Original subtitles

(birds chirping)

(water sploshing)

(soft music)

- [Brian] I was blessed with this bay house.

I don't know, it was just destiny.

I would kill and protect this bay house if I had to.

You just can't go and get these.

You can't buy them, you can't find them,

you can't build them anymore.

The few people that are lucky enough to have one

to take care of it for their little duration of time,

this is just a blessing.

- [Joseph] You know, you grow up out here,

it gets into your blood,

and you really don't wanna let it go.

Fortunately, my nieces are following through

with the family tradition by maintaining this,

and upgrading it, and keeping it all going.

They'll enjoy it.

They're having kids now.

Their kids are gonna be down here enjoying it.

Hopefully, it keeps going all the way down the line.

- [Allison] It was a way to have fun and freedom

and do things on your own and kinda grow up.

Whatever our first memories are in life

include the bay house.

- The happiest times of my life were,

and still are, at the house.

Playing with toy boats in the water.

Fishing.

Clamming.

I can remember clamming when I was three.

- If you're young and you're here,

it's the greatest place in the world.

(gentle music)

You can walk in the marshes, jump in the water,

pick up horseshoe crabs, go for a boat ride.

Once you are born into it, it's in you.

I can't explain it.

I try to explain it to people

and they don't really understand,

and I don't expect them to.

(group clamoring)

It's just a special place.

It's just something that you either love it

or you don't want any part of it.

- [Brian] I come out here and I get away from it all.

I do my workout here and no one bothers me.

I can come out here during a duck season

and go duck hunting.

And I can still look at the craziness

of the mainland right across the canal.

I mean, where can you do that on Long Island?

Where can you jump in a boat and go to a little tiny island

in your own little shack and listen to the radio

and just shut off the world?

(soft music)

- [Barbara] For the longest time, I have been so intrigued

by these otherworldly-type houses

that look as if they're coming straight out of the ocean.

You can see them very clearly from the parkways along

the southern shore of Long Island, New York.

I am on Long Beach Barrier Island,

which is a unique environment,

evidenced by the wind-bend trees along the southern shores.

Nicknamed The City by the Sea,

the island is surrounded by Reynolds Channel

to the northeast and west, and the Atlantic Ocean

to the south.

(upbeat music)

Located just 20 miles from Midtown Manhattan,

or a 50-minute train ride from Penn Station

on the Long Island Railroad,

people flock to Long Beach

from all the New York City boroughs,

especially during the summer months.

They come to be entertained by the fairs,

enjoy the beach, and get away

from the sweltering heat in the city.

Some of my questions were answered

about these houses in the ocean when,

one day, I visited the Lido Beach nature preserve.

And as I wandered through the various flora and fauna

in its marshland, I came upon a sign.

It was on a pedestal, and right across

from this sign I saw these two houses in the distance.

(soft music)

When I began reading the sign,

I learned that these are called bay houses,

and their history was even more interesting

than how they looked.

So with that, my interest was so peaked

that I ran home to Google bay houses in Long Island.

At this point, I learned that there

has been a book written about the bay houses.

Now in its second edition, "On the Bay"

was written by Nancy Solomon.

I was curious to know how many other people

in this area knew about these bay houses.

- My husband, every time we went over the bridge,

"There's the bay house, there's the bay house."

- I know about them.

I don't really know anybody there,

I just see them from the distance.

- "Newsday" did an excellent article on the bay houses

and it really intrigued me.

I've never been there, I don't know anybody

that's ever been there, but I thought like,

how cool is this?

- You know, I guess I don't see the houses.

I guess I'm not that observant.

Now I'll look for them.

- No, not familiar with any of the bay houses.

I don't even even know which bay houses,

what area we're talking about.

I would be curious about them.

So what are they?

(soft music)

- We have this game about what we bring to the bay house.

We always say, "I went to the shack and I brought apples."

Then the next person has to say,

"I went to the shack and brought apples and bananas."

And we go through the whole alphabet.

Basically, what we brought was milk,

potatoes, bacon and eggs.

(gentle music)

Every day we'd had to get ice,

because we had an ice box.

I think it just became a tradition in the family

of wanting to have a bay house.

Aunts, and uncles, and nephews, and nieces,

we all grew up here.

No TV, no radio, no cell phones at the time,

and so we communicated with each other,

which is a rare thing today

And we made up crazy games and just enjoyed life.

- We used to spend a week at a time with my mother.

She got tired of it though, it was very hard living.

There was no plumbing, there was an outdoor toilet.

It was hard.

You know, provisions were difficult to get,

no cell phones, we were roughing it when we were out here.

We learned an awful lot when we were out here.

Learned a lot about taking care of ourselves.

- We're gonna be going on the boat

and the first house we're gonna be going to

is the Muller Bayhouse.

- [Barbara] The author of the book, "On the Bay",

Nancy Solomon, is also the director

of a nonprofit called Long Island Traditions,

which is dedicated to documenting Long Island architecture,

history, and culture.

- The book was really an advocacy work.

We were desperately trying to save these bay houses.

And at that time, in 1991, there was a state law

that said they were going to be torn down.

And with the publication of the book,

the Town of Hempstead, which owns the land

that bay houses stand on, started a conversation

with the bay house owners and with

the State Department of Environmental Conservation, the DEC.

- One of the reasons why the town reached out

to the Bay House Association, to figure out a way

that we could, you know, keep these in perpetuity.

- The first challenge was gaining the trust

of the people who owned the bay houses,

because there had been so many negative newspaper articles

that they did not trust anybody who was not part

of their community.

There were one or two people, at the very beginning,

that welcomed our inquiries and wanted

to help us document this.

And I explained to them that, you know,

unlike a journalist, I was looking to save these bay houses

so that they could be preserved for future generations.

- The combination of persistence, presenting a case

that was credible and logical,

and having the historical background

via Long Island traditions and the documentation

that had gone on.

We, I think, had a foundation to make a case as to why?

- Keeping the people involved in the houses

meant we were gonna keep the houses erect.

- They agreed. (chuckles)

So it was just a wonderful thing.

And the town of Hempstead recognized that bay houses,

at that time, as having historical value,

you know, in the maritime history

in the town of Hempstead, which they do.

- They came to agreements that bay house owners

could in fact pass their leases on to family members

or to a close family friend,

they could repair their bay houses,

and that's how we came to have these bay houses.

- This is my backyard.

In the winter, I call it my island.

It's quite a nice backyard, right? (chuckles)

- Bay houses can only be transferred by lease

for the ones that are on leashed land.

There is a small group of bay houses

on a place called Meadow Island,

and that is privately owned land.

The owners of those houses can sell them.

- Our homes are different than the rest of the bay houses.

We have deeded property.

I own this property just like I own mine and Malverne.

The issue with the storms was rebuilding,

but none of us have had any issues getting

our permits to rebuilt.

There's a new home being built right now.

As long as it's built on what's called the footprint,

which means you don't make it larger than it was,

it doesn't impact the environment any more

than the old home, we can rebuild.

(soft music)

- There's a lot of marine life here.

Supposedly, per acre, there's more diversity

and more life in this type of environment

than any place else in the world.

- Every so often, nobody in the family

is interested in keeping the bay house,

at which point the lease holder is able

to add somebody to their house, on the lease,

as long as they are a town of Hempstead resident.

And if that person's committed to keeping the bay house,

then eventually he will inherit that bay house.

The story of Brian Warasila is a clear example.

- [Brian] When I first came out here, I was 14 years old.

And I was in Eastern Reel Bait and Tackle,

the guy owned a tackle place,

his name was Frankie Decatano.

- Frank would take Brian out as a young boy,

and eventually, as he grew older,

ask him to help with the many projects

that are part of that bay house.

And when Frank passed away, Brian was on the lease,

and so now Brian has that same bay house.

- I gotta find somebody to pass it on to.

I got a couple people picked out.

But you gotta have somebody that's into working

in the bay, into being out on a boat,

can be handy fixing stuff, which, you know,

you could still teach somebody how to do that,

and kinda watches out for it like a child.

You either love it or you hate it.

Like, some people come out here and go,

"Oh God, this is horrible."

My brother-in-law came out, he was looking around

and he goes, "Is there any place to get snacks around here?"

I go, "Snacks. Whatever you want.

We got clams, we got muscles."

They're used to being pampered on the mainland.

Like, I can go in the house and take a shower,

I can stop at McDonald's and get something to eat.

Over here, you can't really do that.

If you wanna have something good,

you gotta catch it yourself or dig it yourself.

Nothing works better than fresh bait.

Yeah, we got a few.

You're spending all this money for fresh clams

over in Freeport, but wouldn't you rather go out

and dig your own clams, knowing that you dug it yourself

or caught it yourself, and cooked your own meal?

Now, for you animal people out there

that are crying because the fish are dying right now

on the hot deck, don't worry,

they're not gonna go to waste.

When we leave here, the birds are gonna have a party.

You can pretty much live off the land

if you wanted to, you know?

Nothing like that, man. That's a home run.

- [Dan] I gravitated to painting and drawing at a young age,

it just came natural.

It was the subject matter that really drew me in,

at a young age, and that had to do with the water.

- [Barbara] Local resident and award-winning artist,

Dan Pollera, has a particular fascination

with the bay houses.

- I'm an avid fisherman, so being out on the water

all the time, you know, you start

to recognize these houses.

Different times of the year, out in the bay,

it has a personality, and the light changes

through the seasons.

It's an individual piece of architecture

that plays into the light during certain times of the year.

And for me, as an artist that loves

to put architecture in my paintings,

I get a great inspiration from watching the light change,

the winter, the summer, whatever it may be.

When I do a painting, I try to create a mood

and a feeling through light and composition

and put the viewer in the peace.

(soft music)

If the bay houses weren't there,

it would be like any other salt marsh.

There's no construction going on around them,

there's no buildings being built,

it just stays more or less in a virgin,

pristine setting that they probably once

were back when they were built.

Most of the people that have these houses

are either fishermen, clamors,

they're water people.

You know, they're people that know the bay.

They're on the bay, and they know the tides,

and the fish that are in the bay, and the clams.

It's part of the environment.

- Get this wall over here. - That's the baby, right?

- Yep. Yep.

- That's the common thread I think that everyone has

who owns the houses and all the friends of the people

that own the houses.

- Now pull a piece of the wall down.

Not far up. Like this, right here.

That's it. - It's what we

call local ecological knowledge, LEK,

and that is what these bay house owners have

many times over.

- My family isn't your traditional bay men,

we didn't make a living on the bay,

but we still have that bond with it,

and respect for the water, and respect for the marshes,

and respect for the people that do work on it.

Watching the guys out there with their giant seining nets

on the sandbar and just out there working,

and just their leathered skin, and you just like,

"That guy's a worker."

Like, to me, that's a hard worker.

You know, so, it's just bay house owners,

it's a love, a respect for nature.

- They understand when certain birds appear

a storm could be coming.

They know that when certain kinds of fish

that live in the bay are no longer around,

a storm could be coming.

So they have an awareness of our ecological systems

and how they work that far surpasses

many weather forecast and meteorologist predictions.

- You'll see snails here, periwinkle snails,

blue-ribbed muscles.

You'll see achilles, lots and lots of a little achilles.

(soft music)

- [Barbara] Salt marshes appear in coastal wetlands,

sometimes called tidal marsh.

This occurs in areas between low and high tides,

often in estuaries where fresh land water mixes

with salty seawater.

This ecosystem serves many vital functions

and is home to a wide variety of marine wildlife.

(birds squawking)

- We see things in the bay that were gone

for a really long time.

So it's clear to me that over, in the period, you know,

when there was a lot of pollution, in the '70s

and into the '80s, a lot of different species

had either died off or just not felt

that the environment was hospitable.

Birds have always been a constant out on the bay,

and I'm a rather avid bird watcher,

and that's part of one of the reasons why,

just from a very early age,

just watching all the different species that would come.

Asking my grandfather, "What kind of bird is that?"

Cormorants.

We have swans that come out.

We have all kinds of ducks and geese.

We have the glossy ibis.

We have oyster catchers.

We have, of course, every type of gull you can think of.

Terns.

Barn swallows.

We get swallows that frequently nest under

the deck of the house.

- The bay houses began out of a dependent relationship

between farmers and fishermen.

Back in the colonial days, farmers needed something

to feed their livestock because the ground

was covered with snow.

And they saw that the salt hay that was going

on the marshlands in the bay had a particular kind

of hay that wasn't covered with snow

because of the warm currents

that came through the estuary.

Back then, the only people who could get out

to those marshlands were basically fishermen,

'cause they were the only ones who had boats.

This would've been in the late 1700s up until the mid 1800s.

The farmers would pay the fishermen to go out there,

row out there, and then come back.

Well, in the wintertime you don't have much time

because daylight is short, and so they would spend,

I would say, good two hours to get out to the marshland,

then they would be cutting the salt hay,

and then they would have to turn around

and come back in, and not have that much

to show for all of that work.

The fishermen said, "Gee, if I had a little house

or a little shack that I could stay in,

maybe overnight, I could do some clamming,

I could do some oystering, and also cut the salt hay."

And that's how the first bay houses came to be.

The house we're passing on our right,

anybody wanna guess why it has a tower?

That was a lookout tower.

Bay houses were a natural friend for run runners,

'cause they gave you a place to hide.

And when the run runners came in,

they wanna keep an eye out for the coast guard.

- The rum runners.

I mean, basically what I've heard are stories.

(bright upbeat music)

- With the passing of the Volstead Act in 1917,

many of the bay house owners who, again,

was this, you know, rough and ready group of,

you know, fishermen and bay men,

they quickly learned that they could probably

make a lot of money by ferrying booze

that was docked just offshore.

- It was a fairly lucrative business

for a good number of people.

They would meet the ship offshore

and they'd lower down the alcohol.

The money would go in a bucket,

they'd send the bucket up.

If it was correct, they'd untie him

and let him come in, and they'd skedaddle.

- Bill McCoy would bring up his ships

from the Caribbean and would anchor just outside

of Jones Inlet and Rockaway Inlet.

- That's where the name "The Real McCoy" came from,

'cause he was the one that would go down to The Bahamas,

the Caribbean, and bring all the rum up,

and they'd sail that 12-mile line,

and they'd stay just outside of it,

and they'd run off, and get it, and come back

in with the small boats.

- The bay house owners and, you know,

some of the local fishermen had boats,

would very quietly at night, you know,

go out there and bring in a case of booze or two,

sometimes bring it to one of the marshland hotels

and sometimes bring it straight to shore

where there would've been cars waiting for them.

- There are lots of stories about how the booze got in.

On an incoming tide with this wind,

the boats would come in the inlet,

drop the crates off, like, Boardwalk Empire,

like up in Hyannis Port, right?

And the crates would float in, the kids would run out

and bring the booze in.

- A lot of the houses would have trapdoors

in the middle of the living area,

and they could drop the booze down

if they have to get rid of it, you know,

one of the other boats would come in and pick it up.

- But the crates were set up and tied together,

and with an anchor, and when they got chased,

if they were caught and the coast guard came

or whoever the law enforcement was,

they would throw them off and the weight

would take all these crates down and they'd disappear,

they wouldn't be on the boat any longer.

And then when they got stopped,

they wouldn't be arrested or, you know,

caught for bootlegging.

And then what they'd do is come back another day,

put a grappling hook down, get the line, pull it up,

and then bring the booze in.

- I know, off of Hewlett Point Park, this guy, Bob,

I don't know if he's still alive,

but his father had a hotel out there,

across from where the park is,

and they had a speakeasy there,

and they used to have the rum runners come in

and out there all the time.

And there's a spot over there

where the hotel or the bar was,

and they got raided, and they pulled the plug on the boat,

I guess the boat that ran off the beach to get the booze.

And to this day, that boat is still down there

with booze bottles in it.

This is what he says. Who knows?

- We have an old logbook from the original 1898 bay house

and it dates back to, I'm not even sure,

but there's talk about Uncle Stewart and Uncle Russell

bringing down their bathtub gin,

and here's the prohibition, and it's tough to make out,

but my cousin has the logs still secured away.

So there was definitely some enjoyment going on here.

- I do have a ring with a rum diamond,

because my great-grandfather, at the time,

he had $10,000 with him at all times

because he may come across somebody

that would have rum to buy.

One of the times he was traded diamonds for rum.

One of the stories was if he had known it wasn't gonna last,

he would've worked a little harder and got, you know,

made more money rum running and never had to work again,

and everybody would've been set.

- Captain Jack Combs and his buddy

who's named One-Armed Charlie, went out to a boat

and had, you know, brought back a case of booze,

dropped it off at a hotel, and had the money,

and went to their bay house.

- He talked about it as if they were, you know,

they were going out to the grocery store.

They'd run up shore and they'd pick up stuff

from McCoy at the 12-mile line,

and they'd run it back in.

- It was an extra high tide that night.

So they had put the money in a box,

and when the tide came into the bay house,

all the money got wet.

- They had it in one of the bay houses,

all tacked up on the wall, and somebody came in there,

I guess one of the wardens, and they had all

this cash tacked up on the walls 'cause it was all wet.

- And the coast guard decided, okay, now's our chance.

They knock on the door and Charlie and Captain Jack Combs

were looking at each other, said,

"Who knocks at a bay house?

This is not good."

And so, when they opened up the door,

they found these federal marshals, you know,

with their guns, and they said, "You're under arrest!"

And they said, "Well what for?"

And they said, "For rum running."

And said, "We don't have any booze here."

And meanwhile, the coast guard was looking

at all this money on the wall and they said,

"Well, where'd you get the money from?"

And they said, "It's not against the law to have money."

And these poor federal marshals just had

to walk away empty-handed.

- [Barbara] The New York metropolitan area had seen

its fair share of storms, but nothing,

at this point in time, was as destructive and powerful

as the hurricane that struck Long Island

and southern New England on September 21, 1938.

- [Reporter] September 21st, in mid-afternoon,

this tropical terror struck,

swept over Harbor, Long Island,

struck with winds roaring 100, 150,

almost 200 miles an hour.

Tidal waves 30 to 40 feet high struck a section unprepared.

The great, wind-driven waves swallowed

the sandy bulwarks of the coast,

washed away the pleasant beaches

of Long Island's southern shore,

literally changed the coastline.

Bridges joining islands to the mainland

were destroyed almost instantly.

Men risked almost certain death trying

to swim to their isolated homes,

and the coast guard restrained them when it could.

Thousands of homes along the seashore were shattered,

mansion and modest home alike.

The storm tore timber from timber,

leaving only tangled wreckage.

(ominous music)

- After World War II, motorboats were affordable,

and there were such a huge influx of people

that were moving to the South Shore of Long Island.

- [Announcer] Something is bringing people to Long Island.

If you ever lived in the city,

you'd know what attracts people to Long Island.

They all come for the same reasons.

Out here, there's room to breathe.

- They all wanted a bay house.

When they saw the first ones that were built

in the 1800s, they said, "I want one of those."

- [Announcer] There's room for the boys to grow

among the trees and open spaces,

the way I did, not surrounded by asphalt and concrete.

- Pretty soon you had, you know, maybe, you know,

20 or 30 bay houses go into the 300, maybe even 400.

We've seen photographs of marshland islands

that are completely dominated by bay houses.

As we start to travel out

I want you to think back in time

before your parents' generation,

when there were hundreds of bay houses on these marshlands.

- People don't realize that this whole area was bay houses.

- They had houses every so many feet on the entire meadow.

I know across the way there was houses,

and it's probably just the way it was,

'cause you had 2 or 300 houses out here, pretty compact.

- [Nancy] You see that foundation there?

There used to be an estate there with a swimming pool

that was supposedly owned by Gloria Swanson.

- [Brian] That's her built-in swimming pool

you're looking at.

The land used to extend a lot further,

and over time it's gotten eroded away.

But all these actors and actresses and people

that just wanted to be off the grid for a while,

would come out here back in the '20s and the '30s,

I guess it was, and they would hang out for the weekend.

- [Nancy] She had a friend who had an amphibious car.

That's a car that could turn into a boat.

- [Announcer] Out of your garage, down the street,

and into the bay for a cruise.

- They would put it in a water at Freeport,

and, I guess, drive the car with the propeller,

and park it in front of his bay house.

And when the day was done, he would drive back,

drive out the boat ramp, and go home.

- [Announcer] It returns to land safe and sound

for the ride home.

- There's a lot of actors out here.

Jimmy Durante was out this way.

And Esther Williams.

Burl Ives had a beautiful one out here

with porches around it.

And Johnny Weissmuller and Buster Crabbe.

Buster Crabbe was my coach, swimming coach.

So, who's ever that age would know who he was.

Flash Gordon.

- We've been trying to figure out why my grandfather

came down here to build a bay house in 1898.

He was a Swede, and there were places in Sweden

that kind of looked like this.

So we think when he saw this,

he decided that he wanted to replicate where he came from.

There was another house up here

that one of the first bay constables, Ralph Combs, owned.

And my parents purchased that in 1955.

The first memories that I have, I was probably about five,

coming out here with my parents.

And my mother and father would row my sister and I over,

we'd get to the other side and open it up,

and be ready for our weekend or however long we stayed.

- When I was younger, just the anticipation

of coming down here for the first time

was just unbelievable, like nothing else really mattered.

I can just remember we would open up Memorial Day weekend

and that was, like, the best day.

You're like, okay, we have a month of school left

or whatever, but we're at the shack and, you know,

it's opened up, and we'll be there till Labor Day.

For, like, two or three weeks in the summer,

we would just come out here and load up.

And I remember taking my GI Joe toys

and whatever I was bringing,

'cause you're there for three weeks,

that's all you have, that's what it's gonna be.

And... There was no "Mr. Rogers"

or Sesame Street. - There was nothing.

It was just your imagination and have fun.

(soft music)

- I actually lost my house in 1992 in a winter storm.

But prior to that, there were 10 or 11 homes,

they were beautiful.

Everyone was different, old, with families

that had been around for a number of years.

It was a nice time back then.

Every Labor Day there was a party.

Every Memorial Day there was a party.

4th of July, someone would say,

"Okay, we'll meet, and we'd put together

our best dishes, and celebrate the holidays."

(fireworks snapping and pooing)

- [Allison] We gonna go in water?

- How'd you get so cute? - We gonna go in the water?

- That's my favorite time of the year.

It's just barbecuing, you can do some fireworks

and music, and just your friends and your family.

Basics. Just basics.

But just everyone's tubing or jumping in the water,

going for short boat rides, fishing,

and having a great time.

- [Person] Whoo!

(planes whooshing)

(soft music)

- [Barbara] The summers are a great time for parties

and gatherings at the bay houses,

especially holidays like Memorial Day and July 4th,

and even some holidays that the families make up,

such as the Celebration of Floatilla

at the McNeese bay house.

- Hey. - Hey, how are

we gonna get back?

(people laughing)

Get back like this.

I'll get ya back.

- I'm very fortunate.

My father, when he bought the place,

he bought it to keep me outta trouble, you know,

one of those things.

He was somewhat successful,

but I can't imagine the kind of trouble

I might have been in if I didn't have my bay house.

Yep.

The layout was for a two-car garage.

Initially, it was supposed to be a little 8 by 12 shed.

I just couldn't do it, I felt I needed to build a house.

So I went a little above and beyond

what my father would've done.

My father used to always say,

"Don't put too much money into it,

'cause there's a good chance you're gonna lose it."

He was right, you know, we did lose it in 1992.

But hopefully, we won't lose this,

and hopefully Sandy shows that we've built it high enough

and strong enough that it should sustain through

any future storms.

We have propane stove, electric refrigerator,

electric runs off of solar panels

and a battery bank that stores the energy.

The 12 volt runs through an inverter

and turns it into one 110,

and anything at home runs out here.

We have beautiful digital quality TV

and running hot water.

We have well water.

We just sent it out to have it tested again,

and hopefully it'll be fine.

We still drink bottled water.

I figure if we drink bottled water inshore,

we should definitely be drinking bottled water out here.

And one of the problems you have out here

is getting material supplies out here,

and then getting what you don't need back, you know?

This entire house, everything on it

came out basically on a 14-foot Boston Whaler.

It's every bit as nice,

I would buy a house like this inshore. (chuckles)

Come on upstairs, I'll show you upstairs.

We always have some fishing rods at the ready,

just in case some fish show up.

(determined music)

So this is it. Nothing fancy.

I have a pretty bathroom.

We have an incinerating toilet,

which is not working right now.

It's in the midst of repair.

That's what I'm saying, there's always a job.

And this was supposed to be the icing on the cake,

if you'd say, life should have been great with this toilet,

but it's been nothing but a headache.

I love being out here.

I love working on my house.

I'll be done with construction,

then I'm stuck with maintenance,

'cause this is a lifetime, you're a slave to maintenance

even if you have a beautiful home built.

Mother Nature is brutal out here.

- You can see it's swirling right over my shoulder here,

what's being called a super storm tonight.

Hurricane Sandy is more than 200 miles off the coast

and is about to crash into two other systems

when it makes landfall.

It's a massive storm, 1000 miles across.

Really anyone east of the Mississippi will be affected.

Hundreds of thousands have already been evacuated tonight.

- This is Sandy right here.

Seven feet up.

- This is Hurricane Irene.

The water level was up to here.

Hurricane Sandy was over our heads.

And the water came into the house,

well, the wall got tore off.

But I have hatches in the floors.

The old-timers used to cut hatches in the floors

so the buildings would flood.

But I think what happened in our case

is either the waves tore off the back wall

or the rugs covered the hatches when the water receded,

so the water had no place to go,

so it went for its weakest point,

and it blew out the back wall.

- When we came out here, everybody was praying

and saying something, and this and that.

But when we got here, these doors were gone,

the windows were gone.

Had a kitchen, that's gone.

The chairs and stuff that was in there, anything was gone.

- We survived Irene the year before,

we just lost a little bit of dock.

I just rebuilt the dock, and then Sandy hit,

and I thought for sure the house wouldn't be here.

Instead of coming the shorter way,

where I could see the roof of the house.

If I saw the roof, I would've known it was there.

But if I didn't see the roof,

the angst would've killed me driving all the way

and saying, "Where's my house?"

So I came on the north end of the island,

so when I get went through this bridge,

it would only be a few seconds of pain if it was gone.

When we hit the bridge, it's amazing,

my boys were in the front, they were jumping,

dancing, high-fiving within 21 feet.

They knew that the house was still there,

and I hadn't seen it, and then I saw

that the house was there.

- When I crawled in, I sat there and I can't describe it,

but I felt almost like spirit, electricity,

energy, I don't know.

But it was like, okay, fix it now.

(soft music) (building ruble crunching)

We gave it to you and it's a mess,

figure out how to make it work.

And that's what drove me.

I mean, I was like, "Dad, we're fixing it."

- This place here, I don't know

if you would've survived even being out here.

I guess if you stayed on the roof,

but who wants to do that?

It was more of a water event than a wind event.

- This is the remnants of three houses that were here.

There were three homes.

The Morse's, a beautiful home.

This was the Meigs home.

It was a little rundown, but it was still

a cute, little home.

And then, the Mayos, who's now owned by PJ Pasalaqua,

the whole house is gone, just completely removed.

It's very sad.

- I was here the day, two days after Sandy,

and just to see what had happened

and what was still standing.

And there wasn't much.

(soft music)

I could look out to the back and see part

of our dock and part of the other bay house,

and see lumber all over the place.

Then about two weeks later, my cousin and I came down

and we walked the marshes, and we started to say,

"All right, well, we can use this, we can use that."

And then, as soon as it was spring,

we got a boat in the water and we just went

and came to every pile of lumber we saw,

got out in the marsh with our chainsaws, and crowbars,

and hammers, and started taking apart, load the boat up,

bring it back, dump it over here.

We spent days just going out and getting the lumber

before we could even start rebuilding the platform.

It was a long process, but without it,

we wouldn't have been able to do it.

- My son and I came out to lock up

and bent down the hatches before Sandy.

This is a coast guard station over here,

and when I noticed that the coast guard had abandoned

their station, there were no coast guard boats,

they were gone, I had an inkling that it was gonna

be a bad storm.

- After Sandy, some of the FEMA personnel came out

with me and wanted to learn more about these bay houses

that would help mainland house owners understand,

and, you know, they used a lot of the technologies

in their formal building guidelines

for people building post Sandy.

The bay house owners helped FEMA understand

what it would take for a house to become storm proof.

(chainsaw whirring)

The biggest challenges for bay house owners

is the continuous need to educate people

about how hard it is to care for the bay houses

and the knowledge that is necessary in order

to build and strengthen a very vulnerable structure

that's out in the middle of the bay.

- It's a heck of a lotta work.

It's one thing to show up on this dock,

and when it's sunny and it's nice out,

and the drinks are cold and there's a nice breeze,

but we work our tails off.

In our minds, it's well worth it.

It's been in our family since 1898,

and just count our blessings.

(gentle music)

- To maintain a bay house, it's very,

very time-consuming, and it's very, very expensive.

You constantly have to be looking out on the underpinning,

the docks, all of those things, because they rot obviously,

and you have to keep on top of them,

otherwise you're going to lose them.

- We all have our own little chores here.

I do the fine points, they do the big stuff.

- [Willie] It's never-ending, there's always

something to do.

I could be here for the next 20 years,

if I ever live that long, and I could do something

every minute of every day and still never get caught up.

- There's always a chance of hitting something

that's been buried for 75 years.

- The foundations of bay houses vary.

Some of them are built on mudsills,

which are planks, and then there are studs on those,

and then built on them.

Some of the pilings are put into the marsh,

and then they're mudsills put on 'em

so it doesn't sink with all of the weight.

This house is a combination of mudsills and some pilings.

- Basically, mudsill is just a piece of flat lumber

that literally sits on top of the marsh,

it's not anchored to the marsh in any way.

The house is literally built on top of that.

One of the things that the army corps is more concerned

with was not necessarily how the bay house

was going to be built, but how we were going

to anchor it to the marshland.

Their big concern was they didn't want

these bay houses floating away and moving across

the marsh at high tide.

And the marsh is a very sensitive ecological type of area.

- The only thing that kept it in place

was the screw piles that are in the ground,

with the Heli-Coils, and the stainless steel cables

that we put up.

- [Joey] After Hurricane Sandy hit,

there were two houses next to Frankie's house,

the one I had worked on, and they were gone.

Frankie's house was still there, so I guess it worked.

There was actually a house wedged underneath a loop bridge,

I think it was going toward Long Beach.

Probably a lot of them just are built on the mudsill.

(soft music)

- Prior to the advent of generators and solar panels,

there was no electricity.

That was one of the pleasures that people enjoyed

being out at the bay house, it being quiet,

you can have television, you might have

a small transistor radio, but pretty much people wanted

to get away from modern conveniences.

They go to their bay houses to be part of the bay,

to go clamming, to go fishing, to work on their house,

and they don't, you know, find themselves looking

at Facebook, unless they wanna take a picture

and share it with people what it's like to have a bay house.

- [Person] Okay, keep going, get the water outta there.

You're winning, you're winning!

- I'm winning? - I think so.

- The cell phones are nice because you capture everything

on video or take a picture.

- [Person] Whoo! Boosh!

- Wow. - Whoo!

- [Person] What?

- [Person] Here it comes.

Whoa, she's comin' on, boys, she's comin' on strong.

(Jason speaks faintly)

- We have a, we call it The shack,

The Shack Facebook page, so we don't have

to worry about where all the pictures are,

because they're in one location.

- Used to have a hard day at the office, you know,

not even feel like, have the energy to come out on the boat,

but as soon as I get on the boat,

as soon as I hit this water, I get relaxed, I feel at home.

We have lots of friends that say,

"Don't you worry about losing your bay house?"

And I never really worry about it

because it's just, it's like part of my life.

If something goes wrong, I'll just fix it.

- When you're here, I mean, like last night,

there was nobody on the bay.

I mean, it's perfectly silent, and it's beautiful.

And we're very lucky today,

because the planes aren't coming into Kennedy,

'cause sometimes this is the flight pattern.

It's very peaceful at night.

It's peaceful and it just, you know,

you just feel at ease with yourself and your surroundings.

- I didn't have to put solar and electric in.

I didn't have to put the well in.

I didn't have to put an incinerating toilet.

All of that stuff is kinda challenging,

and who gets to do that these days?

Not that many people.

I also love duck hunting.

There's nobody out here, you're all alone.

A lot of people can't really imagine that right here,

on Long Island, that there's a variety of ducks

that could be hunted.

(soft music)

- I first started out as a boater

and enjoying the life on the water.

Living right here on the South Shore of Long Island,

that desire to stay out on the water longed itself

to becoming an a duck hunter.

(duck whistle squawking)

There we go.

One.

Two. Oh, boy.

Get 'em, my man.

(guns firing)

- Well, the season lasts from around Thanksgiving,

goes through the last week of January.

The colder it gets, the better the hunting is.

So typically towards the end of the season,

we like to think that the hunting gets better.

(guns firing) (soft music continues)

(duck whistles squawking)

- Yeah. Yeah.

- Old man toss.

- Once we get out there,

we're gonna strategically place our decoys

so that ducks passing by feel invited to come in and land.

Now what I wanna do is I'm gonna put a group

of buffalohead up in here, in the deeper, choppier water.

(Frederick speaks faintly)

- Yep, six or eight.

And then we're gonna make a nice V-shape

with a brant in here.

And we'll tuck some of those mallards up in that flat water.

- [Frederick] Love being out there in the summer.

I think almost love being there

as much in the winter, as well.

It's a different feel out there.

There's no buoys, you really gotta know your way around,

it's a sense of home.

You get to see everything from a different light.

The water's clearer, there's nobody around, it's different.

- It has a tranquility to it where you can be on the bay.

If you're not in love with the sun, the salt, and the sand,

maybe Long Island isn't a place for you.

We'll see what the tide is doing.

Whether it's coming in, whether it's going out,

and where we can physically get the boats.

From the South Shore of Long Island, here where we hunt,

we have a five-foot title swing,

so we can hunt in a place that has two foot of water,

or we can hunt in a place that has five foot of water,

but the tide is gonna drop,

we wanna make sure we can get out of there.

- [Barbara] Well, the tide did get to the better of us

that day, and our film crew had to be escorted,

on foot, back to another boat.

(soft music)

Although environment protection laws were put into place

to protect the local wildlife,

broader environmental concerns

like erosion due to human activity

and global warming have created a new set

of concerns regarding the future of salt marshes.

- [Nancy] The environment around the bay houses

has changed enormously.

There have been such a growth in the number

of people who have powerful boats

that they're creating massive wakes

that every year take off a little bit

of the marshlands on which bay houses stand.

- Back in the day, you had clam boats,

they're little boats, and that's what's made

for these waterways, not these big Sea Rays

that have these big wakes and everything.

It makes it dangerous for us,

it makes the marsh fall down so much.

Our marshland was farther out than the poles

when I was a kid.

I hope the message goes out,

like, respecting the waterways and going slow

isn't just because we want you to go slow

and you're bugging us, it's because you really

are a factor in changing the ecosystem

in this area completely.

- I remember, not too long ago,

when I first started in the 1980s,

that you could almost walk from one marshland to another,

especially at low tide.

- This marsh that we're on, when I was a kid,

went out another 40 feet right out there,

and now it's just destroyed.

Even from last year, with the bad winter we have,

you can see if you look over here, if you look closely,

we lost probably 2.5, 3 foot of marsh.

And that's because of all of the junk that's in the water,

from the nitrates, from the fertilizer and things like that,

it doesn't allow the roots in the marsh

to grow and repel the erosion.

- Now you have enormous channels

separating those marshlands.

They've probably lost close to 20 feet of marshland

in the 20 years that I've been documenting,

due to erosion, pure and simple.

Too many big boats going too fast.

And the numbers of big boats have grown exponentially.

- Wetlands is so important.

It's called the nursery to the ocean.

It absorbs water.

So the less we have, the more water's gonna

go inland during a storm.

The marshland actually helps to absorb any surge.

So the more that this marshland disappears,

it dissipates, the greater chance of coastal flooding.

- When Irene came across Long Island,

that was one of the places that hit hard,

and of course super strong Sandy

bought an enormous strong surge.

And there's been quite a bit of erosion

of the marshlands just from those two storms.

There have been many storms in between

the late '80s and 2011.

- That happened gradually.

And when things happen gradually,

they kind of fly under the radar.

Because one storm may claim a few one year,

then the next year it may claim a few more,

so that slow process, it's a disappearing

that doesn't have a strong impact.

Under normal tide conditions,

the tides seem to be almost normal

over the last 20 or 30 years, but here's the difference.

Anytime that we have a new moon, a full moon,

astronomical moon, with east winds or a storm,

the tides get much higher than they've ever been.

Now, either the land is sinking or the tides are rising,

so, you know, my assumption is, you know,

the water, the sea levels are rising.

- We're seeing many more seals, and dolphins,

and whales that are coming closer,

and they are eating a lot more of the fish.

So there's a drastic decline in the kinds

of fish that used to be numerous.

- If you went out fishing, you came home

with all the fish you possibly needed.

(soft music)

If you wanted bluefish, you wanted Striped bass,

you wanted sea bass, you wanted flounder,

you had a bucket full, no matter what.

The population of the fish started dwindling down.

- We're seeing a major growth in the cormorant population.

That's a seabird that eats fish,

and they're illegal to hunt, cormorants,

so they have been growing and growing

and taking a lot of the fish out of the bay.

- Right now, I don't know how much lower

it could get in the area.

And it's a shame, because it was so pure.

If you looked in this water,

it was like at the Caribbean at the time, and now it's not.

(soft music)

- When Sandy hit, it wiped quite a few out.

That was a devastating storm.

And prior to that storm, these houses,

they got destroyed by Mother Nature.

The protocol was they could never be rebuilt.

- You are not allowed to build a new bay house.

If you do not have a bay house today,

you are never going to have a bay house

unless somebody adds you to their lease.

We don't wanna go back to 1965,

where we had hundreds of bay houses,

all whom were polluting the bay.

And now, with the erosion of marshland

such a critical issue, it would be

an environmental hazard that would not

be permitted by the DEC.

Every year I get calls from people saying,

"I wanna own a bay house."

And I said, "Unless you know and become

very good friends and help a current bay house owner

who might or might not add you to the lease,

you are not going to have a bay house."

- The town of Hempstead, which governs a lot

of the permits and fees to have access

to use these houses, change their rules

and regulations, and let the people who lost

the homes during Sandy rebuild within

a three-year window with the same footprint.

- That's going to be the biggest threat, you know?

That the next big storm could take out all

of the bay houses that we have today.

- And we couldn't rebuild it, it was totally gone.

We don't know where else to go, this is our spot.

It's gonna take a lot more than, you know,

ruining the house to get rid of us, that's for sure.

- [Joseph] They wanted to preserve whatever's left,

and I think that's extremely important,

'cause when they're gone, they're gone.

- The other major challenge for the bay house owners

is whether their children and grandchildren

are committed to keeping those bay houses.

- The younger people, they just don't go out

on boats anymore.

You know, when I was a kid, everybody wanted

a Garvey or a Boston Whaler,

and wanted to go out on the bay,

and go clamming, and go fishing, and do stuff,

but now they wanna play video games.

You know, you'll see 'em on a half a million dollar boat,

sitting there playing a video game.

So, the world has changed quite a bit.

But you don't have break-ins in the bay house

anymore either, because the kids don't go on the bay.

- I look forward to my kids using it and enjoying it,

and them finding out how much they can enjoy it.

I don't know if they enjoyed it as much as I did,

but they do love it.

- There are so many distractions today

for younger people that I don't know

that they have that same appreciation

that their parents and grandparents did

for the solitude and the natural environment

that is the draw for many of the bay house owners.

(soft music)

- The moment that I feel really blessed about

is seeing my family enjoy it, and being part of it,

and being part of something that is something

that's unique, and something that's very,

very important, and having them enjoy it.

(soft music continues)

- It's a beautiful place.

It's misunderstood by a lot of people.

They believe it's a smelly, dirty, yucky place,

and meanwhile it's the nursery for the oceans.

And unless it is taken care of,

unless people pay attention to the needs and to protect it,

the oceans will suffer.

And that means our food supplies will suffer.

I just hope these houses last for many years to come,

so other people could see them.

The older structures that still exist today,

from the original construction,

are just something to be seen.

The rustic boards inside these homes, the beams,

and to go inside a bay house and look out the windows

of these bay house from the inside

of the rustic dwelling gives you

an unbelievable 360 degree panoramic view

of open salt marshes.

It's majestic.

And if the sun sets and hits the tips

of those marsh grasses with the golden color,

you feel like you're in heaven.

It's unbelievable.

It's special.

- Well, the bay house that we currently have

is the culmination of three years

of planning, lugging materials out,

and getting work parties together.

Very similar to the way the Amish do a barn raising.

It's still the bay house, and as the years go by,

it'll become even more like it was.

The houses need to remain there,

they are important to the maritime history of the island.

These houses really are little gems on the marshland.

- This house has, like, a spirit to it.

It has so much story, so much family tradition built in it.

It's not just a house, it's not just a vacation spot for us,

and it's not just wood put up, it's everything to us.

- It's a part of Long Island that unless this is preserved,

you're never gonna see anything like this again.

Once these houses are gone, they're gone.

- I think one of the most precious treasures we have here

on Long Island are these bay houses.

Being out on the water brings out the best of everybody.

There is no place else on Long Island or, you know,

on the eastern seaboard except for these small shacks

that are in the town of Hempstead and the town of Islip,

and I think we're quite fortunate to be able

to appreciate the generations and the centuries

of living on the water that initially brought people

to Long Island.

(soft music)

- It's still the same in the sense that we sit around,

we listen to music, we tell the old stories

over and over again, and we still laugh about 'em.

- Even if you're not from Long Island, like myself,

these are really precious landmarks

that remind all of us of Long Island's heritage.

- One thing that people should know about having

a bay house is that we're the luckiest family alive.

We really are.

(soft music)

I am not a religious person by any means, but I tell people,

this is my church, this is my happy place, this is my home.

I've watched that sunset in the same spot.

I'll be 48 in June.

Every year of my life I've watched that sunset

in the same spot and it's the most beautiful sunset

you can ever see.

(soft music continues)

(birds chirping)

- [Barbara] Funding for this film has been provided

by The Robert Lion Gardiner Foundation

and The MediaEd Project.