Summers In Sands Point

Wendy Goodman Recalls The Long Island Home That Sparked Her Lifelong Love Of Design. Because No Photos Remain, She Turned To Her Friend, Artist Maira Kalman, To Conjure The Splendors Of The Legendary Harriman House.

- Wendy Goodman

IT WAS CAMELOT BEFORE CAMELOT. SANDS POINT, just a 40-minute drive from New York City on a good day, so close and yet a world away on the Cow Neck Peninsula in Nassau County, surrounded by water and bordered by sandy beaches. It’s where Guggenheims, Vanderbilts, and Goulds bought land and built castles—and, some say, it was the model for East Egg in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby. But there was also a more down-to-earth aspect to life in Sands Point—one in which politicians, writers, artists, and theater professionals took retreat in the private oases provided by their hosts. That’s the Sands Point I remember from my childhood summers there, spent in a bathing suit at our two-story shingled house next door to Marie and W. Averell Harriman’s compound overlooking the Long Island Sound.

It was the 1950s, a time as far away from the present as can be imagined, when as governor of New York State from 1955 to 1959, Averell had a state trooper as his security detail, and that was all. My sister Tonne and I would sit at the end of our driveway waiting for the arrival of Pam and Alida Morgan, our summer “sisters,” who would come for two weeks every year to visit their grandparents, the Harrimans. Tonne and I had the ritual down: We’d sit on the hot tar surface, oblivious to the heat and discomfort, at the exact point where we could see the car that had been sent to pick up our friends at the airport as it cleared the trees in the bend of the road.

The arrival of Pam and Alida was the highlight of our summer. Averell had sold our father two acres of beachfront property next door to his in 1954. His property stretched all the way from the main road to the beach and along the coast up to the Herbert Bayard Swope house on the point. (The press baron’s 25-room Lands End, where he held lavish all-nighters, was the alleged model for Gatsby’s parties.)