Cherry Grove

Founding & origin

• 1868 — Archer and Elizabeth Perkinson bought the land from ocean to bay, between Lone Hill (now the Pines) and the Cherry Grove Hotel, for 25 cents an acre. The name comes from the black-cherry trees.
• 1880 — the Perkinsons opened a hotel; local legend (unconfirmed) says Oscar Wilde stayed.
• 1921 — the family sold the land east of Duryea Walk and divided the rest into 109 building lots (50 × 80 ft) at $250 or less; ocean-front lots at no more than $1 per front foot. Buildings salvaged from the deactivated WWI Army base Camp Upton (Yaphank) formed the physical core of the new colony.
• 1922 — a post office was established (site of today’s “Tides,” formerly “The Monster”). 1929 — first boardwalks. 1930 — Duffy’s Hotel, the only place with electricity and a phone.

Governance

• Part of the Town of Brookhaven, Suffolk County; zoned by the town. No paved roads, no private vehicles — ~6-ft boardwalks only.
• Civic bodies: the Cherry Grove Community Association (CGCA) and the all-volunteer Cherry Grove Fire Department (CGFD) (ISO Class 3, 18 hydrants). Access by water only — Sayville Ferry (via LIRR to Sayville) or Fire Island Water Taxi from Robert Moses “Field Five.”
• Health/emergency: in 2014 residents raised ~$90,000 to hire local paramedics (30+ calls by mid-August) and bought an EMS golf cart; Northwell Health runs a summer urgent-care here.

Deep history

• 1938 — the Long Island Express Hurricane destroyed much of Cherry Grove and scared off mainland vacationers. This is the hinge: with straight families gone, the gay community already summering on the island (drifting over from Ocean Beach) settled the Grove. Early arrivals cited: Antoine de Paris and W. H. Auden.
• Origin-myth of the “gay aura”: Christopher Isherwood and W. H. Auden reportedly arrived dressed as Dionysus and Ganymede, carried on a gilded litter (told as legend, not fact).
• 1950s — the Grove was a nationally known “safe haven” alongside Provincetown and Key West; ~60 miles from NYC, reachable by ferry or seaplane.
• Fires that reshaped the town: Duffy’s burned Sept 27, 1956 → replaced by the Ice Palace Hotel. March 27, 2015 — a major fire destroyed the Grove Hotel, Holly House, and two homes; 23 fire companies responded, three firefighters injured; the hotel was rebuilt.

Key people & families

• Esther Newton — anthropologist; her 1993 book Cherry Grove, Fire Island: Sixty Years in America’s First Gay and Lesbian Summer Town (Beacon Press) is the definitive history (VERIFIED). Research began late 1980s. The Fire Island Artist Residency runs a “Meeting Esther” lesbian-narratives project around her.
• Natalia Danesi Murray (1902–1994) — Italian-American broadcaster; Grove lesbians traced their lineage to her, and she took the Grove stage in 1951 alongside Hermione Gingold. Her partner Janet Flanner (1892–1978, New Yorker “Genêt”): the two women’s ashes were scattered at Cherry Grove (VERIFIED via GLReview).
• Truman Capote — completed Breakfast at Tiffany’s in 1957 at the Carrington House just east of the Grove (VERIFIED).
• James Baldwin — visited early May 1959, stayed at the Grove Hotel, wrote part of Another Country there (VERIFIED).
• Frank Carrington (1894–1975) — theater director, co-founder of the Cherry Lane Theatre and builder of Millburn’s Paper Mill Playhouse; bought the Carrington House in 1927 (see Culture). Paul Cadmus and Jared French (Magic Realist painters) lived in the West End. Later Grove figures: Hedda Lettuce, Michael Musto, Panzi (Thom Hansen), Wanda Sykes.
• John Eberhardt (d. 2014) — developer who built the Belvedere and many Grove properties from 1956 into the 1970s (VERIFIED).
• Cross-ref INDEX: no overlap with the user’s western-village (Lonelyville/Fair Harbor) network — the Grove is a separate cultural world east of the Sunken Forest.

NARA records

Cherry Grove falls inside the FINS study area. Method note: full-text search is noisy; record.naId is the true id (repeated “408” = FIIS record-group number). Verified live via Catalog API v2 (x-api-key + browser UA).

• naId 40304849 — “Fire Island National Seashore: A Proposal” — item, Unrestricted.
• naId 183510570 — “FIIS — The Story of Fire Island” — fileUnit, Restricted-Possibly.
• naId 183510571 / 183510572 / 183510573 — Proposed FINS report + Appendix + Supplementary Report — fileUnits (these name the island’s communities in the 1960s seashore planning).
• naId 183510569 — “Erosion of Fire Island, N.Y., 1963” — fileUnit.
• naId 229294700 — “Fire Island, July 1962” and naId 257778913 — “Fire Island [Station], January 1960” — fileUnits, Unrestricted (Weather Bureau station records; relevant to the 1938-hurricane-shaped barrier beach).
• NRHP: the Cherry Grove Community House and Theater was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2013 — one of a handful of sites listed for their role in American LGBT history, cited for “the enormous role it played in shaping what gradually evolved into America’s First Gay and Lesbian Town.” (NRHP is NARA-adjacent; the Carrington House was listed Jan 8 2014, ref. 13001057.)

Money & real estate

• ~300 houses on 41 acres — the densest, smallest-lot community in the cluster. Summer population ~2,000; year-round ~15.
• Documented sale (see Property Value Data 2026): 260 East Walk sold Feb 26, 2025 for $920,000 (Summer Place Realty). The Belvedere Guest House for Men (33 rooms, built 1957) came onto the market for the first time in 2025.
• Values run below the Pines (the Grove’s small lots and shared-house culture cap ceiling prices) but on the island-wide premium: 2025 island average sale $1,420,849.
• Commercial life: historically 5+ bars (one lost in the 2008–09 recession), 6+ restaurants, 4+ entertainment venues — the Ice Palace the signature nightclub.

Culture & character

• The barefoot, bohemian, drag-rooted pole of Fire Island — the opposite of Point O’ Woods’s sealed WASP restraint and distinct from the Pines’s affluent muscle-and-money scene. The Grove’s identity is theatrical, campy, communal, female-inclusive, and self-consciously historic.
• The Arts Project of Cherry Grove — incorporated 1948; first production the Cherry Grove Follies of 1948; billed as the first continuously produced “gay theater” in the U.S. It still runs the Homecoming Queen show, variety/drag shows, and a late-September gala.
• Drag calendar: Homecoming Queen (Memorial Day weekend); Miss Fire Island (the longest-running contest, Labor Day); Awards Night (titles by community vote).
• The Invasion of the Pines — born July 4, 1976: a Grove resident in drag was refused service in the then-more-conservative, heterosexual-leaning Pines; the retaliatory drag procession across the bay to the Pines became the island’s signature ritual (see Research).
• The Meat Rack / Carrington Tract — the easternmost dunes between the Grove and the Pines, legally the Carrington Tract, nicknamed the Meat Rack and the Judy Garland Memorial Park; a storied cruising ground within the Fire Island National Seashore. The Carrington House (built c. 1912 for Frederick Marquet, “probably the oldest surviving building in Cherry Grove”) anchors it.
• Tame deer, no cars, no roads — physically a frozen 1920s boardwalk village carrying a century of queer cultural memory.

Four-layer notes (time/water/earth/sky)

• Time: 1868 land purchase → 1938 hurricane pivot → 1948 Arts Project → 1976 Invasion → 2013 NRHP listing. A continuous, dated queer-American timeline.
• Water: the 1938 hurricane made the gay Grove by clearing the straight mainlanders; access remains water-only (Sayville ferry).
• Earth: 41 acres, 109 original lots, Camp Upton salvage-built; the Carrington Tract dunes.
• Sky: reachable historically by seaplane; the open, performative, see-and-be-seen culture is the Grove’s “sky.”