Just after Arthella Addei moved into her home at 675 Glen Cove Road in 1970, she was greeted by an older gentleman who told her he once lived on the property and thanked her for moving in and renovating the house.
Addei said at first she didn’t recognize the man’s name – John Mackay – but after years of living in Roslyn, she became well acquainted with one of the town’s most famous families.
“I didn’t really know anything about the area when I moved here, but I knew I really liked the property because the rest of the area looked all modern,” Addei said.
Mackay, the wealthy son of Clarence Mackay, built the Glen Cove Road property in 1929 as a smaller replica to his father’s 688-acre estate at Harbor Hill, complete with three buildings used as a kennel, stable and cottage at the entrance.
When Clarence Mackay died in 1938, Harbor Hill was left to John, but the fortune needed to maintain the property was left to Anna Case, Clarence’s second wife, and in 1947 John had to close Harbor Hill to ease the property’s tax burden and to plan for an eventual subdivision.
“I always kept my ears open for more information about the Mackays, and kept him in the back of my mind because this man lived here,” Addei said.
Addei, who worked as a teacher and school administrator within the New York City school system, said she’d pass the house in driving home to Westbury from C.W. Post, where she took classes in the 1960s, and finally convinced her husband Kwabena, a doctor who was finishing up his residency at Winthrop-University Hospital in Mineola, to look at the property.
“It just looked different,” she said.
But the house that caught her eye was not the one Mackay lived in. Her house was once Mackay’s gate house, two buildings that once housed a garage, cottage, kennel and stable and was eventually connected at its center, where those visiting the property used to pass to arrive at Stone House, where Mackay lived.
Over the years, Addei and her husband turned Mackay’s gate house into a home, restoring a hole in the roof with its original Portuguese shingles and fencing off other areas of the property for an outdoor kitchen, pond and other amenities.
Addei said about five years ago, she was looking into replacing the property’s front gate, which she had been unable to close shut since she moved in.
Initially, Addei said she thought about installing iron gates or even put the gate’s doors on skates that would aid in locking it, and a representative from Walpole Woodworkers in Greenvale, which had worked on other fencing projects for her, expressed an interest in buying the gate because of its original hardware.
“To him, they were historical,” Addei said.
Efforts to reach Walpole Woodworkers were unavailing.
Addei said she remembered Mackay, who thanked her all those years ago for retaining the property he built in homage to his father’s famous estate, and thought the builder knew more about the property than he was telling her.
She didn’t sell.
“I decided to leave it because I don’t really do anything with it but I’m glad I did, because it’s a historical part of the Island,” Addei said.
