Big Changes Afoot on Fire Island, Except for One Enclave

Charles Guthrie has the same summer job his father once held — managing the youth sailing program at the Point O’Woods Yacht Club.In the balconied wooden yacht club building that has stood since 1899, the sunburned 22-year-old explained that little else has changed since his father’s youth in Point O’Woods, the secluded Fire Island enclave where he’s spent nearly every summer of his life.“It’s really safe,” Mr. Guthrie said of the family-oriented community, where childhood days are spent roaming between the beach and the playground and the candy store. “It’s great — there’s a lot of freedom. Most kids just have to be home for dinner.”With gas prices spiking, once-sleepy Fire Island is experiencing a surge in popularity as visitors seek out the car-free island’s sandy beaches and weather-beaten cottages are torn down and replaced with contemporary mansions. But time stands still in the exclusive 100-year-old Point O’Woods, where careful — and unique — residence restrictions ensure the enclave remains much as it was at its founding.“There’s nothing like Point O’Woods in the area,” a Fire Island historian, Harry Havemeyer, said. “I don’t know of anything else quite like it.”Fire Island is a half-mile sliver of sandy beach separating the Great South Bay from the Atlantic Ocean. Reachable from Manhattan via the Long Island Rail Road and then a ferry, the trip is roughly 1.5 hours. Because the quaint island bans cars for much of the year, little red wagons, bicycles, and the occasional golf cart are the primary modes of transportation. Traditionally dotted with tumbledown bungalows, in recent years it has begun to compete with the Hamptons as a favored playground for wealthy New Yorkers.“It’s gotten more built-up,” the executive director at the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and longtime Fire Island resident, Lesley Herrmann, said. “In the 1950s and 1960s, there were small, modest cottages. What’s happening now is that people will buy two or three lots and build more Hamptons-like kinds of houses.”With its newly refurbished housing stock, the island is gaining a higher profile, according to CJ Mingolelli, a regional director at Prudential Douglas Elliman, which opened its first office on Fire Island last year. “Fire Island is getting that exposure — global recognition,” he said. “It’s not just local or regional people, it’s people from the West Coast, Canada, and overseas.”This year in particular has seen an uptick in visitors, brokers said. “It’s the busiest rental season we’ve ever had,” a broker at Fire Island Homes, Laura Marvin Smith, said. She said there are usually rentals available into May and June, but the company’s listings were almost fully booked in April. “My phones are still ringing off the hook with people looking to rent,” she said.As oil prices have spiked over the past few years, and this year in particular, Fire Island’s ban on cars may be responsible for some of its growing popularity.“With gasoline prices so high, that’s a tremendous help to us,” the owner of Seasons Bed and Breakfast in Ocean Beach, Harvey Levine, said. This is especially true for New Yorkers, who can reach the island without needing to rent a car. “I see a lot of day trippers — more than ever,” he said.Not everyone is welcoming the new wave of visitors. “Ocean Beach is becoming like Queens — it’s so busy and so crowded,” a Long Island resident who rented a house in Ocean Bay Park for the month of July, Dina Persampire, said.This is certainly not the case inside Point O’Woods, a private community of roughly 100 houses separated by a fence from neighboring Ocean Bay Park. Governed by a homeowners association, Point O’Woods — Fire Island’s oldest community — has its own ferry, post office, volunteer fire department, church, and small general store.The Point O’Woods Association, which must approve new members, owns the houses — residents have 99-year leases. To join, potential members must have children, while an architecture committee oversees any proposed changes to the well-preserved, weathered-shingle homes. All rentals and sales go through a private office; outside real estate brokers do not have listings for Point O’Woods.The community owes its insular nature to its unique origins, according to Mr. Havemeyer. Point O’Woods was founded in the late 19th century as a Chautauqua assembly, a sort of “educational summer camp for adults” that was popular at the time, he said. The Chautauqua group fizzled, but a few members continued spending summers on Fire Island, inviting friends to do the same. The group quickly established rules, such as guidelines for the type and location of the homes that were built. “They found that they liked to have people that they were acquainted with, that they knew and were comfortable with,” Mr. Havemeyer said. “It was organized as a town, but it had all the earmarks of a club, right from the beginning.”An attorney at the real estate law firm Belkin Burden Wenig & Goldman, Aaron Shmulewitz, said the community is very unusual because homeowner associations, unlike co-op or condominium boards, usually exercise little control over members. “Homeowners associations usually have the least level of control,” he said.As a result of the association’s strict rules, locals say the community’s graceful homes seem impervious to the development that’s occurring on other parts of the island.“It feels very old-world,” a Long Island native whose family spends summers in Point O’Woods, Marissa Vitagliano, said of the community. “There’s nothing modern.”Unlike other parts of Fire Island, “when you walk around, most of the houses you see are 30, 40, 50 years old,” Mr. Havemeyer said. “They are old-fashioned, shingle-style houses.”Moreover, the tight-knit nature of the place makes it a safe and comfortable environment for children, Ms. Vitagliano said. “Everybody seems to know each other,” she said. As a result, she said, parents “feel more comfortable letting kids do their own thing. It’s such a great family spot.”The gate sometimes causes friction with nonresidents hoping to walk through the community, but for the most part Point O’Woodsers keep peacefully to themselves, according to Scott Little, owner of the Ocean Bay Park Market, which is situated just outside the community.“Homes stay in the family — there’s not a lot of turnover,” he said. “There’s a ton of heritage.”

Big Changes Afoot on Fire Island, Except for One Enclave

Big Changes Afoot on Fire Island, Except for One Enclave

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