A 1940 home on Gulf Stream Road was demolished to make way for a new 6,605-square-foot home. Photos by Jerry Lower
By Steve Plunkett
A gray two-story, wood-sided house that’s a piece of Gulf Stream history had a date with the wrecking crew in mid-November.
County property records say the residence at 3288 Gulfstream Road was built in 1940, one of the first in the town’s so-called core area, outside the original polo grounds. People who have called it home include a town commissioner, a doctor of internal medicine and a member of Russia’s onetime nobility.
“I hate to see it torn down. It was one of the first cottages they built here, kind of opened up the area down there,’’ Mayor William F. Koch Jr. said.
The house’s new owners, Howard and Bonita Erbstein, razed the 3,131-square-foot home and plan to build a 6,605-square-foot Bermuda Style dwelling. It too will have a detached garage, guest house and swimming pool.
Bob Ganger, who chairs the town’s Architectural Review and Planning Board, regretted not asking to look for artifacts at 3288 when the board approved the demolition permit.
“Gulf Stream still prides itself on quiet, understated elegance — all those things we try to preserve. That’s part of the story’’ the house might have helped explain, Ganger said.
Koch remembered the place being rented for a time to a descendent of the Russian Romanovs who everyone called “Ogi.’’
Town Commissioner Fred B. Devitt III, who owned the property from 1992 to 1999, said he and his family enjoyed living there but that even two decades ago the house was ‘‘worn.’’
“It wasn’t set up for the amenities a modern family needs,’’ he said.
Devitt said he thought about doing some renovations until an empty lot came onto the market just seven or eight houses away. “I got to build fresh down the street,’’ he said.
The wood-frame house was built by the town’s founding Phipps family, either for guests or staff, Devitt said, and sold to Winthrop and Agnes Winslow in 1943. Other owners of the home were Josephine Keyes, Lynn Williams and Dr. Andrew Ladner.
Ganger said Winslow was a direct descendent of the Pilgrims in Massachusetts and had an insurance business in Rhode Island.
“His pedigree takes him to John Winslow, brother of Edward Winslow, the first governor of New Plymouth,’’ Ganger said. “On the maternal side, it is believed that a direct line goes to John Winthrop, governor of the Bay Colony. All three arrived on the Mayflower.’’
The Winslows have another link to the nation’s past. Their home on Harkney Hill Road in Coventry, R.I., is on the National Register of Historic Places.
Ganger, who has written a history of his own home, said he was curious why Winslow bought a house in Gulf Stream during World War II.
“He was in his 50s at the time, and Gulf Stream was really a barracks for Sea Bee and Coast Guard personnel,’’ Ganger said.
Ladner sold the house in June for $1.5 million and moved to a home just off the fairways in the Village of Golf.
Howard Erbstein, the current owner, is the chief investment officer at Kolter Group in West Palm
Beach.
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