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Real Estate

IF YOU'RE THINKING OF LIVING IN: Locust Valley

By JOHN ARUNDEL

Published: Sunday, March 5, 1989

writePost(); WHEN the free-wheeling super-rich settled in Locust Valley during the early 1900's they built secluded estates and extravagant country clubs and wrote tough zoning laws to protect the rural Long Island North Shore community from urban encroachment.
The baronial mansions left by J. Pierpont Morgan Jr., the Vanderbilts and other tycoons of the era survive, lending to the village an air of bygone grandeur.
Locust Valley's downtown also reflects its gilded past. Car repairs are done at a coach and motor works and prescriptions are filled at a chemist.
''The whole world can make progress but we stand still,'' said Edith Hay Wyckoff, founding editor of The Locust Valley Leader, a weekly. ''Piping Rock Road looks exactly as it did when I first came here 48 years ago.''
Locust Valley is generally considered to include the unincorporated areas of Locust Valley proper, Matinecock, Lattingtown, Mill Neck, Bayville and Upper Brookville, about 18 square miles in all. All share post offices and schools and are governed by the Town of Oyster Bay.
''Locust Valley is a state of mind,'' said Whitney Pidot, a Manhattan lawyer and mayor of Matinecock. ''Regardless of which village you inhabit, people still say they live in Locust Valley.''
The downtown shopping area, in the hamlet of Locust Valley, is bisected by the Long Island Rail Road, which runs diesel-powered trains through every hour. Curio, dress and antiques shops line Forest Avenue and Birch Hill Road. Popular dining spots include Barney's Restaurant, serving American cuisine, and Buckram Stables Cafe, serving continental cuisine in an equestrian ambiance.
''I came here because I liked the feeling of the village,'' said Joan Helen de Kay, a broker with Merrill Lynch Realty who moved there from England. ''It reminds me of the Cotswolds.''
Locust Valley's history is steeped in Quaker tradition. The area was settled in 1667, when Capt. John Underhill negotiated the purchase of land from the Matinecock Indians. Quaker families settled into the fertile countryside soon after, establishing farms and lumber and grist mills. In 1725, they built a one-room meeting house in what is now Matinecock. The structure, which was gutted by fire in 1986 and rebuilt, is one of the oldest houses of worship in the country.
The days of the legends of finance and industry, said Ms. Wyckoff, were ''magic.''
''These men could control the world with a phone call,'' said Ms. Wyckoff. However, after the stock market crash of 1929 a gradual sell-off began. Many grand estates were subdivided into two- to five-acre plots and developed.
Stately mansions can still be bought, albeit for a king's ransom. Prices for these homes range from $2 million to $26 million, depending on acreage, view and amenities, while homes that were once the residences of estate managers are priced from $1 million to $2 million. ''Servant'' cottages can fetch as much as $350,000. Apartments are scarce, although summer home rentals may be found for upwards of $6,000 a month.
Local real estate agents say housing prices have leveled since the 1987 stock market crash - when Locust Valley homes were appreciating at a rate of 20 percent a year.
BUT some residents have homes on the market to profit from the sharp rise in prices in the last decade. ''They heard about these fantastic prices and wanted to get on the bandwagon,'' said Bonnie Devendorf, Locust Valley manager of Daniel Gale Realty. ''They want to tack on a little more, but we advise against it. You can't afford to overprice a house in this market.''
A lasting imprint of the financial titans of the century's early decades are the prestigious country clubs they built, where President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were often guests. The Creek Club on Lattingtown Road was formed in 1923 by 10 prominent residents, led by Morgan, who initially kept membership restricted to 100 men.
Women and children were admitted as members in 1934, but the club is still exclusive. Once past a rigorous selection process, members pay a $12,000 initiation fee and $4,000 in yearly dues.
This allows use of an 18-hole golf course, 13 tennis courts, four bowling alleys, a salt-water pool, a clubhouse and a 1,000-foot-long beach.
The Piping Rock Club in Matinecock was founded in 1911 by a group of residents led by Paul Cravath, a founding partner of the Manhattan law firm of Cravath Swaine & Moore. Club activities originally revolved around its stables, which until 1970 sponsored a polo team and horse show.
Today the club's 800 members play golf, tennis and squash, as well as skeet and trap shoot, on its 320-acre grounds in Matinecock. Piping Rock also operates a five-acre beach club on Foxes Point, which juts into Long Island Sound, as well as a clubhouse with 30 sleeping rooms for nonresident members and guests.
An alternative to the private clubs are the four clay courts behind the Locust Valley Library on Buckram Road. Yearly family dues are $275.
Because Locust Valley has no town hall, the library serves as the site of most meetings and events. Constructed in 1915, the large wood-framed building served successively as a settlement house, fire station and bowling alley. In 1916, it was converted to a library and today it houses 55,000 volumes.
''We're one of the few libraries in Nassau County that does not have video,'' said Mary Graves Johnson, the librarian since 1980. ''We try to get children in the habit of using a library when they're young.''
Teacher salaries in the Locust Valley School District, which has two elementary schools and a junior-senior high school, rank in the top quarter in Nassau County.
Dropout rates are the lowest in the county and enrollment has declined precipitously over the last decade, from 2,700 in 1978 to 1,800 at present. The current student-teacher ratio of 9 to 1 permits individualized attention.
Dr. Eric Berger, the district's assistant superintendent for administration, said that Locust Valley Junior-Senior High School's curriculum includes advanced-placement courses, honors-level classes and an ongoing system of curriculum evaluation and development.
The school has an excellent tradition in extracurricular activities and athletics, with strong teams in lacrosse, wrestling and soccer. There are volunteer service groups and foreign-language clubs, as well as opportunity for study abroad. Each spring 20 students from the 10th grade spend three weeks of study in an English farming village near Stratford-on-Avon.
Among the private schools is Friends Academy, a pre-K through 12th grade day school founded in 1876 as a coed Quaker boarding school. The Quaker tradition remains a strong thread in school life. While fewer than 1 percent of the school's 700 students are Quakers, all are required to perform community service before they graduate, as well as attend a Quaker meeting once a week, where they vent personal frustrations or political views.
Portledge School is a smaller, independent day school in the hamlet of Locust Valley. Founded in 1965, it has 300 students who attend classes from nursery school through 12th grade in a 78-year-old mansion and carriage house modeled after a 16th-century estate in Devonshire, England.
AMONG the noted residents of the past were the late John Lennon, who spent weekends in his small cottage near the hamlet of Locust Valley; Billy Joel, who used his glass house near Cove Neck (sold last year for $2.5 million) as an inspiration for his ''Glass Houses'' album, and Rudyard Kipling, who lived for a time in Mill Neck.
''We do very little promotion of the area,'' said Patrick Mackay, president of the Piping Rock Associates realty firm. ''We don't really have to convince people that this is a nice place to live.'' GAZETTEER Population: 8,514 (1988 estimate). Median household income: $74,000 (1988 estimate). Median price for a one-family house: $575,000. Property tax on a median house: $7,973. Distance from midtown Manhattan: 30 miles. Rush-hour commutation: 60 minutes on Long Island Rail Road local from Locust Valley, $5.75 one way, $123 monthly, or 30 minutes on the express from Mineola, a 15-minute drive away, $5 one way, $107 monthly. Government: Town Supervisor (Angelo A. Delligatti, Republican), elected to a two-year term, and six Councilmen, elected to four-year terms. Public-school expenditure per pupil: $11,621. Plum-in-Mouth: Many deny it, but residents are said to use a unique speech pattern, mostly in social situations, called ''Locust Valley lockjaw.'' The teeth are clenched and enunciation is done principally by the lips, producing a nasal tone. ''No one inside the town has ever even heard it,'' said Edith Hay Wyckoff, editor of the Locust Valley Leader, with a smile, ''though sometimes I see a few ladies getting a little jammed up.''
Photos of St. John's of Lattingtown Episcopal Church on Lattingtown Road.; The Piping Rock Club in Matinecock, founded in 1911. (The New York Times/Vic DeLucia); map of Locust Valley, N.Y.

A version of this article appeared in print on Sunday, March 5, 1989, on section 10 page 11 of the New York edition.