A Manhasset civic association official said Tuesday the association is preparing an application to designate the former St. Ignatius Retreat House as state landmark in an effort to prevent the sale of the North Hills property to a buyer who reportedly plans to demolish the house.
Richard Bentley, president of the Council of Greater Manhasset Civic Associations, said the organization does not have the required consent of the Jesuit order that owns the 33-acre property, but would instead include the consent of the Community Wellness Centers of America, a Queens-based non-profit health care company that has an interest in purchasing the house.
“Our methodology is to present it as a unique set of circumstances whereby a facility that’s eligible for the national registry is in a sale process where the owners are in imminent transfer between parties and there are additional parties placing offers on it,” Bentley said.
Bentley said the association planned to investigate the details of the original donation of the mansion to the Jesuits in the 1930s, to learn whether the property’s deed includes a restrictive covenant or any other clause that would require the Jesuits to maintain the property.
Bentley said the civic association also plans to submit a petition with signatures from members of the North Hills community.
As of press time, the petition had 349 signatures, but Bentley said the online service the group has used to gather signatures has not worked properly, leading to complaints.
A new petition on a different server, he said, is forthcoming.
“We know that it’s a long shot, but doing nothing guarantees nothing,” Bentley said of the petition.
The 87-room, 37-chimney retreat house, named “Inisfada” after the Gaelic word for “Long Island,” was built for $2.3 million between 1916-1920 for industrialist Nicholas Brady and his wife Genevieve, who also had residences in Manhattan and Rome.
Following her death in 1938, Genevieve Brady left Inisfada to the Jesuit order, who used the Searingtown Road property as a seminary and retreat house for regional parishes and addiction rehabilitation groups.
The Jesuits maintained the property for more than 50 years, but officials said high operating costs led the order to sell off most of the 300-acre property and put the rest including the house on the market for $49 million a little more than a year ago.
Rev. Vincent Cooke, who is overseeing the sale of the property for the Jesuit order’s New York province, has declined comment on specific details about the negotiation for the property, nor would he confirm the identity of the buyer, reportedly a land developer based in China.
But Cooke said in an interview with Blank Slate Media last month the negotiations for the acquisition of the estate, which closed June 2, were going as planned.
“We have a legally binding agreement that we entered into in good faith with the people we’re in negotiation with and we intend to honor our obligations,” Cooke said.
According to reports, it is unclear whether the Jesuits are in negotiations with a buyer who plans to maintain the mansion and build around it or demolish it outright. The property has zoning for two houses per acre.
Alexandra Wolfe, the director of preservation services for the Society for the Preservation of Long Island Antiquities, said there are two ways of achieving landmark designation for a property.
A property can receive designation at the local level, through village and town preservation laws, or it can go through state and federal historic designation processes.
State and federal historic designation would not prohibit demolition from a private owner, Wolfe said, but it would subject the property to a review process that would seek alternatives from demolition.
“It kind of slows things down and says, ‘let’s consider other alternatives first,’ and the owner has to show that no other alternatives to demolition exist for what they’re trying to accomplish,” Wolfe said.
Because the Jesuits have not shown an interest in preserving Insifada, Wolfe said the process becomes more difficult.
Wolfe said a third party can help establish a building’s eligibility for registry with the historic preservation office, a process that includes providing a thorough physical description of the property as well as its a comprehensive overview of the site’s history.
Wolfe said there are four major criteria involved in deeming a property eligible for the national registry: it must show fine design and craftsmanship, it must associate with important people in history, it must stretch across broad patterns of history and have the potential to yield archeological information.
The Society for the Preservation of Long Island Antiquities, Wolfe said, made an eligibility determination request for Inisfada in June 2012, around the time the Jesuits put the property on the housing market, as a means of increasing the potential for state grants and rehabilitation tax credits.
“It’s a common scenario for a large structure on a substantial parcel of land,” Wolfe said of the Jesuits’ sale efforts. “The owner typically sees the value in maxing out on the acreage as opposed to continue to use the property as it is currently, and they’re under no obligation in that regard. In their defense, keeping old buildings is not their mission, and of course they’d want to max out in the quickest way they can. It’s unfortunate, but it happens.”
Lou Paolillo, a spokesman for the Community Wellness Centers of America, said the Jesuits had made a verbal agreement with the organization to reconsider the sale.
But neither Cooke nor Guthrie Garvin, who represents the Jesuit order on behalf of Massie Knakal Commercial Real Estate, could confirm whether the deal had ever been made.
Paolillo said the Community Wellness Centers of America is willing to match the offer the Jesuits have received for the property to continue the mansion’s work as a retreat house, a plan supported by the Greater Manhasset Civic Associations.
“This is a really important part of American history here, not just Long Island history,” Paolillo said. “These very wealthy people built these big country homes and the Jesuits preserved it well, it looks just like it did 80 years ago. The architect that built it built one house in New York, so if you kill that, you kill a part of American history.”
Robert Aquino, an administrative assistant for Community Wellness Centers of America who is overseeing the group’s finances in a potential acquisition of the house, said last week that Community Wellness Centers has not made a formal offer for the house because the Jesuit order has not returned its calls.
“We were told they were interested, but unless we can sit down with them we can’t make them another offer,” Aquino said.
Aquino said the Community Wellness Centers of America has found another financier, the non-profit technology firm Synergy First International, as well as other groups who’d like to keep Inisfada open as a retreat house and addiction recovery facility.
But, he said, the Jesuit’s unwillingness to discuss the negotiations is making the goal seem unattainable.
“You’ve done so much good for people in the entire 60 years they were there, and what do you say now, you’re going to walk away from everybody?” Aquino said. “That’s unconscionable.”
