MELVILLE, N.Y. -- The once-grand white house watches over Long Island Sound from the tip of Sands Point, its days numbered.
Lands End, the 25-room Colonial Revival mansion that local lore says was F. Scott Fitzgerald's inspiration for Daisy Buchanan's home in The Great Gatsby faces demolition this month.
In the 1920s and '30s, Winston Churchill, the Marx Brothers and Ethel Barrymore attended parties there. Fitzgerald was perched on the back deck, drinking in the view. Rooms featured marble, parquet and wide wood-planked floors, Palladian windows and hand-painted wallpaper.
Sands Point Village in January approved plans to raze the house and divide the site into lots for five custom homes starting at $10 million each.
Lands End is the latest Gold Coast estate to be doomed. With each demolition, the North Shore loses more of its gilded past. Historians say hundreds of the mansions have been lost in the past 50 years as owners faced increasing taxes and maintenance costs.
"The cost to renovate these things is just so overwhelming that people aren't interested in it," said Clifford Fetner, president of Jaco Builders in Hauppauge, N.Y., and Lands End project construction manager. "The value of the property is the land."
From about 1890 to 1950, business titans, politicians, and old-money families built as many as 1,400 opulent homes on the North Shore. The homes often were designed by noted architects such as Stanford White and echoed European grandeur. They belonged to Vanderbilts, Woolworths, Morgans, and Astors.
Katharine Ullman, a Sands Point village trustee who lives near Lands End, at first opposed the subdivision, saying it would increase traffic, disturb a creek, and tear down a navigation landmark for sailors. But now "I understand the problem," she said. "It was costly to make the repairs to make it livable."
Taxes, insurance, and maintenance of the 24,000-square-foot house and 13-acre grounds total as much as $4,500 a day, said David Brodsky of the real estate company that is redeveloping the site. His father bought Lands End for $17.5 million in 2004 from Virginia Kraft Payson, the late wife of former Mets owner Charles Shipman Payson.
"In its heyday, it had 20 in help," Mr. Brodsky said. "It was a true Gold Coast estate."
Monica Randall, an Oyster Bay historian, said about 500 historic North Shore homes were knocked down in the 1950s and '60s and more have fallen in the past 30 years.
First Published March 27, 2011, 4:15 a.m.
