The Robert Gardiner House: All Right
The residential parts of Main Street, whether in East Hampton, Sag Harbor or Southampton, have always been prestigious addresses. They might not appeal to the buyers of the sprawling, new, look-alike shingle mansions being constructed on every available lot in former potato fields, but for people who resist the McMansion mentality, these streets have cachet.
The latest demonstration of that durability is the sale of the Gardiner estate on East Hampton’s Main Street. After the death of Robert David Lion Gardiner in August 2004, at 93 years old, his widow, the English born Eunice Gardiner, decided to permanently give up East Hampton for Palm Beach, where she had already been spending most of her time.
The house was listed with Brown Harris Stevens in East Hampton at $9.9 million, and is in contract to a New Yorker who did not previously own in the Hamptons. Peter Turino is the broker. Although Mr. Gardiner proclaimed himself “16th Lord of the Manor of Gardiner’s Island” based on the English land grant to an ancestor in 1639, the Main Street house where he lived was not historic.
His aunt, Sarah Diodati Gardiner, built the house in 1940 in an Italian Renaissance style, perhaps reflecting her European roots. Composed of limestone and brownstone, with a tile roof, it comes off as more Old World than Eastern Long Island. But at 9,000 square feet with intricate detailing, irreplaceable materials and craftsmanship, and 5.2 prime acres, it is a superb piece of Hamptons real estate.
The Robert Gardiner Legacy: All Wrong
Sarah Diodati Gardiner is the hero in this family saga. She was responsible for keeping Gardiner’s Island in the family, having bought it for $400,000 in 1937, just days before it was to be auctioned to pay the debts of the profligate cousin who then owned it. On her death in 1953, the island passed to a trust with Gardiner and his sister, Alexandra Gardiner Creel, as the beneficiaries. The trust fund ran out of money to maintain the island in the 1970s. Gardiner refused to kick in his share, so the upkeep was paid entirely by his sister, who died in 1990, and by her daughter, Alexandra Creel Goulet. The Goulets continue to pay to maintain the island, and with East Hampton taxes included it now runs about $1.8 a year. The bitter feud between Gardiner and the Goulet family was never resolved.
Gardiner was a contradictory figure. "The Fords, the du Ponts, the Rockefellers, they are nouveaux riches," he once pompously said in an interview. Yet his behavior was hardly aristocratic and was often tawdry and tasteless. Gardiner sued, publicizing the family quarrels, and in a series of court cases eventually gained back the right to visit the island. In another sordid episode, Gardiner, who had no children, attempted to adopt a distant male relative with no local connections to keep the primogeniture line intact, but that stunt fizzled out. Alexandra Goulet is now the island’s sole owner.
The contradictory nature of Gardiner’s life was manifest in his death. He continually boasted of his family’s history, but did nothing for the local community while alive and in his will left nothing to be preserved. The entire contents of the house went to auction at Christie’s, to the dismay of the East Hampton Library, the East Hampton Historical Society and the Southampton Historical Museum, whose directors had hoped some items, deeply important to local history but of minuscule value relative to the wealth of the estate, would be willed to them. With only one exception, the organizations could not compete successfully with deep-pocketed private bidders for the historical objects they coveted.
What Gardiner did not realize is that having an “old family” only means they stayed in one place longer than most families and acquired some good real estate, not that they gained any moral entitlement. So perhaps it is not sad that for the first time no one with the Gardiner name will be associated with either the Main Street estate or the island.