Fishers Island

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Fishers Island, shown highlighted

Fishers Island is a small island, approximately 9 miles (14 km) long and 1 mile (1.6 km) wide, in Suffolk County in the U.S. state of New York. It is located at the eastern end of Long Island Sound, 2 miles (3 km) off the southeastern coast of Connecticut across Fishers Island Sound. It is approximately 11 miles (18 km) from the tip of Long Island and approximately 7 miles (12 km) southeast of New London, Connecticut, from which it is accessible by plane or a regular ferry service. The United States Census Bureau defines the island as Block Group 2, Census Tract 1702.02 of Suffolk County, New York. As of the 2000 census there were 289 people living year-round on 10.496 km² (4.053 sq mi) of land; ^[1] however, the population rises to over 2000 during the peak summer weekends. Fishers Island is primarily a remote summer getaway for the extremely wealthy.

1 Geography
2 History
3 Culture
4 References
5 External links

[edit] Geography

Fishers Island represents a section of the same terminal moraine that formed the North Fork of Long Island, which comes ashore at Watch Hill, RI. During the late phase of the Wisconsin glaciation, glacial Lake Connecticut formed at the retreating fore edge of the ice sheet, over what is now Long Island Sound; it formed an outlet in its moraine dam at The Race, famous for rip currents, which still separates Fishers Island from the North Fork. Fishers Island is essentially a long barrow of rocky till scoured from the surface of New England.

[edit] History

The island was called "Munnawtawkit" by the Native American Pequot tribe. Adrian Block, the first recorded European visitor, named it Visher's Island in 1614, after one of his companions. For the next 25 years, it remained a wilderness, visited occasionally by Dutch traders. In 1640, the General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony granted the island to John Winthrop, Jr., who lived only one winter on the island. After being named governor of the Connecticut Colony, Winthrop used the island to raise horses and goats. The island remained a property of the Winthrop family for 218 years until it was sold to Robert R. Fox in 1863. In 1889 it was sold to Edmund and Walton Ferguson.

The island was the subject of a border dispute between New York and Connecticut. A 1664 land patent granted to the Duke of York included all islands in the Long Island sound, effectively granting the island to New York. However, when Winthrop became governor of Connecticut in 1657, he had included Fishers Island in Connecticut's charter. The dispute would not be settled until 1879 when a joint commission decided that the island was part of New York. New York State, Connecticut and Rhode Island meet in the waters east of Fishers Island.

The island was a target of British soldiers during the Revolutionary War, who raided islands in the Long Island sound for supplies. Many of the residents of Fishers Island took their herds to the relative safety of Connecticut in 1776. The raids continued though, and in 1779 the British burnt many of the island's homes.

The New England Hurricane of 1938 caused widespread damage on Fishers Island, but only a few local residences were destroyed, primarily by wind. (Most Fishers Island residences have sittings above sea level that protect them from storm surge.) Winds in excess of 120 m.p.h. ripped the roof off John Nicholas Brown's ultra modern residence "Windshield", designed by Richard Neutra, which had only recently been completed. The Browns rebuilt "Windshield", but it was destroyed by fire in the early 1970s.

[edit] Culture

Despite being a part of New York, in many ways the island has closer links with Connecticut, 2 miles to its north, than with the rest of New York, 10 miles to the southwest. For example, its ZIP Code is 06390; Connecticut zip codes begin with "06" while all other places in New York State besides Fishers Island have zip codes starting with "1". The island is the only point in Suffolk County to which telephone calls placed from the greater New York City area are classified as long distance and not "regional," even though the island's area code is the same as that of eastern Long Island (631).

Since the turn of the 20th century, well established and old money families have selected the Island as the destination for their summer vacation, and their luxurious dwellings (the island's exclusive estates) reflect an emphasis on continuity and tradition. Its more notable residents include former Governor Thomas Kean of New Jersey, former CIA Director Porter Goss, filmmaker Albert Maysles, former Whitney Museum director Tom Armstrong, former Kidder, Peabody & Company chairman Albert Gordon, Scudder Sinclair, president of the Sinclair Pharmacal Co. Inc. (based on Fishers Island), author Rick Moody (The Ice Storm), and heirs to IBM and DuPont (including Christopher duPont Roosevelt). Most of the island's year-round residents reside in the hamlet of Fishers Island on the western end of the island. In addition to their houses, there are all the necessities for small-town life, including a grade school, bowling alley, movie theater, liquor store, grocery store, gas station, volunteer fire department, and post office. The west end also has a small air strip, a museum, an ice cream shop (Toppers) and a cafe, a boutique (The Beach Plum), and a restaurant/bar (The Pequot).

The eastern two-thirds of the island is scattered with large summer estates accessible by a single private road. During the main season, access to the private road is protected by a guard shed, which is decorated festively once a year on Labor Day, for the annual Harbor Open Golf (HOG) parade and tournament.

The island has two country clubs. The smaller club, on the islands western portion, is Hay Harbor. Hay Harbor's golf course is a nine hole links-style course with a second hole that runs along the ocean. Its tennis club has approximately ten clay tennis courts, a swimming pool, and a salt water swimming area affectionately called The Tank. Finally, Hay Harbor has a sailing club. With the magnificent winds that swirl all around the island, sailing is a popular pastime for people summering at the island.

The second country club, Fishers Island Club, usually called The Big Club, is at the island's eastern tip. It is home to a world-class links golf course that is rated eighteenth in the US by Golf Magazine and referred to as a "real course" in a July 1957 letter [1] from President Dwight David Eisenhower to John Hay Whitney. The club also has four tennis courts, a beach club, and a members-only beachfront. The main clubhouse has two dining rooms capable of seating 250 people. There are also housing facilities for over forty employees on the island.

The Fishers Island Yacht Club holds races every Saturday during the summer. There are two active racing fleets: the International One Designs (IODs), which are 33-foot boats designed in 1936 by Bjarne Aas of Norway, and the Bullseyes, which are 16-foot boats designed by Nathanael Herreshoff in 1916. The club has two small buildings and is quite casual. It hosts several parties during the summer, as well as weekly picnic barbeques.

The seaside scenes in the movie The World According to Garp, starring Robin Williams and Glenn Close, were shot on Fishers Island on and about the grounds of the mansion originally built by Bethlehem Steel founder Robert Linderman.