Rocker Billy Joel put his Centre Island estate on the market because the village gave him grief over repairing the dock at the 14-acre waterfront spread, writes legendary publisher Dan Rattiner in his memoir to be released next month.
“I thought I could put one of my boats there and speedboat to Manhattan in twenty minutes when I needed to go,” Joel tells Rattiner, “…in the end, they wouldn’t let me do it…so I just gave up on it…the house is for sale.” Joel’s estate has been on the market since 2006. The current asking price is $32.5 million for the home where he and wife, Katie Lee, married in 2004.
Rattiner’s book, "In the Hamptons: My Fifty Years with Farmers, Fisherman, Artists, Billionaires, and Celebrities" (Harmony Books; $24.95), is full of reminiscences of Hamptons icons, including artists Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, authors John Steinbeck and Spalding Gray, and his longtime friend Joel, who also owns a home in Sag Harbor and two in Sagaponack.
Over dinner at the American Hotel in Sag Harbor, Rattiner writes, Joel explained what brought him out to the Hamptons in the first place, and what keeps him there. “I’m a Long Island boy, born and raised,” Joel says, “but I’m from the working man’s Long Island, Levittown. Massapequa. The working men and women live out east. And I want to be among them.”
Comments (1)
So glad Billy Joel mentioned my hometown of Massapequa when characterizing the "working man's Long Island."
I remember when there were actually potato farms in Massapequa. My great aunt, Geneva N. Gallow, taught six grades in a 1 room schoolhouse in Massapequa Park.
After the war, people like the Joels and my grandparents moved out of the Bronx and Brooklyn - into affordable tract housing - out in "the country."
Massapequa and Levittown were safe, clean places for people to raise their families.
So happy that I can recall those days so clearly- since that reality does not exist anymore.
What a shame.