Renovating House Taken 33 Years Ago Gives Mt. Sinai Man Sense of Closure

After more than thirty years, Randy Hagerman feels like he’s finally made his peace.

In 1978 his family was forced out of the home his father had built on a quiet stretch of beach in Mt. Sinai by the Town of Brookhaven using eminent domain to build Cedar Beach Park. On Friday, Hagerman attended the opening of the Mt. Sinai Harbor Marine Environmental Stewardship Center located in the house he grew up in, the one he helped to save from being leveled by the same Town that took it from him.

The new center is touted as an opportunity to educate people young and old about the importance of Long Island’s coastline. The irony of that fact is not lost on Hagerman who says he spent his entire childhood on that very beach as his backyard. No one knows better than Hagerman just how important that beach really is.

“I had an unusual childhood but it couldn’t have been better,” he said of living on the beach where he and his five siblings spent dawn until dusk playing in and around the water, even eating the fish they caught by cooking them on campfires in the sand and picking beach plumbs for afternoon snacks. One of his sisters raised monkeys on the property and another had donkeys as pets.

He also recalled a time when the road was still made of dirt and the Mt. Sinai Yacht Club was just being built.

When the town came in and took the home away that he had built with his own hands in 1960, it broke his father’s heart.

“After losing this house he never went back to the beach,” said Hagerman. “It had no positive effects only negative.”

The family moved to Miller Place, where his father, a second-generation carpenter renovated an old farmhouse for the family home. Eventually James and Maxine Hagerman retired to Missouri.

For the son, who also became a carpenter, the pull of the beach never let go. He moved to Mt. Sinai twenty years ago, up the road from his old home.

“I don’t have the same view,” he said from the back of the new center overlooking Cedar Beach and the Long Island Sound. “But it’s pretty close. I think it’s a little bit of Karma.”

A little more Karma came his way when Hagerman picked up a local paper and saw that the old house he’d been forced out of as a child was being torn down because of unsafe conditions, particularly leaks and a build-up of mold.

“It was the final insult after having lost the house,” he recalled.

But Hagerman thought that if he could help save the house, it might help him make peace with the loss of his old home, so he sent a letter to Town Councilwoman Jane Bonner offering his services, for free.

“When he heard the house was going to be knocked down he did all the research on how to rectify the mold,” said Kim Hagerman, his wife of 30 years. “It was neglectful that people weren’t paying attention to it.”

In the end, Hagerman’s offer beat out all others in the process of putting out bids for the project.

“Who’s going to bid less than zero?” he said.

According to Town Supervisor Mark Lesko, after Hagerman approached Bonner about the prospect of saving the homestead, she was “relentless” about getting the project done.

“For good reason,” Lesko said. “My hat’s off to her.”

After 700 hours of labor that Hagerman estimates he put into restoring the home, fixing leaks and remediating mold in the basement, in addition to the 1,000 additional hours put in by his team of 30 volunteers, the Mt. Sinai Harbor Marine Environmental Stewardship Center was finally ready to open.

It’s been an emotional and tiring experience for Hagerman, according to his wife who said to get ready for the grand opening on Friday he had put aside all of his other jobs and worked seven days a week. There’s still some more work to be done. Hagerman called the center a “work in progress.”

The original nature center was not equipped to handle the water and weather, according to Bonner. She said that the bitterness of having to give up the home was only exasperated by the plan to demolish the house saying it “added insult to injury” for Hagerman but renovating the house was “very cathartic for him.”

“Sometimes politics and government is about healing old wounds,” said Bonner.

Hagerman said that his father had made his peace with everything long ago but he wasn’t so quick to forgive. That’s why he was motivated to save it.

“I never forgot this place,” he said.

Hagerman says that now he’s finally made his peace.

“I hope everyone enjoys it,” he said. “It will be bigger and better every year.”