a neighborhood picnic, and they used the Reverend Long’s old community center for “heritage” meetings—a historical-appreciation club spearheaded by the doctor’s wife. They mourned when Frank Brennan, a jovial six-foot-seven senior vice president at Cantor Fitzgerald, was killed in the World Trade Center attacks, leaving his wife, Barbara, a widow. They mourned again when old-timers Michael Newman and Don Hendricks died. Their homes all sat near one another off the Bayou, the road in the center of Oak Beach—near the Suffolk County cop, John Bunkhard, and Charlie Entenmann, the pastry king, and Connie Plaissay, the Park Avenue florist. At night, with the waves lapping the tombstone jetties along the beach, they all could go back in time—experiencing, however briefly, that sense of grace and purpose.
The gate could do only so much. The rest of Long Island was becoming a Gothic fun-house mirror of suburban living, an early adopter of the coming decade’s reality-show excess. Right across the Great South Bay was Massapequa, home of Amy Fisher, whose shooting of the wife of her boyfriend, Joey Buttafuoco, served as the starting gun for Long Island’s long, low hustle toward tabloid infamy. Twenty miles away from Oak Beach was Mineola, where the body of a twenty-two-year-old prostitute named Tiffany Bresciani was discovered in 1993 in the back of a pickup truck. She was one of sixteen women killed by Long Island’s most notorious serial killer, Joel Rifkin. Thirty miles away, the body of a twenty-eight-year-old prostitute named Kelly Sue Bunting was found in a trash bin in Melville in 1995; she was one of the five confirmed victims of the area’s other great serial killer, Robert Shulman. More recently, fifty miles away, four bodies were discovered in Manorville, including that of a twenty-year-old prostitute named Jessica Taylor, whose head and hands had been cut off. The Manorville killer was never found.
As the people of Oak Beach tried to preserve their way of life, changes were coming from within, where the money was. As much as the rest of Long Island, Oak Beach benefited from the great real estate boom of the nineties. People whose parents paid six thousand dollars for a cottage thirty years earlier had become paper millionaires. The increased value of the land meant more turnovers, more development, more tear-downs, more renovations, more curb cuts, more bathrooms, more screened-in porches, more swimming pools—and potentially, fewer sand dunes. The only entity able to stop a leaseholder’s plans to remake his old bungalow into a twenty-first-century dream home was the Oak Island Beach Association.
After a century, the board remained the center of the neighborhood’s money and power, collecting dues from each household and setting rules. How people felt about the way that power was used often depended on how friendly they were with the members of the board. The most active board members were the Hacketts and their friends; Gus Coletti became board p
resident in the nineties after Connie Plaissay. But in a village that was smaller than Mayberry, where everyone was supposed to take care of their neighbors, people now looked at each other with suspicion. Who on the board was building a garage without the right approval? Who was running a business out of their house when the bylaws strictly prohibited that? Which board members were being employed by that business on the side? Were any of those people being paid with association dues? Who was getting two thousand dollars a month from the association for landscaping work, then paying a landscaper five hundred to do it? Then it got more personal: Which board members were out late without their spouses and seen together in parked cars, doing more than talking about driveway permits and sand dunes?
The whispers escalated to open conflict in 2004, when the father from Oak Beach’s charming fish story—Joe Scalise, Sr.—and his family were almost driven out of Oak Beach by the association. The Scalises lived in a cul-de-sac on the west end of Oak Beach, down the road a quarter mile or so from the Hacketts and the Cannings and the Brennans, next door to Frank Solina, who wanted to put in a swimming pool without a permit. Frank’s good friend was the president of the board at the time, Gus Coletti, who did not object. Neither did the Scalise family until Frank bulldozed a sand dune that Joe liked. When Joe contacted the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, it was war.
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