An art show hidden in paradise

Three cottages without addresses stand on the western fringes of Fire Island Pines. And as the thousands of visitors who call the Pines home for the summer depart, the Carrington Estate on the corner of Sandy and Ocean Walks will mark 27 years of vacancy.

But before the community enters hibernation for winter, the non-profit organization Friends of Carrington (FoC), in collaboration with collector Gina DeJoy, hosted an art exhibition from Sept. 6 to 15 displaying the photographs, paintings, and sketches of photographer George Daniell at the over-100-year-old homestead.

DeJoy’s collection of Daniell’s work includes film negatives and notebooks detailing every color and figure of a particular scene.

“I accidentally fell in love with George because as I started digging through thousands of paintings and photographs, I also got his journals, his letters, his correspondence, everything,” DeJoy said. “On photos, he writes about each character… there’s a lot of detail, and he’ll tell a story about somebody on the back of his sketches.”

Daniell captured iconic pictures of 20th-century stars, from Audrey Hepburn and Sophia Loren to Georgia O’Keeffe and Tennessee Williams. He spent his summers between Cherry Grove and Fire Island Pines from the ‘30s to ‘60s and lived in a cottage a few houses down from the Carrington Estate between 1948 and 1961.

Upon walking down the shaded boardwalk up to the semi-restored guest house, visitors to the show experienced life in mid-century Fire Island while looking at images Daniells captured of the early Fire Island communities. Visitors could also appreciate Daniell’s colorful paintings of casual and intimate life on the beach.

The FoC also hosted a silent auction on their website, friendsofcarrington.org, which generated $20,638 to support future research and preservation of the Carrington Estate.

Once home to playwright Frank Carrington, founder of the Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn N.J., the Carrington Estate gave refuge to LGBTQ+ artists like Truman Capote from an openly homophobic outside world. Today though, the boarded-up windows and faded white sidings on the estate’s largest bungalow seem only to provide a canvas for amateur graffiti artists and a marking point for travelers between Cherry Grove and the Pines.

FoC Founding Member Bill Hildebrandt is proud to host the organization’s inaugural art show, despite the difficulties in researching Carrington’s life story.

“Nobody knows very much about him,” Hildebrandt said. “There’s few records; he had no partners… He was very dedicated to his career and was very, very talented in the business.”

While Carrington himself remains a mystery, his famous friends enjoyed their summers tucked behind the dunes inside the same guest house where the George Daniell show is taking place.

According to the Fire Island Pines Historical Preservation Society, Carrington’s guestbook included actors, artists, and authors like Katherine Hepburn, Henry Fonda, and Christopher Isherwood.

The guest house also gave inspiration to two of the great American novels. Truman Capote worked on his novella “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” while vacationing at the cottage with his partner Jack Dunphy, in 1955.

Secluded behind the thickets of pines, without electricity to connect him to the outside world, Capote would later tell Newsday in 1982 how the isolation was “conducive to good writing.” Hildebrandt also says a longtime Saltaire resident claims that Capote helped Harper Lee start her novel “To Kill a Mockingbird” during her visit to Capote that summer.

Originally serving as an oil house for the former Lone Hill Life Lifesaving Station next door, Hildebrant estimates the guest house hosting “George Daniell’s Fire Island” is about 150 years old, making it among the oldest surviving structures on the island.

The main house on the estate is around 112 years old, and Carrington bought the home in 1927, before purchasing the two lifesaving station buildings and converting them into a guest house and storage shed in 1947.

In his final years, Carrington agreed to transfer ownership of the estate to the National Park Service, and after his death in 1975, National Park Ranger Bob Freda would live there with his family until 1997. Since then, the estate and surrounding woods have gone unoccupied while under National Park ownership, but there have been renovations in recent years.

In 2016, the estate became listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and the National Parks Service partnered with high school students from New York City to repair damage to the main house in 2022. The Friends of Carrington hopes the late-summer art show will inspire future creative uses for the Carrington Estate, but for now the cottages on Fire Island Pines’ western edges will continue standing unoccupied.