The Painted Shore

The century between eighteen thirty and nineteen hundred took a working coast and painted a resort onto it, and the paint kept its color long enough that a lot of it still shows. It began with a novel and a paddlewheel and ended with a rail bridge and a colony of architect-designed cottages on the hillside. In between it drew in Cooper and Whitman, Harper's correspondents nearly every summer, theatrical royalty from Broadway, and — on peak Saturdays — three thousand day-trippers a day off the boats.

The people already here — the fishermen, the clammers, the pilots, the farmers on the ridge — did not disappear. Harper's wrote them into the same paragraph as the yachtsmen. That is more or less how it went.

This chapter is not finished. What follows is an outline — the shape of the story, not the told version of it. The research is under way and the text will be replaced.

The first steamboat, the Saratoga, arrived in eighteen thirty. The paddlewheel era ran from that date to the automobile drawn-out end of the eighteen-nineties, and its peak years were the seventies and eighties. The Sea Bird, the Albertina, the Jersey Lily, the Our Mary, the Long Branch, the Chrystenah — names that fill the maritime pages of the Highlands borough archive. Seven round trips a day at peak. Three thousand passengers a day off the wharves.

You cannot walk the modern boardwalk without stepping over their foundations. The pier pilings that survive at low tide off Bay Avenue are steamboat pilings.

Ferdinand Fish came up with the Water Witch Club in eighteen ninety-five. Cooper had died forty-four years earlier and the novel had sunk into that middle stratum of American letters where a name survives longer than a plot. Fish borrowed the name, bought a hillside, hired the same architects who were building the Tuxedo Park colony up the Hudson, and planted a summer colony of Shingle- style cottages on the highest ground between the Twin Lights and the harbor.

The men who summered here in the first cohort were bankers and publishers and one Broadway theater owner. The children they raised here included a Pulitzer editor, a state Supreme Court justice, and the woman who eventually wrote the National Register nomination that saved the district in two thousand and four.

The cottages are still there. Most are still occupied. From the porches at the top of the path you can still see the same shore Cooper described and the same steamer pilings the Sea Bird tied to.

Ferdinand Fish's biography does not scan neatly. He was born in Brooklyn in eighteen forty-eight, made his money in coal, spent a decade of his adult life running a shipping-agent business out of what is now the Fish House on Waterwitch Avenue, and in his fifties reinvented himself as a real-estate developer of one extremely specific hillside colony.

The Water Witch was his project. The name came from Cooper. The architectural language came from the architects. The financing came from the men he'd sold coal to, most of whom bought the first row of cottages sight-unseen. Fish himself moved into cottage number three and stayed until nineteen twenty-eight.

He is buried in the small cemetery behind the club's dining pavilion. The gravestone says only Ferdinand Fish, of the Water Witch.

The steamboat era ended by nineteen thirty-two. The automobile ended it. The trolleys were pulled up. The grand hotels became boarding houses became apartment buildings became empty lots. The Water Witch survived because the families that founded it kept coming, and because their children kept coming after them, and because the Shingle-style cottage turns out to be a remarkably durable building.

The shore in Cooper's phrase is still here. Every scene in every chapter that follows is one Cooper would have recognized. So is the particular quality of light at four in the afternoon in August that the Harper's correspondent kept trying and failing to describe.