Their beach home is a driveway

WESTHAMPTON BEACH, N.Y. — Dune Street stretches a number of miles alongside a skinny barrier island in Westhampton Seaside, New York, like a needle threading via paradise. On one facet is Moriches Bay, a relaxed waterway superb for pleasure boaters and clam diggers. The opposite facet is oceanfront. To personal one of many supersized homes on both facet of Dune Street will value you tens of millions.

Eli Manning, a former New York Giants quarterback, and Maria Bartiromo, a tv anchor, are amongst these with locations within the space. So is Eric Nathan, 77, whose household has had property in Westhampton Seaside for the reason that Nineteen Sixties.

However Nathan is just not technically a home-owner. He, together with some family, has a driveway on Dune Street — or a “car parking zone,” as he put it on a go to to the positioning earlier this month.

“I attempt to get out right here yearly,” mentioned Nathan, who lives in Danbury, Connecticut.

The strip of sandy floor is eighteen toes broad by a number of hundred toes lengthy and stretches from Dune Street again to Moriches Bay. There may be room sufficient to suit possibly six automobiles, earlier than the dune grass takes over.

The property taxes are a music — about $15 a 12 months — and the maintenance is nonexistent. Had been it not for 2 tall poles of driftwood painted turquoise that stand close to the roadside like markers, the driveway can be indistinguishable to passersby.

As Nathan drove alongside Dune Street towards his slice of land on a latest Wednesday morning, he rose in his seat with anticipation.

His household as soon as acquired a suggestion of $40,000 for his or her 18 toes of Dune Street frontage, however turned it down. “I wouldn’t promote for any amount of cash,” Nathan mentioned. “It’s my ticket to the seashore.”

That seashore, behind a wall of oceanfront properties on stilts throughout the road from his driveway, is all however non-public. And there are few if some other locations that Nathan would reasonably be.

His love for the ocean goes again to his adolescence, when his mother and father, now deceased, saved sufficient to purchase a cottage on Dune Street, again when the group was dotted with modest bungalows. Nathan says his happiest instances had been spent alongside this stretch of sand and sea.

However via a mixture of things, together with a tragic accident and a pure catastrophe, in the present day all that continues to be within the household is the driveway.

It’s hallowed floor for Nathan, who known as it his “non secular residence.”

Planting Roots

Nathan’s mother and father, Edward and Suzanne Nathan, had been lifelong seashore individuals, natives of the Rockaways, a neighborhood in New York Metropolis’s Queens borough. He and his half brother, Ralph, who’s 12 years older, inherited their longing for the salt life. Within the Nineteen Fifties, the household took summer season leases in Atlantic Seaside, off Far Rockaway. It wasn’t lengthy earlier than the mother and father, renters in Manhattan, determined it was time to purchase a spot out east.

The cottage that they purchased, at 730 Dune Street, within the early Nineteen Sixties was a former duck-hunting blind that sat on low pilings and had been added onto a number of instances. An extended unheated dwelling, it had an open lounge, two bedrooms, a small kitchen and a again deck going through the bay.

The views had been expansive, sky and sand, and you would stroll straight onto the seashore. The Nathans’ neighbors, like actress Ruth Warrick, who starred within the cleaning soap opera “All My Youngsters,” lived in comparable seashore shacks.

Early on, the Nathans winterized the cottage, permitting them to spend weekends there year-round. Quickly after, Nathan’s elder half brother and different family constructed homes throughout the bay, in Remsenburg, making the realm the locus of the household.

For a teenage Nathan, weekdays within the metropolis had a drabness, however weekends on the seashore had been in Technicolor.

“Once we acquired on the LIE on Friday night time, it was like a darkish cloud lifting out of your soul,” he mentioned, referring to the Lengthy Island Expressway. “The reverse occurred Sunday night time leaving the seashore — you felt your self shrinking and being compressed by town.”

At present, summer season within the Hamptons calls to thoughts boozy nights on the Surf Lodge, profligate spending on luxurious items and experiences and taking selfies all over the place from the Hamptons Polo Membership to the Carvel on Montauk Freeway. However the Nathans’ weekends there a long time in the past had been fortunately spent at residence, doing chores like repairing their picket walkway to Moriches Bay or sweeping out the sand.

Nathan’s father, who labored as a lawyer within the metropolis, purchased a sailboat and a speedboat. His mom dug for clams, cleansing them in saltwater and making linguine with clam sauce for dinner. At night time, the household would sit on the deck and watch the sundown.

Their good instances ended abruptly in 1984. That October, Nathan’s mother and father had been in a deadly automobile accident close to their cottage in Westhampton Seaside. Nathan’s father, then 80, died on the scene, and his mom just a few weeks later at 70.

“That modified all the things,” Nathan mentioned.

After the funeral, he drove his father’s ashes out to Dune Street. He scattered some outdoors the cottage, close to his father’s favourite pine tree, and a few into the ocean. (His mom’s stays went to her household’s mausoleum within the metropolis.)

“I went into the ocean with my father on a regular basis,” Nathan recalled. “We’d be doing our chores round the home, and I’d whistle to him or he’d whistle to me: ‘Let’s take a dip,’ and we’d go.”

Nathan and his half brother inherited the seashore cottage collectively, together with land round it that their mother and father had acquired, together with a pleasant dimension lot subsequent door, at 728 Dune Street.

Within the years after his mother and father’ loss of life, Nathan, who lived in Manhattan and labored within the payroll division for the Seagram Co., continued going to Westhampton Seaside. Ultimately, he began to deliver his three kids.

For his eldest daughter, Molly Paige, now 41, summer season seashore weekends turned father-daughter bonding time.

When she was younger, Paige mentioned, Dune Street was closed to owners for a time after a part of the seashore eroded. Her father was undeterred. He hoisted her on his shoulders, grabbed their baggage and grocery luggage and walked a mile on the sand to his home.

“The very best factor that my dad gave me, aside from my siblings, is a love for the seashore,” Paige mentioned. “He believes it may well remedy you; it’ll make a foul day higher. That particular seashore is, to him, virtually otherworldly.”

The ocean was, within the phrases of Nathan’s son, Eli, “his completely happy place.”

“He would say he needed to get a dunk in, a dip in,” Eli Nathan, 34, mentioned. “He simply needed to be within the ocean.”

Getting Uprooted

Westhampton Seaside, like a lot of coastal Lengthy Island, is in fixed flux. Because the sand will get carried by the currents, one part of seashore erodes whereas one other grows. West Hampton Dunes, the part containing the Nathans’ driveway, was itself created by a storm breach in 1931.

In November 1992, a nor’easter introduced record-high tides and hurricane-force winds. Some 80 homes in Westhampton Seaside had been swept into the ocean, the Nathans’ cottage amongst them.

“There wasn’t a splinter left,” recalled Nathan’s half brother, Ralph, now 89.

When the seashore was rebuilt just a few years later by the U.S. Military Corps of Engineers, it coincided with the booming ’90s economic system. As huge cash arrived within the type of Wall Avenue titans, company legal professionals and leisure stars, the Hamptons, a low-key vacation spot for artists and writers, turned The Hamptons.

Quickly after the seashore was rebuilt, Nathan’s half brother offered many of the property he had inherited from their mother and father. Nathan hoped to rebuild. He employed an architect to draft plans for a year-round residence.

However he was going via a divorce on the time, and his household had moved to Westchester County. The concept of residing three hours from his younger kids was unacceptable.

“So I agreed to promote the property,” Nathan mentioned, “which I regretted instantly.”

By then, the funky shacks that after characterised Dune Street had been being leveled and changed with supersized properties whose foundations and residing areas had been constructed as much as shield them from coastal flooding.

These trip properties now can value upward of $9 million and may include 4,000 sq. toes of residing house and $300,000 infinity-edge swimming pools overlooking the ocean. Technically, the seashore beneath is public. However the lack of parking or quick access signifies that a home-owner who buys on the ocean facet of Dune Street basically enjoys a non-public beachfront.

Homes rapidly rose on the plots offered by Nathan and his half brother, who collectively held onto one parcel: the strip now used because the driveway.

Nathan owns his half outright; his half brother has given his portion to his three kids, Kevin Nathan, Suzanne Harrison and Daphne Cafone, who’ve their very own affection for Dune Street.

Kevin, 57, spent a lot of his childhood there. He now lives in Connecticut and drives to the household plot a number of instances a 12 months, he mentioned. “Each time I am going,” he added, “I get sentimental about my grandparents, about my household’s historical past there. That’s residence to me.”

Eric Nathan, in contrast to his nephew, hardly ever will get to Westhampton Seaside nowadays. That’s partly due to his well being: He usually will get dialysis, and has different illnesses.

On the cloudy day of his latest go to this summer season, Nathan was joined by his cousin Joan Abrahams, whose mother and father constructed a home in Remsenburg. One 12 months aside in age, the cousins recalled combing the seashore of their youthful years for small, fan-shaped seashells that they known as “fortunate shells.”

“So, Joanie, do you need to take a stroll out on the spit?” Nathan mentioned, referring to a sandbar created by the 1992 nor’easter that juts into Moriches Bay and grows annually. He believes his father’s stays have turn into one with the realm, and has informed his personal kids to scatter his ashes on the spit.

Wearing inexperienced shorts, a grey T-shirt and a denim bucket hat whose ripped prime he had patched himself, Nathan, utilizing a cane, and Abrahams walked to the bay on a path fabricated from wooden chips and decking. It was made and is maintained by the homeowners of the cedar-clad home beside the Nathans’ driveway. They let Nathan and his family use the trail once they go to.

Quickly, extra neighbors will come: On the opposite facet of the driveway, a uncommon part of undeveloped land has been subdivided into three parcels. Nathan eyed the boundary flags for 3 potential properties with a weary fatalism.

“Generally I really feel like a pauper out right here,” he mentioned.

A Household Legacy

Along with passing on his love for the ocean to his three kids, Nathan hopes the driveway can be a part of the legacy he leaves them.

His youngest daughter, Sarah Nathan, 35, will inherit her father’s portion alongside together with her siblings. In school, she and her buddies drove out from town and camped within the driveway in a single day. She has additionally used the driveway as a parking spot for summer season seashore days.

Sarah mentioned she doesn’t know what she would do with this “bizarre asset” sooner or later, however that promoting isn’t an choice. Her brother and sister agree.

“His ghost will harass me for the remainder of my life if I hand over this driveway,” Sarah mentioned of her father.

After a pair hours out on the spit in Moriches Bay, the warmth acquired to Eric Nathan and he and Abrahams headed again to the driveway.

However earlier than taking the lengthy drive again to Connecticut, Nathan was intent on doing one thing. He walked again to the automobile and grabbed a blue duffel bag. Inside was a seashore towel.

He crossed Dune Street and walked to a public entry bridge, hidden between two large homes, that led to the ocean.

When he acquired to the seashore, he started shedding objects: first his socks and sandals, then his cane. He walked with objective into the ocean and was quickly chest excessive in foamy water.

A giant wave got here and knocked him again. He stood within the water, ready for the subsequent wave to crash over him. And the subsequent. He appeared to wobble within the turbulent ocean.

Abrahams appeared on nervously from the shore.

Slowly, Nathan steadied himself within the breakers, circled and walked out of the water. He was dazed and dripping moist however smiling.

“Oh, God,” he exclaimed to himself, standing once more on his seashore. “I made it.”