Matinecock Point

John Pierpont Morgan Jr., known as Jack, was the son of the financier J. Pierpont Morgan and took charge of the family banking empire after his father died in 1913. In 1909 he bought East Island, off the northern shore of Glen Cove, for a country estate. His architect was Christopher Grant La Farge, of the firm La Farge and Morris and a son of the artist John La Farge. The Georgian Revival house was finished in about 1913; the Glen Cove Public Library gives 1912, and the house appeared in The Brickbuilder in February 1913. The library describes an approach through an allee of linden trees, formal gardens, cow-dotted lawns, a 400-foot dock for yachts and a private guardhouse.

Accounts of the size of the house and grounds differ. The American Aristocracy database gives 57 rooms and 18 bathrooms, a cost of about $2.5 million, and an estate of 140 acres reduced to 73 acres by 1943. The library gives 250 acres, and other accounts give 41 rooms.

On the morning of July 3, 1915, a man forced his way into the house and shot Morgan. A contemporary United Press report says one bullet struck him in the groin and passed out at the hip, and that Morgan grappled with the gunman and, with his butler's help, disarmed him. Physicians said the wounds were not serious. The library identifies the attacker as a former Harvard professor who acted in a vain attempt to end the First World War.

Morgan died in 1943, and his sons Junius and Henry sold the estate in 1944. It changed hands quickly, and its new owner, Philip Publicker of Philadelphia, leased the house to the Soviet Union as a retreat for its diplomats at the United Nations. After Publicker failed to pay a tax bill in 1949, the City of Glen Cove took the property. Following a 1950 auction it passed to the Sisters of St. John the Baptist, who used it as a novitiate until 1971. The nuns then sold the property, the land was divided, and the house was leveled in 1980.

Three newer houses now stand on the site of the mansion. The estate's dairy complex and several cottages are reported to survive as private homes. East Island is a private residential community, and none of the former estate is open to visitors.