The morning rain clouds had parted and blue sky peeked through as some 75 members of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society waited on a Long Island pier. They had gathered on a recent Sunday for The Great Gatsby Boat Tour, a 90-minute cruise around Manhasset Bay to explore East Egg and West Egg, the fictional peninsulas where Fitzgerald set his 1925 novel, “The Great Gatsby.”
While the captain worked to replace a dead battery on the boat, the group of Fitzgerald scholars and fans munched on deli sandwiches and mingled.
Kirk Curnutt, a professor of English at Troy University in Alabama, explained that the cruise was the kickoff event for the society’s annual conference, which, befitting the centennial of the publication of “Gatsby,” was being held this year in New York.
Attendees had come from around the country and world. Mr. Curnutt pointed to a tall blond woman who was a professor of American literature at the University of London and the author of several works on Fitzgerald, including a recent article for The Financial Times about how “Gatsby” predicted Trumpism.
“That’s Sarah Churchwell,” he said. “She’s one of the stars.”
Mr. Curnett, 60, teaches “Gatsby” to education students who will go on to teach the novel in high schools. “We teach them how to teach,” he said. “Like avoiding the phrase ‘American dream.’ It’s such a shopworn cliché.”
It wasn’t until college that Mr. Curnett himself read “Gatsby.” This was the mid-1980s, during one of the book’s periodic cultural revivals.
“I remember a lot of hipster girls who wanted to be Zelda,” he said, referring to Fitzgerald’s wife and muse, and an artist in her own right.
There were no obvious Zelda look-alikes, but one woman in the group was dressed like Daisy Buchanan, a central character in the novel who is the obsession of Jay Gatsby.
“I dress fairly vintage most of the time,” said Steff Keim, a lawyer from the Bronx, who was wearing a loose, light pink dress and a cloche hat, paired with big round sunglasses. “I do the ’20s through the ’40s. The ’50s is my hard line — no petticoats. Women’s roles changed then and became more domestic.”
Also among the society members waiting to board was Matt Quinn. A big, strapping guy, he is a firefighter for the New York Fire Department.
Having grown up in Queens, Mr. Quinn, 44, said he was fascinated by the industrial wasteland which Fitzgerald refers to in the novel as the Valley of Ashes, and which is now the area around Citi Field. But, he said, literature isn’t a topic of conversation in the firehouse. So he paid $30 to join the Fitzgerald Society.
“I’ve never been exposed to anyone else” who appreciates “Gatsby,” Mr. Quinn said excitedly. “But now, I’m among the clan.”
After a time, the tour guide, Kevin C. Fitzpatrick, appeared to say that the boat was ready and the group would now board.
“Meyer Wolfsheim just delivered us a new battery,” Mr. Fitzpatrick said, speaking over a microphone and making an inside reference to a character in the novel.
Mr. Fitzpatrick, 59, who was dressed in a blue seersucker suit and tie, is one of those people whose soul belongs to another era. He is the author of several books about the Jazz Age and is the founder of the Dorothy Parker Society.
As he told the cruisers, “I’m the one who brought Dorothy Parker’s urn from Baltimore to the Bronx and buried her next to her parents.”
Last year, Mr. Fitzpatrick took over the Gatsby boat tour from a friend who had started it in 2008. The most famous passenger so far has been the director Baz Luhrmann, who was looking for potential locations for his 2013 film adaptation of “Gatsby,” which starred Leonardo DiCaprio.
No doubt Mr. Luhrmann was looking to see, as the cruisers were, the real-life setting of arguably the greatest American novel. The Fitzgeralds lived in a cottage in Great Neck from 1922 to 1924; the spectacular houses, wealthy people and carefree atmosphere of the area in those roaring years are reflected in the novel.
The boat set sail from Port Washington — to the south of Sands Point, or “fashionable East Egg,” as Fitzgerald describes the old-money enclave. Some of the old waterfront mansions have been torn down and replaced with new ones, but many remain.
“The white building on your portside is Carl Fisher’s house — he popularized the car headlight and built Miami Beach,” Mr. Fitzpatrick announced. “He came here in 1922, so he and Fitzgerald were on this water at the same time.”
Heading south along the shore, the boat passed the village of Plandome Manor (“A lot of hedges, a lot of privet — and it’s not to keep the deer out,” Mr. Fitzpatrick said) and the boathouse where John Hay Whitney, a wealthy investor, publisher, philanthropist and ambassador to the United Kingdom who was known by many as Jock, kept his seaplane and yacht.
Remarking on the many docks jutting into the bay, Mr. Fitzpatrick said, “I’m not going to hit you over the head too much about the green light, but these were the kind of docks you would have put a light at the end of.”
Then the captain turned toward West Egg — Great Neck — “the less fashionable of the two” peninsulas per Fitzgerald, where Nick Carraway, the novel’s narrator, lives in a modest rented cottage “squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season,” one of them being the mansion where Gatsby holds his lavish parties.
In Fitzgerald’s time, Great Neck was the summer play land of show business, vaudeville stars and the nouveau riche.
“The scenery, the views, the topography, the water hasn’t changed in a hundred years,” Mr. Fitzpatrick said.
Neither, apparently, has the social striving.
The boat cruised past a copper-domed mansion that looked plucked from the Loire Valley. A 6,457-square-foot Tudor showplace on the property once owned by the comedian Alan King had been bought for $12.75 million and torn down. Its replacement boasted an 11-car subterranean garage and some of the highest property taxes in New York State (more than $400,000 a year).
Mr. Fitzpatrick noted that the house had been built by the chief executive of First Quality.
“Does anyone know what First Quality makes?” he asked the group. “Anyone?”
A beat.
“Adult diapers. This is the house adult diapers built.”
Steven Kurutz covers cultural trends, social media and the world of design for The Times.
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