SANS: Then And Now

Last summer, a tradition that has been carried out for generations continued under sunny skies on Ninevah Place in Sag Harbor.

With grill smoke spiraling up into the air, upbeat music playing in the background, and the smell of cooking hamburgers wafting, small children lined up at one end of the dead-end street, waiting for the signal to go, before racing to the other end, as their parents, friends and relatives cheered them on. Many of the parents had run the same races at the Sag Harbor Hills Improvement Association neighborhood block party years earlier and looked on fondly as their own children were now partaking in the same summertime festivities on the quiet street just steps away from the bay.

In many of the ways that matter most, the collection of neighborhoods off Route 114 in Sag Harbor often referred to with the acronym SANS — which stands for Sag Harbor Hills, Azurest and Ninevah Subdivisions — have not changed. An almost familial kind of relationship still exists between neighbors who often meet up on the bay beaches that are the jewel of the area. Traditions like the block party and children’s races are still highly attended and anticipated events, and many of the residents live in homes that have been in their families for generations — some even built from scratch by their grandparents more than 60 years ago.

But it would be disingenuous to say that SANS has remained frozen in time. It has not been immune to the forces that have drastically changed the socioeconomic makeup of the rest of the area in more recent years, when real estate values have soared, and many families and individuals who previously only spent part of their time living on the East End have decided to permanently reside in the area.

There is always a considerable degree of hand-wringing and angst about the ravages of overdevelopment and the affordability crisis when it comes to housing on the East End. But those issues can carry extra significance in the SANS neighborhood, for special reasons.

Residents of Azurest, Sag Harbor Hills and Ninevah have similar stories, with common threads.

Many of them were, at least initially, second-home owners, living in modest, stylish ranches and bungalows that have, in most cases, been in their families for generations. And the majority of them are Black.

Azurest was the first of the three neighborhoods to be developed and subdivided. It was founded in 1947 by sisters Amaza Lee Meredith and Maude Terry, who were architects. Terry had been a frequent visitor to Sag Harbor, spending summers in the historic Eastville neighborhood nearby, which had been home for many years to Black families, starting initially as a place where African Americans who worked on whaling ships out of Sag Harbor had lived. The owners of the land that became Azurest, the Gale family, agreed to have the properties subdivided and sold.

In the early years of the Azurest subdivision, a syndicate was created to manage sales of the lots and provide mortgages.

Over the years, Azurest, Sag Harbor Hills, and Ninevah became well-known not only for being a safe and nurturing place for middle class Black families to spend summers in the fresh air and away from the city, but also for many prominent Black elites, a trend that continued over the years. Roscoe Brown Jr., a Tuskegee Airman who died in 2016, owned a home there, and other prominent Black men and women, revered or famous for one reason or another, have gravitated to the area, whether as homeowners or frequent visitors — from Duke Ellington and Lena Horne to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, to former New York Knicks basketball star Allan Houston, and author Colson Whitehead.

The story of the three neighborhoods is in many ways simply about the fulfillment of the American dream. But it is also a story of triumph over racist barriers intended specifically to deny Black Americans access to that dream by many means, including blocking them from obtaining mortgages, real estate redlining, and other nefarious, discriminatory practices.

In a story about SANS from a 2019 edition of The Express magazine, Dr. Beverly Granger, a longtime resident of Sag Harbor Hills, described how the neighborhoods maintained a very specific sense of community that made the area feel more like it was one big extended family. Granger spoke about how she was able to provide her daughter, Alyssa Cuyjet, with the same kind of broad freedom to roam at a young age that she had enjoyed while growing up spending summers there herself as a child, in the 1950s, in the home owned by her parents, Gus and Dorothy Granger, built by them along with her uncle, Lester Granger.

“It was like Camp Sag Harbor,” Dr. Granger recalled. “You went out of your house in the morning, and at dinner time, when it was time to come home, everyone had a ship’s bell, and they’d ring it, and everyone’s bell sounded different.

“It was very much of a community, and everyone was like an aunt or uncle,” she continued. “You were all in and out of everyone’s home. There was always a parent someplace, and you knew you’d listen to them if you were told you needed to be doing something.”

Summers in Sag Harbor Hills were a stark contrast to life during the rest of the year, in many ways. Growing up, Dr. Granger and her brother were the only Black children in their school in Glen Cove. But it was a completely different existence when they arrived in Sag Harbor Hills — and that was part of the appeal, Dr. Granger said

Lisa Desamours is the president of the Sag Harbor Hills Improvement Association. Her family bought their home in Sag Harbor Hills in the 1970s, when she was 8 years old, and Desamours fondly remembers spending summer days with her friends, with the kind of broad freedom and autonomy most children today do not experience. They would ride their bikes to Mashashimuet Park for “park camp,” and then return home around noon, often eating lunch together at each other’s homes, before spending the afternoon on the bay.

“It was just a wonderful and truly blessed childhood,” she said.

Desamours said that while children today do not experience that kind of freedom, the spirit essentially is still intact. “It remains a community of generational friends, which makes it a very special place,” she said. “It’s a community of families who embrace the serene respite from the hustle and bustle of the city.”

When it comes to families with deep roots that go way back in the neighborhoods, there is perhaps no better representative for that viewpoint than Steve Williams, the president of the Azurest Property Owners Association.

His parents, Michael and Dolores Williams, bought property in Azurest in 1947, building a home there that was finished in 1953.

He spoke about the intentions of the earliest residents of the neighborhoods, like his parents.

“People who built here wanted to be together, in an environment where you could take your kids away from the urban hustle and bring them to a place where they were safe,” he said. “Where they could exhale and enjoy the summer in a civilized way and meet each other.”

He pointed out that nearly all of those early residents were Black professionals, working in careers as lawyers, dentists, doctors or in the business world, where they were typically the only Black people working in their fields. Getting away from that, and coming to an area during the summer months where they were surrounded by fellow Black professionals and their families — many of whom they already knew and had connections with — was a welcome respite, Williams said, especially during a time when Jim Crow laws and segregation were still the norm.

In March 2019, the neighborhoods were added to the New York State Register of Historic Places, by the state’s Board for Historic Preservation, and in June of that year, U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand called on the National Park Service to place the SANS Historic District on the National Register of Historic Places.

State and federal recognition are helpful in efforts to preserve the history of the neighborhoods, providing opportunities for tax credits that would be welcome relief for many families. Developers have set their sights on the neighborhoods — some say aggressively — in the last 10 years, and many homeowners have sold their properties. A drive through Azurest, Sag Harbor Hills and Ninevah reveals an increasing number of large-scale homes over the years that stand in direct contrast to the small ranch houses and bungalows that were more commonly seen in previous generations.

Renee Simons, who lives in Sag Harbor Hills, is one of several residents who has been at the forefront of efforts to preserve and protect the communities, including working and advocating for state and federal landmark recognition. The process was labor intensive, requiring surveys and historical documentation of the more than 300 houses in the three subdivided neighborhoods. Much of that work was funded by residents, while some money came from grants and other organizations with a vested interest in seeing it through.

Simons says she has been invested in the process because she does not want to see the neighborhoods succumb to the same fate that has met other historically Black beach enclaves in the country — namely, an erasure of its history and way of life. She pointed to Hilton Head, a popular beach resort in South Carolina, which began as a traditionally African American beach enclave, an important historical detail that most people do not know.

From her view, being listed in the state and national registries, while a point of pride, are distinctions that are more or less honorariums, without the kind of power behind them to help actually preserve the neighborhoods. That kind of power ultimately resides with the Village of Sag Harbor, and she believes that the village has not been proactive enough in its responsibilities.

“Years ago, in the 1980s, they became a certified local government and established what we have structurally in the village as overseers of preservation,” she said. “Their role, as deputized by the state, is to look at the inventory [in the village] and ensure, if relevant, the preservation of significant areas within Sag Harbor Village.”

While neighborhood homeowners are all concerned about preservation, they differ in opinion about the best approach to take.

The prevailing view of the residents of the three neighborhoods, according to Williams, Desamours and Errol Taylor, the president of the Ninevah Beach Property Owners Association, is that any architecturally based historic preservation status kind of approach is not the right tactic, because they believe it would impose restrictions on homeowners when it comes to what they can or cannot do with their homes, thus decreasing their property values.

In the last year, Williams, Desamours, Taylor and several other homeowners have worked together in a tri-community group to submit a proposal to the village with recommendations for preserving the character of the neighborhoods via the creation of an overlay district, and protecting it from overdevelopment in a way that doesn’t unnecessarily interfere with the rights of homeowners to make changes to their homes and properties.

For the three presidents of the neighborhood associations, preserving the neighborhoods is less about trying to exert control on the physical structures being bought, sold and built there, and more about trying to preserve the character and feel and spirit of neighborliness in other ways.

To that end, more neighborhood residents have become invested in serving on various land use boards and taking a more active role in village politics, generally speaking, in recent years, following in the footsteps of some other residents — including Bill Pickens, who died in September 2021, and E.T. Williams, longtime homeowners who were actively engaged in village politics and preservation efforts for decades. Steve Williams, who has had a long career in real estate development, served on the village’s Historic Preservation and Architectural Review Board, for instance, while several other residents have places on the Zoning Board of Appeals and other boards.

They do not feel that the neighborhoods are under any kind of direct or immediate existential threat, and say that change isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

“Just as the village has evolved, our subdivisions have evolved as well, and in many regards the ownership of these homes in these subdivisions are a key investment for families,” Taylor said. “When there’s development in the communities, that can enhance the value of the homes — that’s not a bad thing.”

Both Williams and Taylor pointed out that one factor that has historically held many Black families back from advancement in the country has been the inability to transfer generational wealth, and that a spike in the value of properties is a big way to make that happen for families.

There is no question that the demographics of the neighborhood have shifted over the years, but that fact does not seem to concern the longer-term residents there. They don’t mind if their neighbors are Black, white, Asian, or any other race or ethnicity, they say, as long as they want to be neighbors — to connect, socialize, wave to each other, or stop to chat when they’re on the beach.

It is possible to respect and protect the history of the place and embrace changes at the same time, Taylor said.

“This community was founded in part as a result of Jim Crow laws and intense discrimination that African Americans faced, and the founders of all three communities were really visionaries in the way they were able to secure the land and subdivide it and lay a foundation for this really special community,” Taylor said. “That deserves to be cherished and remembered and celebrated. I think we have to do that in the context of understanding the natural and expected progression for a community like this as times change.

“I think the fear that [the neighborhoods] are changing in a way that risks eroding the neighborhoods is not a fait accompli,” he added.

“It’s about the people,” Taylor continued. “And the broad look and feel of the community — the trees, maintaining that character where there’s no impervious driveways or sidewalks, and everyone has beach access. It’s not the race of the people but the sense of community that this neighborhood has.”

Williams agrees on those points and says that, for him, the focus is less on the size or look of any new house, or where the homeowners may hail from. Instead, it’s about their willingness to engage and connect.

“What we don’t like is people who move into the neighborhood who don’t want to be neighbors,” he said. Small but significant details like a “no trespassing” sign, a metal chain drawn across a set of beach access stairs, or a dense privet hedge perimeter surrounding a new home are antithetical to the character, Williams said.

While those markers pop up in some instances, Williams said he is still buoyed by the many signs he sees that the original spirit of the neighborhoods remains intact. The association recently remodeled the parking lot and beachfront in Azurest, putting in new planters and benches. Association members were told they could purchase plaques and emblazon them with 40 or so words of their choice.

Many of the residents could have written about their professional achievements, which for many of them are significant and impressive. But Williams said there really has been none of that individually centered “boasting.”

Rather, those who have purchased plaques have hewed to a dominant theme: Instead of trying to highlight any specific career achievement, most of them hearkened to the past, expressing their gratitude to descendants for purchasing homes there generations earlier.

“They were about the legacy and the beauty,” Williams said, “of living in Sag Harbor.”