Land’s End

Lands End stood on a point of land at the northern tip of the Sands Point peninsula, overlooking Long Island Sound. A 1991 survey of the village, prepared by the Society for the Preservation of Long Island Antiquities for the Sands Point Historic Preservation Commission, described it as a two-and-a-half-story Colonial Revival house with a central block, two side wings set off the main axis, a Palladian window over the entrance, and a two-story rear portico of four Doric columns facing the water. The architect is not recorded in any source found.

Sources disagree on the date and the first owner. Newsday, as summarized by the History News Network, and a local historical society president writing on Patch both give 1902. A village history published in 2000 is reported, in a search snippet, to say the house was built in 1900 for attorney C. D. Sloane, while a 2014 study of Fitzgerald refers to Malcolm Douglas Sloane's Lands End. The 1991 survey lists a J. S. Browning as owner in 1914.

By 1939 the property belonged to Herbert Bayard Swope (1882 to 1958), executive editor of the New York World and, as the state's eligibility finding notes, the first reporter to receive the Pulitzer Prize for reporting, in 1917. Swope and his wife, Margaret, entertained constantly; guests named in press accounts include Bernard Baruch, George Gershwin, Robert Moses, Irving Berlin, the Marx Brothers, Dorothy Parker and Winston Churchill. Because F. Scott Fitzgerald knew Swope, the house has often been named as a model for the Buchanans' house in The Great Gatsby. In 2011 the executive director of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society supported the connection, while the Sands Point village clerk rejected it, noting that the house could not be seen from Great Neck.

Later owners included Mrs. Virginia K. Payson, listed as the owner in the 1991 survey. In an eligibility finding attached to that survey, the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation judged the house eligible for the State and National Registers for its architecture and its association with Swope, and noted few alterations. By the 2000s the house stood empty. Bert Brodsky, founder of a health care technology company, bought it in 2004, found it too large for his family, and won permission to divide the 13 acres into five house lots. Bulldozers razed the house over a weekend in April 2011, leaving only brick chimneys standing for a day.

Nothing of the house remains, and the site is private property.