The Playhouse (Woodward estate)

The old goldcoastmansions.com entry for the Woodward Estate gave a date of 1927, a sale in 1957 to a private 'Town Club', and a later religious owner. Those details fit the Playhouse at Sunken Orchard in Oyster Bay Cove, the house where the 1955 shooting took place.

Sunken Orchard began as the country house of Fay Ingalls and his wife, Rachel Gaff Holmes. Their architect, George de Gersdorff, designed a three-story, 29-room Georgian house that was finished in 1916. In 1922 the Ingalls family sold the estate to Charles E. F. McCann and his wife, Helena Woolworth McCann, who enlarged it to 192 acres. In 1927 the McCanns hired the architect James W. O'Connor to alter the main house and to add the Playhouse in the gardens. It held a skylit indoor clay tennis court and a Tudor-style music room about 33 by 70 feet. A Smithsonian garden slide of Sunken Orchard from about 1930 names the landscape architects Annette Hoyt Flanders and Innocenti & Webel, and it lists McCann, William Woodward and Winston Guest among the people associated with the property. The McCanns divided the estate around 1935 and kept 46 acres around the main house.

Around 1950 William Woodward Jr., owner of the Belair Stud Farm in Maryland, rented the property and then bought it. He and his wife, Ann, divided the Playhouse into two buildings and leased the music room to the Cinerama Corporation, which recorded soundtracks there. In 1955 Time magazine described their Long Island place as a 60-acre estate at Oyster Bay.

The Woodwards came home at about 1 a.m. from a Saturday night dinner party given for the Duchess of Windsor, and in the early hours of October 30, 1955, Ann Woodward fired a shotgun from the hallway outside her bedroom at a figure she said she took for a prowler. She killed her husband, whom police found in the foyer of his bedroom. In late November 1955 a grand jury cleared her; newspaper headlines reported that it found no evidence of a criminal act and needed only one ballot. She was never tried, so descriptions of an acquittal, including the one on the old site, are inaccurate.

In 1957 Sunken Orchard was sold to the Oyster Bay Town Golf Club, which demolished the west wing of the main house. About 1983 the property was sold to the Society of St. Pius V, a traditional Catholic priestly society. According to American Aristocracy, a compiled website about prominent families and their houses, the Playhouse was not demolished and its music room is now the St. Pius V Chapel. The chapel's own website places it off Berry Hill Road in Oyster Bay Cove but does not describe the building's history, and the compiled page also says, inconsistently, that the property is once again a private residence.

What stands today, and who owns the main house, needs confirmation from Oyster Bay Cove records or from the chapel before publication. The main house is private and should not be visited.