Dune Road stretches several miles along a thin barrier island in Westhampton Beach, N.Y., like a needle threading through paradise. On one side is Moriches Bay, a calm waterway ideal for pleasure boaters and clam diggers. The other side is oceanfront. To own one of the supersized houses on either side of Dune Road will cost you millions.
Eli Manning, the former New York Giants quarterback, and Maria Bartiromo, the television anchor, are among those with places in the area. So is Eric Nathan, 77, whose family has had property in Westhampton Beach since the 1960s.
But Mr. Nathan is not technically a homeowner. He, along with some relatives, has a driveway on Dune Road — or a “parking lot,” as he put it on a visit to the site earlier this month.
“I try to get out here every year,” said Mr. Nathan, who lives in Danbury, Conn.
The strip of sandy ground is 18 feet wide by several hundred feet long and stretches from Dune Road back to Moriches Bay. There is room enough to fit maybe six cars, before the dune grass takes over.
The property taxes are a song — about $15 a year — and the upkeep is nonexistent. Were it not for two tall poles of driftwood painted turquoise that stand near the roadside like markers, the driveway would be indistinguishable to passers-by.
As Mr. Nathan drove along Dune Road toward his slice of land on a recent Wednesday morning, he rose in his seat with anticipation.
His family once received an offer of $40,000 for their 18 feet of Dune Road frontage, but turned it down. “I wouldn’t sell for any amount of money,” Mr. Nathan said. “It’s my ticket to the beach.”
That beach, behind a wall of oceanfront homes on stilts across the street from his driveway, is all but private. And there are few if any other places that Mr. Nathan would rather be.
His love for the ocean goes back to his adolescence, when his parents, now deceased, saved enough to buy a cottage on Dune Road, back when the community was dotted with modest bungalows. Mr. Nathan says his happiest times were spent along this stretch of sand and sea.
But through a combination of factors, including a tragic accident and a natural disaster, today all that remains in the family is the driveway.
It is hallowed ground for Mr. Nathan, who called it his “spiritual home.”
Planting Roots
Mr. Nathan’s parents, Edward and Suzanne Nathan, were lifelong beach people, natives of the Rockaways in Queens. He and his half brother, Ralph, who is 12 years older, inherited their craving for the salt life. In the 1950s, the family took summer rentals in Atlantic Beach, off Far Rockaway. It wasn’t long before the parents, renters in Manhattan, decided it was time to buy a place out east.
The cottage that they bought, at 730 Dune Road, in the early 1960s was a former duck-hunting blind that sat on low pilings and had been added onto multiple times. A long unheated dwelling, it had an open living room, two bedrooms, a small kitchen and a back deck facing the bay.
The views were expansive, sky and sand, and you could walk straight onto the beach. The Nathans’ neighbors, like the actress Ruth Warrick, who starred in the soap opera “All My Children,” lived in similar beach shacks.
Early on, the Nathans winterized the cottage, allowing them to spend weekends there year-round. Soon after, Mr. Nathan’s elder half brother and other relatives built houses across the bay, in Remsenburg, making the area the locus of the family.
For a teenage Mr. Nathan, weekdays in the city had a drabness, but weekends at the beach were in Technicolor.
“When we got on the L.I.E. on Friday night, it was like a dark cloud lifting from your soul,” he said, referring to the Long Island Expressway. “The reverse happened Sunday night leaving the beach — you felt yourself shrinking and being compressed by the city.”
Today, summer in the Hamptons calls to mind boozy nights at the Surf Lodge, profligate spending on luxury goods and experiences and taking selfies everywhere from the Hamptons Polo Club to the Carvel on Montauk Highway. But the Nathans’ weekends there decades ago were happily spent at home, doing chores like repairing their wooden walkway to Moriches Bay or sweeping out the sand.
Mr. Nathan’s father, who worked as a lawyer in the city, bought a sailboat and a speedboat. His mother dug for clams, cleaning them in saltwater and making linguine with clam sauce for dinner. At night, the family would sit on the deck and watch the sunset.
Their good times ended abruptly in 1984. That October, Mr. Nathan’s parents were in a fatal car accident near their cottage in Westhampton Beach. Mr. Nathan’s father, then 80, died at the scene, and his mother a few weeks later at 70.
“That changed everything,” Mr. Nathan said.
After the funeral, he drove his father’s ashes out to Dune Road. He scattered some outside the cottage, near his father’s favorite pine tree, and some into the ocean. (His mother’s remains went to her family’s mausoleum in the city.)
“I went into the ocean with my father all the time,” Mr. Nathan recalled. “We’d be doing our chores around the house, and I’d whistle to him or he’d whistle to me: ‘Let’s take a dip,’ and we’d go.”
Mr. Nathan and his half brother inherited the beach cottage jointly, along with land around it that their parents had acquired, including a nice size lot next door, at 728 Dune Road.
In the years after his parents’ death, Mr. Nathan, who lived in Manhattan and worked in the payroll department for the Seagram Company, continued going to Westhampton Beach. Eventually, he started to bring his three children.
For his eldest daughter, Molly Paige, now 41, summer beach weekends became father-daughter bonding time.
When she was young, Ms. Paige said, Dune Road was closed to homeowners for a time after part of the beach eroded. Her father was undeterred. He hoisted her on his shoulders, grabbed their luggage and grocery bags and walked a mile on the sand to his house.
“The best thing that my dad gave me, other than my siblings, is a love for the beach,” Ms. Paige said. “He believes it can cure you; it will make a bad day better. That specific beach is, to him, almost otherworldly.”
The ocean was, in the words of Mr. Nathan’s son, Eli, “his happy place.”
“He would say he had to get a dunk in, a dip in,” Eli Nathan, 34, said. “He just had to be in the ocean.”
Getting Uprooted
Westhampton Beach, like much of coastal Long Island, is in constant flux. As the sand gets carried by the currents, one section of beach erodes while another grows. West Hampton Dunes, the section containing the Nathans’ driveway, was itself created by a storm breach in 1931.
In November 1992, a nor’easter brought record-high tides and hurricane-force winds. Some 80 houses in Westhampton Beach were swept into the ocean, the Nathans’ cottage among them.
“There wasn’t a splinter left,” recalled Mr. Nathan’s half brother, Ralph, now 89.
When the beach was rebuilt a few years later by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, it coincided with the booming ’90s economy. As big money arrived in the form of Wall Street titans, corporate lawyers and entertainment stars, the Hamptons, a low-key destination for artists and writers, became The Hamptons.
Soon after the beach was rebuilt, Mr. Nathan’s half brother sold most of the property he had inherited from their parents. Mr. Nathan hoped to rebuild. He hired an architect to draft plans for a year-round residence.
But he was going through a divorce at the time, and his family had moved to Westchester County. The idea of living three hours from his young children was unacceptable.
“So I agreed to sell the property,” Mr. Nathan said, “which I regretted immediately.”
By then, the funky shacks that once characterized Dune Road were being leveled and replaced with supersized homes whose foundations and living spaces were built up to protect them from coastal flooding.
These vacation homes now can cost upward of $9 million and can come with 4,000 square feet of living space and $300,000 infinity-edge pools overlooking the ocean. Technically, the beach below is public. But the lack of parking or easy access means that a homeowner who buys on the ocean side of Dune Road essentially enjoys a private beachfront.
Houses quickly rose on the plots sold by Mr. Nathan and his half brother, who jointly held onto one parcel: the strip now used as the driveway.
Mr. Nathan owns his part outright; his half brother has given his portion to his three children, Kevin Nathan, Suzanne Harrison and Daphne Cafone, who have their own affection for Dune Road.
Kevin, 57, spent much of his childhood there. He now lives in Connecticut and drives to the family plot several times a year, he said. “Every time I go,” he added, “I get sentimental about my grandparents, about my family’s history there. That is home to me.”
Mr. Nathan, unlike his nephew, rarely gets to Westhampton Beach these days. That’s partly because of his health: He regularly gets dialysis, and has other ailments.
On the cloudy day of his recent visit this summer, Mr. Nathan was joined by his cousin Joan Abrahams, whose parents built a house in Remsenburg. One year apart in age, the cousins recalled combing the beach in their younger years for small, fan-shaped seashells that they called “lucky shells.”
“So, Joanie, do you want to take a walk out on the spit?” Mr. Nathan said, referring to a sandbar created by the 1992 nor’easter that juts into Moriches Bay and grows each year. He believes his father’s remains have become one with the area, and has told his own children to scatter his ashes on the spit.
Dressed in green shorts, a gray T-shirt and a denim bucket hat whose ripped top he had patched himself, Mr. Nathan, using a cane, and Ms. Abrahams walked to the bay on a path made of wood chips and decking. It was made and is maintained by the owners of the cedar-clad house beside the Nathans’ driveway. They let Mr. Nathan and his relatives use the path when they visit.
Soon, more neighbors will come: On the other side of the driveway, a rare section of undeveloped land has been subdivided into three parcels. Mr. Nathan eyed the boundary flags for three prospective homes with a weary fatalism.
“Sometimes I feel like a pauper out here,” he said.
A Family Legacy
In addition to passing on his love for the ocean to his three children, Mr. Nathan hopes the driveway will be part of the legacy he leaves them.
His youngest daughter, Sarah Nathan, 35, will inherit her father’s portion along with her siblings. In college, she and her friends drove out from the city and camped in the driveway overnight. She has also used the driveway as a parking spot for summer beach days.
Sarah said she doesn’t know what she would do with this “weird asset” in the future, but that selling isn’t an option. Her brother and sister agree.
“His ghost will harass me for the rest of my life if I give up this driveway,” Sarah said of her father.
After a couple hours out on the spit in Moriches Bay, the heat got to Mr. Nathan and he and Ms. Abrahams headed back to the driveway.
But before taking the long drive back to Connecticut, Mr. Nathan was intent on doing something. He walked back to the car and grabbed a blue duffel bag. Inside was a beach towel.
He crossed Dune Road and walked to a public access bridge, hidden between two massive houses, that led to the ocean.
When he got to the beach, he began shedding items: first his socks and sandals, then his cane. He walked with purpose into the ocean and was soon chest high in foamy water.
A big wave came and knocked him back. He stood in the water, waiting for the next wave to crash over him. And the next. He seemed to wobble in the turbulent ocean.
Ms. Abrahams looked on nervously from the shore.
Slowly, Mr. Nathan steadied himself in the breakers, turned around and walked out of the water. He was dazed and dripping wet but smiling.
“Oh, God,” he exclaimed to himself, standing again on his beach. “I made it.”
Steven Kurutz covers cultural trends, social media and the world of design for The Times.
Vincent Alban is a photojournalist and a member of the 2025-26 Times Fellowship class, a program for journalists early in their careers.
The post Their Beach Home Is a Driveway appeared first on New York Times.
