Booker T. Washington's Long Island summer house sits mired in red tape

A house stuck in time, Booker T. Washington's Fort Salonga summer home is covered in white shingles speckled with gray patches. Silvering wood boards with a wavy grain conceal the windows.

Standing on an eroding bluff overlooking Long Island Sound, the house was designated a Town of Huntington landmark in 2005. Since then, it has largely been sitting and waiting. While some neighborhood homes have physical protections against further erosion, Washington's former summer house does not.

In 2022, a new set of private owners purchased the unoccupied house in hopes of doing what others could not: navigate the red tape attached to a landmarked structure to restore the house and mitigate the risks of erosion. As its current owners do the research required to make plans, the house sits in silence and disrepair.

"It's sitting on a precipice," said Thelma Abidally, a former East Northport resident whose early-2000s efforts led to the historic landmark designation. "It's getting ready to fall into the Long Island Sound, because of the erosion there."

Current state of Booker T. Washington's home

Born into slavery in Virginia in 1856, Booker T. Washington was a prominent African American educator, author, orator and reformer. He was the founding principal and first president of Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Alabama — known now as Tuskegee University. 

Washington bought the house in 1911 and sold it in 1914, shortly before his death in 1915, Town of Huntington Historian Robert Hughes said.

Ownership of the home has changed multiple times since it was granted landmark status, property records show. 

When current owners Frank and Margalit Zinghini closed on the historic house in 2022, they had never been inside. The house was listed as-is, they said. Property records confirm they paid $1.45 million.

"I came in first, because Frank had to go to a meeting, and I literally cried," said Margalit, 52, of her first time entering the house. "It's very emotional, to buy a property that belonged to such an important person in our history. But I hoped to find things that were here when he lived here with his family, to feel that."

The house was gutted to the studs. Pointy edges of broken bricks protruded from one wall, showing signs of a fireplace. In the basement, there was a pile of neatly stacked bricks and a community of crickets.

Previous owners' plans to move the home did not sit well with the Zinghinis, who said a move would be too risky and further compromise the already vulnerable house.

"We're studying everything — we've had the foundation inspected, it's still sound. We've had soil borings done, the hill is sound," said Frank, 66. "We're making sure it's safe. We don't want to move it."

As he and his wife formulate plans to present to the town, and to determine the financial logistics, Frank said he is hoping to get the approval to keep the house in its current spot.

"Everything's intention and desire right now; nothing's a plan," he said.

What Huntington Town, DEC say

Because the house is a designated landmark, the Zinghinis need approval from the Historic Preservation Commission or the Huntington Town Board, depending on the circumstances, to move forward with their plans, Hughes said.

In response to repeated requests for information about the state of the house and plans for the property, Town of Huntington spokesperson Christine Geed said in an email that there was little information available. Geed confirmed the property is in a Coastal Erosion Hazard Area.

According to Geed, the director of the Department of Planning and Environment said a prior town administration had worked to approve plans for a resident to move the house to a different spot on the same property. Because the property was privately owned, there was no public funding for the project, the department said.

The Zoning Board of Appeals approved a variance that would allow the relocation, as well as a building permit, according to the department. The owner did not carry out the plan.

In an email, the state Department of Environmental Conservation confirmed it did receive an application for a bluff stabilization project from a homeowner in 2009. According to the DEC, two Notices of Incomplete Application were sent to the applicant in August and December of that year.

The applicant had not submitted additional information, the DEC said, and the agency closed the application in 2014.

For Coastal Erosion Hazard Area permits, which are required for certain projects in erosion-prone areas, the Town of Huntington has delegated authority, the DEC said.

The DEC confirmed it does not have any record of the town applying for a project at the address.

Previous owners' efforts

Over the years, through the efforts of various owners, Hughes said, the house has been gutted and gotten a new roof. He stops by the property every now and then and said he has not noticed visible signs of further erosion.

"It seems like it's stabilized, but maybe we're one big storm away from that changing," Hughes said.

As a longtime admirer of Washington, Diane Gleason read his writings and purposely chose this house. Property records show Gleason co-owned the property from 2007, when it sold for $1.295 million, through the most recent sale in 2022. The Town of Huntington confirmed Gleason was an owner when officials issued approval to reposition the house.

It is unfathomable to Gleason, still, that in her efforts she found there was a "profound lack of care" for the preservation of the property.

We followed every single bloody rule. We did everything the right way. And at every single solitary turn, there was a stop.

 — Diane Gleason, previous co-owner

"We followed every single bloody rule. We did everything the right way. And at every single solitary turn, there was a stop," she said. "It didn't matter what we wanted to do, it didn't matter how far we were willing to go."

By the time Gleason got the house, it was "a wreck" that had already been empty for years, she said.

"I was overjoyed," said Gleason, 79. "He's somebody who's really important to me."

In the current political and cultural climate, which she described as rife with prejudice and persistent racism, she wondered whether a landmark linked to a white historical figure would be receiving more attention.

Geed said the current Town of Huntington administration could not speak to the actions of past administrations. This administration has not interacted with past or current owners of Washington's home, she said.

"Any association with race pertaining to Booker T. Washington and preserving historical markers has nothing to do with this administration," Geed said. "We continue to work with every community — Black, Hispanic, all diverse communities — to ensure that their legacy and their cultural history within this town is maintained."

The town's approach to preserving Black history includes the African American Advisory Board's ongoing effort to create an African American history museum in the area, Geed said. 

As for Washington's house, Geed added, "We can't intercede on state issues, we can't provide public funds for a private property initiative, but anything that the town could do — even in past administrations — anything that they could do, they did do."

Gleason described her own drawn-out effort to preserve the property.

"We weren't looking to destroy the look of the house, I wasn't looking to make some stupid modern mansion out of it," she said. "I wanted to keep it in the natural setting, the way it was."

One priority was to build a retaining wall to protect the site from further erosion. The nearby golf course had a retaining wall, she said, but she could not get permission to build one to protect her own land.

That effort continued until she got sick, she said, and needed to make a choice.

With the goal of ensuring the historic home could be used as an educational tool — and a reminder of a prominent figure in Black history — Gleason said she was willing to take an even greater monetary loss.

"We offered to give it to the town. We offered to give the town the entire house," she said. "All they had to do was take it and put it some place where people could go through it, right? There's no way people are going to go through it where it is."

Geed said the town has "has no record of an offer to give the property to the town."

Moved by history

A tall, blue historical marker with letters in yellow type is planted at the edge of the property. Abidally herself paid $615 for the sign, including a $20 delivery fee, in 2003. The town reimbursed her after officials saw there was public interest in the home, she said.

The marker predates the historic landmark designation, which Abidally fought for as she researched Black history in the community.

For Washington's house, Abidally's starting point was an article in The New York Times, she said; she set out to confirm this independently.

“The two sisters that lived there, I was lucky enough to speak to them before they passed, and speak to a lot of the African Americans who lived in Northport in the early 1900s, and they knew about it,” she said.

Abidally's own interest in saving the house came of a childhood memory. Growing up in 1960s Selma, Alabama, Abidally would take school trips to Tuskegee University. After the tour, the university served a hot lunch she remembers decades later: cornbread muffins, beets, meatloaf, mashed potatoes, green beans and a small container of milk, served on a plastic tray.

Saving Washington's house, she said, was her way of thanking the university for the hot lunches.

What comes next

On a February visit to the home, Margalit Zinghini approached one of the few artifacts left — a white bathtub with a cracked and peeling exterior. She intends to save the tub, she said.

The Zinghinis are familiar with historic houses, having taken on other restoration projects on Long Island. To find this one in this condition was disappointing, they said.

"Even just to get a sense of the history. Sometimes you scrape some paint off and you see some wallpaper and you peel the wallpaper back and you see something else, you get the story; and we missed out on all that," Frank Zinghini said.

In searching for photographs of the home before it was gutted, the Zinghinis have found very little. Still, they plan to base the restoration on the few details and images available.

"My intention is to try and bring all of that back," Margalit said, noting that one photograph showed a small bench in an area now barren. The Zinghinis' vision involves landscaping the hilltop with native plants to drive out invasive species.

"Our heart is in bringing this back to life, not tearing it down or anything like that," Frank said.

The neighborhood

Situated on a bend on Cousins Street in Fort Salonga, the house is isolated, Gleason said. In the winter, the house is visible from the street through the skinny, barren branches of trees; but the neighborhood has grown around it.

The area is a close-knit beach community where homeowners collect sea glass and observe wildlife traveling by air and water, said Mia Pizzo, a Northport-based agent with Howard Hanna Coach Realtors.

"You're constantly seeing people outside and enjoying nature," Pizzo said.

In selling area homes, Pizzo said it was hard to find comparable sales.

"There really are not a lot of sales in that particular neighborhood," she said. "It's just a testament to how much they love being there ... nobody really leaves."

Watching from the house next door, Glenn Treacher and his wife, Owen, have seen the same storyline play out more than once over the past two decades. A wide-eyed, optimistic buyer arrives with the intention of restoring the house; the homeowner hits roadblocks trying to get town approval to take action.

Glenn, who owns The Liberty NYC, a Manhattan bar and restaurant, said he is indifferent to the home, but it has been costing him money, too. Because that house is unprotected from erosion, his own is at greater risk.

"The biggest problem for me is, it's cost me hundreds and hundreds of thousands to protect my house," said Treacher, 68, who came to the United States from Wales 48 years ago.

The "ghost house," he said, also draws uninvited loiterers to the property.

But past owners have had good intentions, he said. Of one previous set of owners, he said, "they were prepared to do anything and everything."

At the time of purchase, the Zinghinis did not know much about previous attempts to restore the house, but they do now. They remain optimistic about the house's future, the project driven largely by Margalit's passion for it.

"We're persistent," Frank said. "We will do this. And it's just going to take time. But we will do it, and we will do it right."

By Arielle Dollinger

arielle.dollinger@newsday.com@aridollinger

Arielle Dollinger joined Newsday as a staff reporter in 2022. Previously, she covered local and national news as a freelancer for The New York Times, Newsday and other outlets.