A contingent of Manhasset residents, not-for-profit groups and local civic organizations have filed an application to make the closed St. Ignatius Retreat House in North Hills a national landmark, officials said Tuesday.
Robert Aquino, an administrative assistant working with the grassroots group, said the landmark application was filed late Monday in the name of Synergy First International, a Brooklyn-based health care company that made an alternative offer last week to purchase the house from the New York province of the Jesuit order.
Dr. Eli Weinstein, who is overseeing the proposed acquisition for Synergy First International, said the company made a $36 million cash offer for the property on the condition that the Jesuit order restore parts of the chapel it had deconstructed since the house closed June 2.
The Jesuit order recently removed the retreat house’s Genevieve Chapel for donation to Fordham University. The chapel is considered historically important to local Catholics because Pope Pius XII celebrated mass there while on tour in the United States in 1936 while still a cardinal.
Weinstein said his company also plans to file for an injunction on behalf of the North Hills community against any future deconstruction or demolition efforts the Jesuit order or its prospective buyer undertake.
Weinstein said Aquino and the Council of Greater Manhasset Civic Associations would collect the necessary signatures to petition the court to grant North Hills residents with the necessary standing to file an injunction.
“We have heard the cries of the people of Long Island,” Weinstein said. “They don’t want it taken apart and it should not be taken apart. I don’t care which developer wants to do what with it, you don’t take something apart when the people don’t want it taken apart.”
Weinstein said Synergy First International would maintain the property as a retreat, developing the 33-acre property into “something New York has never seen before.”
Rev. Vincent Cooke, who is overseeing the sale of the property for the Jesuit order’s New York province, said he was unaware of Synergy First International’s offer for the property, but has declined comment on specific details about the negotiation for the property on several occasions.
Cooke has also declined to identify the identity of the buyer with whom the Jesuits have been negotiating since the house closed, reportedly a land developer based in China, though he told Blank Slate Media last month that the acquisition of the estate was going as planned and directed all questions to the order’s real estate agent, Guthrie Garvin of the Manhattan-based Massey Knakal Realty Services.
Efforts to reach Garvin Tuesday were unavailing.
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.
Cooke said he could neither confirm nor deny recent observations made by residents of moving trucks entering and exiting the property’s Searingtown Road entrance across from Christopher Morley Park, which have been reported to Blank Slate Media.
“I’m just overseeing the sale of the property,” Cooke said. “I’m not overseeing the details of what’s going on in that house.”
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, which used the Searingtown Road property as a seminary and retreat house for regional parishes and faith-based addiction help support 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.
Since the retreat house’s closing, the Council for Greater Manhasset Civic Associations has worked with an possible alternative buyer for the property, the Queens-based Community Wellness Centers of America, which seeks to continue the mansion’s use as a retreat house.
But wellness center officials said they have not been able to schedule a meeting with Jesuit officials or their real estate representatives, and have not been able to receive specific information about the ongoing negotiations to make a counter-offer to purchase the house.
Community Wellness Centers spokesman Lou Paolillo said in early June that the center’s financiers, including Aquino, were willing to match the offer the Jesuits had received for the property and that a verbal agreement had been made with the order to reconsider the sale.
