Lane House Script

33 West Second Street

Narrator: Alva Lane Leslie (1915-1992), voiced by Mary Kalich

Hello. I’m Alva Lane Leslie. My father Herbert T. Lane built this beautiful house back about 1870. He was a harness maker, one of two in Riverhead at the time. His shop was just down the street, past the old Post Office Building. You know, harness making was an important business back then. His shop was sort of like an auto-parts store today. Farmers could raise their own horses, but without harnesses, those horses couldn’t do any work!

My father did pretty well for himself too, don’t you think – to be able to build this nice house when he was only in his 20s. At the time, this was considered an Italian style house.

Notice those round-top windows on the second floor. Just like you might see in Tuscany!

You’ll see those on a bunch of other houses in the neighborhood from that time period.

That wrap-around front porch was sure nice too. You know, back then we didn’t have air conditioning. We could sit out there and talk to our neighbors as they went by. This was a really nice neighborhood –one of the best in Riverhead.

My father was a charter member of the Yennecott Tribe of the Improved Order of Red Men. You’ve probably never heard of them. It was a fraternal organization where they all pretended to be Indians – you know, dressed up in Indian outfits and called their leaders great sachems. Membership was over half a million by 1900. Despite the name, naturally, the so-called red men were actually all white men.

As for me, I met a promising young man from Peconic named Frank Leslie. He was an accountant in the county treasurer’s office. We married in a big society wedding in the spacious parlors of the Griffin House hotel just up Griffing Avenue. Would you believe it was a temperance hotel? You know know what that means? It means they didn’t serve any alcohol! Can you imagine?

Our wedding was two days after Christmas, and everything was tastefully decorated with greens. I wore my mother’s blue silk wedding gown, cut in a Martha Washington design. It was quite an affair. The Philharmonic Orchestra played the wedding march. We sat down for breakfast with 150 guests in the Griffin House’s dining room before leaving on a honeymoon that took us to New York, Philadelphia and Washington.

Unfortunately, our marriage didn’t work out too well. We had a daughter. Then Frank left me and moved to Queens. But I continued to live here with my mother for many more years in the big house while my brother ran the harness business.

Later Tom Twomey bought our old house for his law firm. Then he bought the Boyer house on the right and the Tuthill house on the left, combining them all into one big building to accommodate what become the largest law firm in eastern Long Island.