Dunewood

Founding & origin

Dunewood is the island’s youngest and most deliberately designed west-end community. In 1958, homebuilder Maurice Barbash (1924–2013) and his business partner Irwin (“Irwin”/sometimes “Murray”/“Irving” in loose sources — the verified partner name is Irwin Chess) began developing the tract. Before development the land was a dumping ground for the surrounding towns, “with almost no trees or greenery” — Barbash’s firm built it into a planned colony of ~100 cottages (early reporting says fewer than 10 original houses, all identical, simple and functional; the community grew to ~100). Barbash’s design philosophy, in his own words: “you’re at Fire Island to be active outside so you don’t need a big house.” His company, Barbash Associates of Babylon, is credited (by a travel source — weaker) with a “sequential rotation” siting trick to soften the uniformity, and with the nickname “Levittown by the Sea” (single, less-authoritative source — flag as color, not fact). The community was zoned strictly residential, no commercial.

This is the single most important cross-link in the whole community set: Dunewood’s founder IS the moral keyholder of the Fire Island founding myth. Maurice Barbash, with brother-in-law Irving Like, co-founded the Citizens’ Committee for a Fire Island National Seashore in 1962, sketched the counter-proposal “on a napkin,” and led the grassroots campaign that defeated Robert Moses’s Ocean Parkway extension — producing the Sept 11, 1964 federal designation of FINS. Dunewood was literally the home base of the family that saved the island from the highway. See the full, VERIFIED treatment in Barbash Family.

Governance

Unincorporated; no village government. A strong community/homeowners association maintains the residential-only zoning, the walks, the bay beach and the amenities. Dunewood has no market and no restaurant — it depends on Fair Harbor (west) for groceries, hardware, liquor, restaurant, and fire/EMS service. Land use is Islip town code under the FINS (1964) overlay. The Dunewood Yacht Club (founded early 1960s) and private tennis courts and a lifeguard-protected bay beach are the association-maintained core.

Deep history

• 1958 — Barbash + Chess begin development on former dump land (“There were no trees,” per the family). First houses built; “each of the families kept a house for themselves” (Cathy Barbash recollection).
• Early 1960s — the Dunewood Yacht Club starts, teaching young adults to sail on the bay with instructors. Over ~15 years the community adds tennis, swimming and sailing lessons. First-generation social life: summer barbecues, picnics, and an end-of-season Fire Department parade with trucks for children.
• 1962–64 — the Barbash/Like anti-Moses campaign runs out of the Dunewood/Bay Shore orbit, culminating in FINS (Sept 11, 1964). (The land under Dunewood itself was already built; the fight was to stop the parkway that would have run the island’s length.)
• 2018 — “Dunewood Turns 60” retrospective (Fire Island News, Laura Schmidt) documents the founding generation.
• Sept 2024 — the Barbash children (Cathy, Susan, Shepard) donate the Citizens’ Committee for a Fire Island National Seashore Collection to Stony Brook University for the 60th FINS anniversary — the canonization of the Dunewood-founding family in the formal archive. (See Barbash Family.)

Key people & families

• Maurice Barbash (1924–2013) — Dunewood developer; FINS co-founder. VERIFIED (NYT obit Mar 21, 2013; Newsday Mar 15, 2013; Barbash Family).
• Irwin Chess — Barbash’s 1958 development partner; chose the site as “a residential, family community.” VERIFIED.
• Lillian Like Barbash (1927–2020) — Maurice’s wife, co-organizer of the Dunewood community, “Long Island’s First Lady of the Arts.” VERIFIED.
• The Barbash next generation — children Cathy, Susan, Shepard; grandchildren incl. Jonah (Katz/Barbash) (Compass broker, NYC + Dunewood) and Eddie Barbash (professional jazz saxophonist, who live-streamed Bach from the Dunewood back deck for Lillian’s July 7, 2020 memorial). VERIFIED (Barbash Family, Jonah Katz Barbash, Eddie Barbash).
• Irving Like — Lillian’s brother, environmental lawyer, co-founder of the Citizens’ Committee; papers at Stony Brook. VERIFIED (Irving Like).
• User standing: the project owner grew up one community east (Lonelyville) and was a sailing instructor; in direct childhood contact with the Barbash grandchild generation through the same sailing/swim programs (late 1990s–2000s). Family energy described as “weird… not fully transparent.” (Network intelligence, not web-researchable.)

NARA records

• naId 280992842 — 98th Congress, Fire Island National Seashore — Senate Resolution 1705 · item · Unrestricted.
• naId 280992840 — 98th Congress, Fire Island National Seashore — House Resolution 3697 · item · Unrestricted.
• naId 280993434 — 99th Congress, FINS Act of 1964 — Senate Resolution 2483 · item · Unrestricted (the founding statute).
• naId 40304849 — Fire Island National Seashore: A Proposal · item · Unrestricted.
• naId 183510570 / 183510572 — FIIS “Story of Fire Island,” “Appendix to Report on Proposed FINS” · fileUnits · Restricted-Possibly · NARA Boston.
• naId 257778913 — Fire Island [Station], January 1960 · fileUnit · Unrestricted — the Coast Guard station log for Jan 1960, the closest-in-time federal record to Dunewood’s founding years.
• The deeper archive for Dunewood is NOT at NARA — it is the Citizens’ Committee for a FINS Collection + Irving Like papers at Stony Brook University (donated Sept 2024), which is the proper repository for the Barbash/Dunewood founding story.

Money & real estate

Dunewood shows the clearest community-level 2025 sales data of the four:

• 206 Bay Walk (one house off the bay) — sold $950,000, Sept 2025 (117 days on market).
• 15 Dune Walk — sold $1,600,000, Nov 17, 2025 (873 days on market).
• 187 Bay Walk (bayfront, 9,750 sf lot) — asking $2.2M.
• 31 Gull Walk (3bd/2ba, 1,480 sf, built 2011) — listed at ~$1,250/sf. Island-wide median for context: $987,500 (July 2025, +1.3% YoY). Listings market Dunewood as “the only master-planned community on Fire Island,” emphasizing the private tennis courts, lifeguarded bay beach and yacht club — amenity-value, not nightlife-value. Buyer profile: family buyers and multigenerational owners seeking a quiet, planned, services-adjacent (via Fair Harbor) community.

Culture & character

Dunewood is the quietest, most intentionally domestic of the four — “a very quiet community” for people seeking tranquility (Like). No bars, no stores, no scene; the cottage-equality of the original design (identical modest houses, “you don’t need a big house”) encodes an almost ideological middle-class egalitarian ethos — the anti-Pines, the anti-Point-O’-Woods. On the barefoot-vs.-Mercedes axis it is barefoot-family-planned: people with real means (the founding family built the Long Island Philharmonic and the Islip Arts Council) choosing deliberate modesty and a tennis-and-sailing-lessons childhood for their kids. Its moral weight on the island is outsized relative to its size because the family that built it also saved the whole island from Robert Moses.

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

• Earth: the most striking earth-layer fact is that Dunewood was built on a reclaimed town dump with “no trees” — the leafy “cottages-in-the-woods” image is entirely engineered/planted, a made landscape, not a found one. Dunewood is the clearest case on the island of nature-as-design-product.
• Time: it is the youngest west-end community (1958) and therefore the one that falls outside the pre-war federal record — a community born into the age of planning and zoning rather than homesteading (contrast Kismet’s 1920s hand-built scow-and-kit origin).
• Water: carless and store-less, Dunewood’s life is organized around the bay (yacht club, bay beach, sailing lessons) and its dependence on the Fair Harbor dock/services to the west.
• Sky/orientation: standard bay-north/ocean-south grid of named “Walks.”