Montauk is a census-designated place (CDP) that roughly corresponds to the hamlet with the same name located in the town of East Hampton in Suffolk County, New York, on the eastern end of the South Shore of Long Island. The population is at 3,300. Montauk is a major tourist destination and has six state parks. It is particularly famous for its fishing, claiming to have more world saltwater fishing records than any other port in the world. Located 20 miles (32 km) off the Connecticut coast, it is home to the largest commercial and recreational fishing fleet in New York state. Montauk is considered a beach resort, using its position at the tip of Long Island to promote itself as “The Living End” or “The Last Resort” and become one of the busiest tourist locations within the town of East Hampton. The small town is host to many restaurants, bed and breakfasts, and hotels, and is a popular vacation spot in the warm weather months. Such accommodations are rarer elsewhere in the Hamptons. Many of the Montauk hotels are only open April through November, some for shorter time periods, while a few serve fishermen and other customers year round, including the famed Gurney’s Inn.
Located at the tip of the South Fork peninsula of Long Island, Montauk has been used as an Army, Navy, Coast Guard and Air Force base. The Montauk Point Light was the first lighthouse in New York state and is the fourth oldest active lighthouse in the United States.
In 1926, Carl G. Fisher bought most of the East End of Long Island (10,000 acres (40 km2)) for only $2.5 million. He planned to turn Montauk into the “Miami Beach of the North”, a “Tudor village by the sea”. His projects included blasting a hole through the freshwater Lake Montauk to access Block Island Sound to replace the shallow Fort Pond Bay as the hamlet’s port; establishing the Montauk Yacht Club and the Montauk Downs Golf Course; and building Montauk Manor, a luxury resort hotel; the Montauk Tennis Auditorium, which became a movie theater (and is now the Montauk Playhouse); and the six-story Carl Fisher Office Building (later the Montauk Improvement Building and now The Tower at Montauk, a residential condominium). This last building remains East Hampton’s tallest occupied building, as zoning ordinances restricted heights of later buildings.
The 30 or so buildings Fisher put up between 1926 and 1932 were designed in the Tudor Revival style. Fisher had successfully developed Miami Beach before beginning his Montauk project, but although he continued to pour his money into the development, to the extent of $12 million in total, he eventually lost his fortune due to the Wall Street Crash of 1929, and most of his enterprises were shut down. Other hotels which opened at that time of Fisher’s project include Gurney’s Inn, built by W. J. and Maude Gurney, who had managed a Fisher hotel in Miami Beach.
