Union Street

Sag Harbor · Historic Restoration

The house that was nearly lost

Six Union Street had been standing for roughly two and a half centuries when it came to us, and it was very nearly not standing much longer. Known to Sag Harbor as the Morpurgo house, and to the historical record as the Captain John Hulbert house, it had spent decades in decline — floorboards missing, a chimney close to collapse, rodents throughout. The building inspector had questioned whether the structure could be saved at all. Demolition was a live possibility.

A plaque beside the front door records what the house is:

Whether Hulbert’s company really carried a flag of stars and stripes ahead of Betsy Ross is one of Long Island’s long-running arguments — historians have gone back and forth on the Hulbert flag for a century. We make no claim either way. We simply think a house with that argument attached to it deserves to still be here.

We acquired it in the summer of 2017 and finished eighteen months later. The back section was too far gone to salvage and had to be reframed. The original foundation was failing, and replacing it meant lifting the house — something Sag Harbor’s Board of Historic Preservation and Architectural Review approved only after considerable discussion. More than a hundred corbels were catalogued; about thirty had to be recreated from scratch. New windows, new roof, historically accurate siding, all of it detailed to match what was there.

Much of that work happened in our own shop, with our own carpenters. That is the part that is hard to buy and easy to notice.

Along the way the house gave things up: a 1920s pencil sketch of a whaling boat behind a third-floor bathroom wall, newspapers from 1943 packed into a cavity around old gas pipe. The finished house is 6,000 square feet — five bedrooms, five baths, a third-floor bar, a rooftop deck with a fireplace, a finished basement and a pool. Our own family were the first people to legally live there in years.