Roslyn
The Town of North Hempstead recently held a public hearing for the proposed designation of the Roslyn Country Club together with its 10 acre site. Designed by the architects Cross & Cross as a residence for industrialist Edward S. Moore, and constructed in 1920, the residence was adapted for clubhouse use by William J. Levitt, in 1948, as part of a development of 668 homes located between Roslyn Road, I.U. Willets Road and Locust Lane. Levitt’s intention was to provide a planned community of affordable dwellings with the country club as its centerpiece. As such, every homeowner was granted an easement for use of the clubhouse and its facilities, a restaurant, bar, rooms for entertaining, tennis courts, adult and “kiddie” swimming pools, ballfields and trails. Levitt set aside ten acres to ensure that such facilities would remain with the clubhouse.

The significance of the Cross and Cross house and its ten acre site are several fold. Although Cross & Cross completed nine commissions on Long Island, only 3 are known to survive and one of these, “Bayberryland” in Southampton, is threatened by development plans which are likely to result in its demolition. Of the nine commissions, most are masonry, in the English Manor and Tudor styles.

The clubhouse was unique in the Crosses’ work, resembling a rambling Long Island farmhouse with the complex of rooflines typical of such houses after centuries of succeeding families’ use. Cross & Cross situated the house at the crest of a hill, its low lines enhancing its hillside setting. The clubhouse is a mirror of Long Island’s passage from the country house era to the post World War II suburban housing boom. Levitt’s role in designing this community with the foresight to retain the adaptively used clubhouse as its focal point, tells an instructive history lesson about the development of 20th century Long Island. SPLIA hopes that this example will remain to inform other developers in melding what is there with what is to come.

Old Westbury
A recent subdivision application in the Village of Old Westbury has preservationists and historians concerned. The 35 acre property contains an architecturally significant country house, known as “Knole,” designed by Carrere and Hastings, completed in 1903 for Herman B. Duryea and purchased in 1910 by Henry Phipps for his daughter at her marriage to Bradley Martin. The house has stayed in the Martin family until its recent purchase by a developer.

Even more significant is the 300 year old Seaman-H icks house, locally called “The Old Place”, which lies by the side of Post Road facing south at the entrance to “Knole”. Its history is important not only to Long Island but to the United States as well. One of the earliest Quaker farmhouses, said to be built in either 1695 or 1715, according to local sources, owned by two of the

most influential Quaker families, Seaman and Hicks, it stayed in Quaker ownership until the farm was purchased by Duryea in 1900. The last owner, Rachel Seaman Hicks, was a skilled amateur photographer who left a large collection of glass plate images, now in the Nassau County Museum archives, taken mostly in the 1880s and 1890s which inform our knowledge of Nassau County before its genesis as a post Wo r l d War II suburb. Rachel Hicks also played a role in the Women’s Suffrage movement.

Of paramount importance to the future survival of the Seaman-Hicks house, is its documented role as a way station on the Underground Railroad, during the years of its occupancy by Joseph and Lydia Hicks in the 1840s. Both the State of New York, through its Heritage NY program, and the Federal Government, through the National Park Service, are engaged in programs to document these important signposts of African American history. The goal of both the Federal and State programs is to support with grants the documentation and interpretation of Underground Railroad sites. SPLIA is urging both the Village Board and Planning Board to preserve the main house and the Seaman-Hicks house as part of the subdivision plan, and is offering to work with both the Village and the developer to find solutions.
Source: Kathleen G. Velsor, Ed.D., SUNY Old Westbury; “The Long Island Freedom Trail” in Afro-American Genealogical Historical Journal, Fall 20 03.