Pembroke

Joseph Raphael De Lamar (1843 to 1918) was born in Holland, made a fortune in western mining, and was known as Captain De Lamar. Late in life he built Pembroke, a country house on Red Spring Lane in Glen Cove. His architect was C. P. H. Gilbert, the New York designer of town houses and country houses who also designed Meudon and Winfield Hall. The Glen Cove Public Library says construction began in 1914 and took four years. Other accounts give 1910 or 1916, and one of the library's own photographs of the palm house carries the date 1912, so the building sequence is not settled.

According to the library, the mansion had 82 rooms and about 60,000 square feet on 46 acres. In September 1919, a year after De Lamar's death, The American Architect published an illustrated article on the estate and described it as one of the largest houses on Long Island. Its plates show a grotto, a tea pavilion seen from the entrance porch, and a swimming pool inside a glass tropical house and palm garden. The library adds that the palm house held a Tiffany glass pendulum and an aviary of exotic birds, and that the grounds had both Japanese and formal gardens. The magazine praised the owner's interest in rare plants and noted large greenhouses that held a collection of tropical specimens.

In 1924 Marcus Loew, whose holdings centered on Loew's, Inc. and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, bought Pembroke from the De Lamar estate for an announced price of $1,000,000, and he was said to have spent several million more on it. Loew died in September 1927, and his funeral was held from the Glen Cove estate. The library notes that during the Loew years the gardens were turned into a golf course.

The house and its conservatory were razed in 1968. The property became a gated community, the Legend Yacht and Beach Club. The estate's entrance gates, more than 15 feet tall and over 5,000 pounds, had been moved off the property; in December 2014 they were stolen from a Port Washington property where they were being kept.

No part of the main house is known to survive, and the former estate is private land with no public access. An earlier version of this site said that a ten-story belvedere water tower still stands inside the community; no source consulted for this entry confirms it.