Fenimore Meyer House

18 First Street

Narrator: Fenimore Meyer (only son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, Jacob an Annie Meyer, 1892-1951). Voiced by Bob Kaplan

Hello, my name is Fenimore Meyer. You are standing in front of my house on Frist Street. Old time Riverheader’s know the name. Meyer’s Department Store was the leading retail emporium on the East End of Long Island. It helped make Riverhead the shopping destination for the whole area.

My parents, Jacob and Annie Meyer, were Russian-Yiddish immigrants. Dad arrived in this country about 1875 when he was 10 years old. They settled first in Sag Harbor, but in 1896 dad and his two brothers moved from there to Riverhead and bought out the 42-year-old business of Jonas Fishel, one of Riverhead's leading merchants, Fishel had been one of the first Jewish immigrants to move to Riverhead in the mid-1800s. I’ve heard he started out as a peddler, going door to door selling little trinkets and things.

My family renamed the store Meyer Brothers. Dad soon bought out his brothers and simply called the store Meyer's Department Store.

After dad’s death in 1924, I continued to operate the department store. We built a new store in 1929. Started construction just three months before the stock market crash and opened it a year later. It was crazy fancy. Four stories with 17,000 square feet of selling space. There was even an Otis elevator. The first in Riverhead. You walked in through an arcade lined with shop windows. And we sold everything. We specialized in women’s clothing on the main floor, but we had men’s stuff too. We sold living room furniture, bedroom sets and carpets upstairs. Downstairs we sold china, linens, household goods, kitchen appliances, and so on. You name it, we sold it. It was a real department store. It’s a shame they had to take that building down. It was a real beauty – made of marble, limestone and bronze. Would you believe that when we opened, we had 26 people of the staff? We were known for our fine clothes and personal service – although these days it seems that what old timers remember most were the squeaky wood floors and that grand staircase to the second floor.

In 1902 dad and mom bought this fine house on First Street, enlarged it, and moved in. I never married, but did live here for the rest of my life. Dad told me that the house was built back in the 1850s by someone named Edwards. I think he was a carpenter who also made coffins and served as the town’s undertaker. Maybe that’s why he built such a fancy house – to show off his skills.

That was when Italian architecture was all the craze around here in Riverhead. That’s why the house has that mansard-roofed tower with ornate wrought iron crest work. That’s the way they did things in Italy. It also why it has those hooded arch-top windows on the tower and those brackets all around holding up the eves. It’s still a pretty nice house, don’t you think?

The store was located just to the south, where the Culinary Institute is today, facing Main Street. Although local rumors said there was a tunnel connecting the house to the store, but that’s not true. But it was a very short walk to work for me and my father.