Bay houses: Part of forgotten LI history

The 23-foot-long Sea Ox skims the sun-glinted surface of the Great South Bay. It's a warm morning in early summer, and the motorboat's skipper, George Munkert, is guiding visitors toward a glimpse of a fascinating and largely forgotten part of Long Island history.

From Munkert's dock in Amityville, the boat whirs out into the network of waterways extending through the wetlands of South Oyster Bay, the body of water north of Jones Beach and adjacent to Great South Bay. The marshy, green knolls out here have names -- Squaw Island, Townsend Island, Goose Island, once known to every mariner along the South Shore, now as irrelevant to the lives of most Long Islanders as a blacksmith's anvil.

Yet, a century or more ago, an economy and a culture flourished on these waters. Before retail, high-tech or aerospace, Long Island was a bay economy. Generations made their livelihood on these waters, harvesting salt hay for farmers; gunning for ducks that would end up as delicacies on the menus of swank Manhattan restaurants; guiding the Gilded Age swells who came to rural Long Island for weekend "shooting parties" and fishing trips.

Parkways, suburbs, changing attitudes toward hunting all helped put an end to this way of life. While their disappearance has been much lamented over the past 20 years, important monuments to the baymen's world still remain, jutting out of the waters of these wetlands on the coast of the Town of Hempstead.

The bay house.

Once, hundreds of these simple structures -- designed to provide shelter for fishermen on a cold night; or storage for their gear -- stood along the South Shore, from the Five Towns to the Hamptons. Today, they are almost all gone except for about 34 within the Town of Hempstead and 40 in the Town of Islip.

The oldest remaining ones date to the 1860s. Built originally by baymen, a second wave in the mid-20th century were erected by recreational boaters and sport fishermen.

"They come in all shapes and forms, with as many variations as there are builders," says Nancy Solomon, author of "On the Bay," a history of Long Island's bay houses.

For work and play

Typically, the houses are one-story, two- or three-room wood-framed shacks, sheathed in clapboard or (more recently) vinyl siding. Solomon, a Roslyn Heights resident who has been working to preserve and document the bay houses for nearly 25 years, was on hand for a recent visit to one of the most notable examples: The Little Stone Creek House, built in 1912, has been leased for the past 20 years by two well-known, contemporary baymen: Ben Sohm of Amityville and the late Bill Powell of Seaford. Both members of families that have worked these waters for generations, Sohm and Powell made the house a center for both work and play; as evidenced today by the cluster of fishing gear and traps piled outside the exterior of the house; while inside, bags of pretzels and chips on a kitchen table, comfortable couches, and signs with sayings such as "Women Want Me, Fish Fear Me" give this the air of a maritime man cave.

Powell lived in Seaford and died at age 62 in February. Munkert, a retired truck driver from Amityville, was part of the crew of fishermen and gunners who spent time here, often during the winter duck-hunting season. Powell, he said, "was the heart and soul of this house," noting that a pair of his shoes, still sitting on a bench in the shack, were left there by their owner days before he died. "I'm sure he didn't think that it would be the last time he was going to be here," Munkert added.

As comfortable as it is, the Little Stone Creek House is not likely to end up in Architectural Digest magazine. It really is a built-out shack, which Solomon says is why the bay houses have often been overlooked by historians and preservationists. What they don't see, she says, is the intelligence in their design: The houses sit on a sort of platform of poles and planks, to keep them raised above the water. In the event of rising water during a storm, each has a hole cut in the floor that allows water to come in -- thus keeping the house from floating away.

"They knew what they were doing when they built them," Solomon said. "They knew to build them low to protect against storms, they knew how to site them to get a good breeze."

As if on cue, cool air blows through the open windows of the Little Stone Creek House. No need for air conditioning here.

The next stop is a cluster of bay houses perched in sight of the Wantagh Parkway bridges.

All in the family

Two appear tidy but closed up: their leaseholders, Solomon says, probably only come out on weekends. Another, she hints darkly, might be home, but is not likely to take warmly to uninvited guests. At a fourth house -- called the "Bay House Hilton," according to a wood plaque hanging over the front door -- a family has just arrived, and we are welcomed as if we are part of the brood. The leaseholder, Eddie Sheehan of Wantagh, a retired Garden City firefighter, took over the lease in 1972 from the Freeport Fire Department, which had used the house as a getaway spot for many decades.

Sheehan says he is holding on to the house for his children and grandchildren. Getting a lease to one of these houses now is almost impossible; like Giants tickets, they tend to stay within the families that hold them.

"All our kids have been raised here," Sheehan said.

His son-in-law, Joe Byrne, who married Amy Sheehan, was there unpacking groceries for the weekend.

Byrne grew up in Wantagh, but until he met the Sheehans, he said he didn't know the houses existed. Looking out on the broad expanse of water and sky, he says: "It's amazing the peace and quiet out here."

Nancy Solomon will be speaking about Bay Houses and signing copies of the new, second edition of her book "On The Bay," on August 18, 6 p.m., at the Starfish Book Café, 186 Park Avenue, Amityville; and August 23, 7:30 p.m. at the Seaford Historical Society, 3890 Waverly Avenue, Seaford. For more information: www.longislandtraditions.org