Seven to Save Spotlight: SANS
A contemporary group photo on the beach at SANS
We love going to the beach in August, don’t you? This month we’ll be spending some time exploring the beachside community of Sag Harbor Hills, Azurest & Ninevah Subdivisions (SANS), one of our current Seven to Save. This historically African American vacation community on Long Island was developed in the late 1940s and early 1950s as a way for Black people to have a place of their own during a time when they would have been excluded from other public recreation areas in New York. Segregation and Jim Crow laws made this a fact of life all over the country.
An archival family photo on the beach
Azurest was the first of the subdivisions to be developed. In 1947, sisters Maude Terry and Amaza Lee Meredith negotiated the purchase and development of the land, and through their strong social networks found others to buy and construct houses on the 120 plots there. Amaza Lee Meredith is particularly noteworthy. She was a graduate of Columbia University (both sisters attended that Ivy League institution) and founded the Art Department at Virginia State University. She was a Black woman who was designing houses at a time societal restrictions kept her from receiving any formal training in the field of architecture. She is most well known for her International Style home Azurest South where she lived with her partner Edna Meade Colson from 1939 until her death in 1984. She designed at least two homes that were constructed in Sag Harbor, and left designs for many more (her papers can be found in the Special Collections and Archives at VSU).
SANS steering committee receiving the Excellence in Historic Preservation award in 2019
Sag Harbor Hills and Ninevah followed shortly after in 1950 and 1952, respectively. These three subdivisions carved new neighborhoods out of an expansive wooded land with no roads or buildings and created a haven for a tight knit community to spring up in its place. In 2019, SANS received long overdue recognition by first being named to the New York State Register of Historic Places and then to the National Register of Historic Places. The State Historic Preservation Office also awarded SANS its Excellence in Historic Preservation Organizational Achievement award. The attention and accolades are much deserved, but local stakeholders are still working hard to ensure that their community can continue to survive by attempting to mitigate deterioration and discourage development that is not in keeping with the neighborhoods’ character. Today, SANS is one of the last remaining, thriving examples of an area formed primarily by African Americans in the Post-WWII era for recreational purposes. SANS is one of the few primarily African American privately-owned beachfront developments left in America. This rich history is worth protecting, and the League is proud to stand with the local advocates who have been on the front lines of protecting this historic community.
We’ll be sharing more about SANS in the coming weeks, through blog posts, our inaugural Preservation Book Club pick, and other programming. We hope you’ll follow along to learn more about this special place.
You can find all the blog posts in the series by clicking here.