Threatened idylls
One of the North Shore's picturesque summer colonies faces a questionable future amid land lease battle
For six generations, families have summered on Little Neck, a picturesque enclave overlooking the meandering Ipswich River. Little has changed since the first settlers arrived by steamboat. The ladies gather for afternoon coffee. Children delight in swimming lessons and fishing contests. And the card game bridge remains the most popular pastime on the peninsula.
"It's hard to explain the lifestyle on the Neck," said Michelle Anthony, who has summered on Little Neck for the better part of two decades. She discovered the hidden gem while courting her husband, a Charlestown boy whose family owned a seasonal cottage there. "Friends will come to visit, and they can't believe it."
On the Neck, that conventional construct known as the play date does not exist. There's no call for it. Here, kids hit the ball field promptly at 9 a.m., with swim lessons following lunch. Craft classes and youth dances are weekly occurrences. When there is no structured activity, carefree youngsters wander freely from beach to playground, where every child has a hundred mothers. Misbehave, and your mother will know about it before your shadow darkens her door.
Little Neck is one of only four summer communities on the North Shore, seasonal escapes where neighbors own their homes but lease the property under them. The others are Long Beach in Rockport, Conomo Point in Essex, and Asbury Grove in Hamilton.
Though they have survived the turmoil of two world wars and the Great Depression, these summer colonies and their Norman Rockwell idyll are being threatened by calamities unforeseen less than a generation ago. The roughly 100 homes at Conomo Point, many of them dating to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, are scheduled to be either moved or destroyed when the homeowners' current land lease with the town of Essex ends on Dec. 31, 2011. Essex voters in 1999 determined that control of those properties should revert to the town. The future of the land remains undecided.
And on Little Neck, homeowners are engaged in a protracted legal battle with their landlords over the terms of their leases. The land here is owned by the Feoffees of the Grammar School, a trust established in Colonial times to benefit the public schools in Ipswich. The trustees are demanding that the rents be based in future years on the assessed value of the improved lots on the Neck; homeowners argue such an arrangement would result in unreasonably high rents. The long-running dispute, now in its third year, has many longtime Little Neckers questioning the future of their beloved summer escape.
"We are living under a cloud of fear and threat," said William A. Gottlieb, the chairman of the Little Neck Legal Action Committee. "Everyone tries to have life go on as it has for a long time. We try not to focus on our tenuous situation, try to savor the enjoy ment of it now because we fear we may be forced to sell. If the feoffees prevail, Little Neck will become a place only the wealthy can afford."
The current land rents are $5,000 a year for seasonal owners, $5,500 for year-round residents. The trustees have recommended raising the rents to $9,700 for seasonal, and $10,800 for year-rounders. Then in 2012, the land rents would change and vary by location, with homeowners on the waterfront paying more than their inland neighbors. Property taxes in the colony average around $3,500 a year, and the owners also pay personal property taxes on the contents of their homes.
Gottlieb compares the terms of this proposed lease to a teaser rate on a credit card: Most Little Neckers can come up with the extra cash required to meet the increased fees in the first years of the lease, but fear they would not be able to afford the rates after 2012.
Established by a trust that dates to 1660, the feoffees are the last remaining example in America of an ancient English institution. The word feoffee comes from "fief" and means the trustee of land set aside for public use. The current seven feoffees consists of three selectmen and four members who were appointed to their lifetime positions by their predecessors.
During the early years of the trust, the 27-acre property was rented out for pasture. But by 1906, the trustees had divided the barren hill into lots for a cottage colony. In the decades that followed, a flurry of home building took place, until the Great Depression destroyed the economy.
Today, 143 seasonal cottages and 24 year-round residences with names such as "Sea View" and "Hitching Post" dot the landscape, boasting sweeping views of Crane Beach and Plum Island Sound.
Many of the cottages have storied histories, documented in painstaking detail by Richard B. Betts in "History of Little Neck," a coffee table book published in 1998. Betts notes that several of the summer colony's earliest cottages originally belonged to the Crane estate. They were brought across the ice in winter to Little Neck on planks and skids, or floated across the river on a barge. Others were modest fishing shacks, expanded over the years to accommodate growing families.
The oldest cottage on Little Neck, "Summer School," was once a portable school house. The structure dates to 1870; it was bought at an auction in Ayer in 1920 and taken to the Neck in sections on a flat bed trailer, where it was reassembled. It remained in the same family until August of 1998, when Michelle Anthony and her husband, Michael, purchased it from Phyllis Bottomley. She was the daughter of the original owner, a milkman who was told of Little Neck's bucolic beauty while on his route in Boston's Quincy Market.
The Anthonys transformed the dilapidated hovel into a cozy three-bedroom cottage. The couple preserved its high ceilings and salvaged much of the original bead board, adding a suspended bunk bed in one of the children's rooms and a modern kitchen and bath. It is for sale for $290,000.
"Little Neck is such a lovely hideaway, I could not have asked for a better place to raise my children. But now that they are getting older, I'd like to travel a bit, maybe take them to Europe," said Anthony, whose oldest child is now 13.
To Anthony's dismay, finding a buyer is difficult. There was a time, not too long ago, when Little Neck cottages were bought and sold in a matter of minutes. Literally. All one had to do was nail a "For Sale" shingle on the stoop, but such transactions are now unheard of. These days, homeowners serious about selling hire an experienced real estate agent.
"In the past, there would be maybe four or five cottages sold each year, and there was a line of buyers waiting to snap them up," said Marilyn Gilbert, an agent with Vernon A. Martin Inc., who not only helps homeowners sell properties on Little Neck, but also owns a seasonal cottage there. "But the market has changed."
Although waterfront properties often retain their value, even in a soft market, the seaside cottages on Little Neck have seen a significant decline in value since 2005. Properties that would have commanded a sales price in the low $600,000 range just a couple of years ago are now being listed in the mid-$400,000s, Gilbert said. Homeowners blame the dispute with the feoffees for turning buyers sour.
"I think when the legal action committee stuff started, no one knew what was going on," said Anthony. "People were holding their breath and waiting for everything to work itself out."
The higher rents proposed by the feoffees are a result of a study the trustees commissioned several years ago, according to Patrick McNally, a feoffee and town selectman.
"I think everyone agrees that the land rents were artificially low, the question is 'what should they be?' " said McNally. "The court case will decide that issue."
"We have no desire to displace anyone," McNally added. "As human beings, certainly we are concerned about the people who live there, but as managers of the trust, our concern must be what is a reasonable rate of return for the beneficiary of that trust, which is the public schools."
The homeowners agree that the rents were below market, but feel the feoffees' proposed system for determining the market value was flawed.
Nearly three years have lapsed since the rent dispute began, but the future of the land leases is no clearer and the uncertainty is "destroying the market," Gottlieb said. He believes the reason for the sluggish market is clear: Anyone who buys a cottage on Little Neck must first sign the feoffees' land lease, the very one that is the target of the homeowners' ire and the subject of a class-action lawsuit in Essex Superior Court.
In the past three years, only three cottages have sold on Little Neck; two of them were listed by Gilbert. Today, the market is flooded, with more than a dozen cottages listed. Still, the seasoned real estate pro remains optimistic. She knows firsthand that the beauty of the Neck, with its coveted ocean views and laid back lifestyle, has the power to seduce.
"My husband and I bought our cottage with a handshake, then took the bill of sale to my lawyer," said Gilbert, recalling the 1967 purchase. "He thought I was nuts, buying a property without a contract. But it's a decision we have never regretted. Sometimes, life requires a leap of faith."
To learn more about Little Neck, or to rent one of the seasonal cottages there, visit littlenecknews.com.
