The Great Gatsby and the Gold Coast

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby while he lived among the Gold Coast Mansions of Long Island’s North Shore. The novel’s East Egg and West Egg are invented names, but the peninsulas behind them are real, and a few of the Gold Coast Mansions on those shores still stand and can be visited.

Where Fitzgerald lived

In the fall of 1922 Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda moved into a rented house at 6 Gateway Drive in Great Neck, a Mediterranean style house built in 1918. Preservation Long Island reports that he began writing The Great Gatsby there, in a room above the garage, and finished the book in France 2 years later. The novel was published in 1925. The house is still a private residence and is not open to visitors.

East Egg and West Egg

In the novel Gatsby’s house stands in West Egg, the peninsula of new money, and the Buchanans live across the bay in East Egg, the older and quieter side. The 2 eggs are matched to 2 real peninsulas that face each other across Manhasset Bay. Preservation Long Island says most readers see West Egg as Great Neck, where Fitzgerald lived, and East Egg as Sands Point, and adds that recent research has cast a wider net. The Sands Point Preserve Conservancy, which runs the Nassau County park on the old Gould and Guggenheim estate, states that the Sands Point peninsula was East Egg. Nassau County’s tourism office puts the West Egg Mansions at Kings Point, at the tip of the Great Neck peninsula, and the East Egg Mansions at Sands Point.

Houses tied to the book

Fitzgerald never named a model for Gatsby’s house. Preservation Long Island cites the historians Raymond and Judith Spinzia, who suggest that the house was an amalgam of local houses and of Fitzgerald’s memories of Europe. 3 Gold Coast Mansions are tied to the novel more often than any others, and all 3 have been demolished.

Beacon Towers, Alva Belmont’s house on the shore at Sands Point, was built in 1917 and 1918 and torn down in 1945. It is the house most often called the model for Gatsby’s. The National Trust for Historic Preservation says it was often cited as Fitzgerald’s muse and leaves it at that. The historian Raymond Spinzia calls the link unsubstantiated speculation: Belmont spent most of her time in France after 1920, and William Randolph Hearst bought the house in 1927, 2 years after the novel appeared. The gatehouse and the garden walls survive.

Land’s End, Herbert Bayard Swope’s house at the tip of Sands Point, is the house most often named as the model for the Buchanans’ house. Swope was executive editor of the New York World, and his guests included Dorothy Parker, Irving Berlin, the Marx Brothers and Winston Churchill. Fitzgerald knew him. When the house was demolished in April 2011, Reuters reported the claim and the doubts together: the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society supported the connection, and the Sands Point village clerk rejected it, noting that the house could not be seen from Great Neck.

Harbor Hill, Clarence Mackay’s house on the hill above Roslyn, is documented as a house Fitzgerald visited. The National Trust reports that Scott and Zelda attended a party there in 1923. The house was demolished in 1947. The gate lodge and the water tower still stand in East Hills and can be seen from the street.

Other Gold Coast Mansions, among them Oheka Castle, Farnsworth and Pembroke, are sometimes named as inspirations. We found no source that documents a connection for any of them.

The films

The novel has been filmed 5 times. None of the 5 was shot at a Gold Coast Mansion.

Paramount made the first film in 1926, directed by Herbert Brenon with Warner Baxter as Gatsby. The Library of Congress lists it among the lost American silent films. Only a trailer survives, preserved in the archive anthology More Treasures from American Film Archives.

Paramount filmed the book again in 1949, directed by Elliott Nugent with Alan Ladd as Gatsby, according to the AFI Catalog.

The 1974 film, directed by Jack Clayton with Robert Redford as Gatsby, was shot in Newport, Rhode Island, from June 1973. Rosecliff stood in for Gatsby’s house in the party scenes, and interiors were filmed at Marble House and The Breakers, according to the AFI Catalog and the Preservation Society of Newport County.

A television film by A&E and Granada, with Toby Stephens as Gatsby and Mira Sorvino as Daisy, was filmed in Montreal and first shown in 2000, Variety reported.

Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 film with Leonardo DiCaprio was shot in Sydney, at Fox Studios Australia and at locations around the city, ABC News reported. The Hollywood Reporter wrote that the design of Gatsby’s house was inspired by Beacon Towers. A 2016 profile in Boulevard, an Anton Media Group magazine, reported that the spiral staircase in the rotunda of La Selva in Upper Brookville was copied for the film’s set.

What you can visit

Sands Point Preserve, the Nassau County park on the East Egg shore, holds Hempstead House, Castle Gould and Falaise. Hempstead House opens for guided tours and events, and the conservancy gives a Great Gatsby tour and talk there, with a guided tour of the house and a discussion of the novel’s hold on the North Shore. Westbury House at Old Westbury Gardens is open to the public in season. Oheka Castle gives docent-led tours by reservation. Beacon Towers, Land’s End and Harbor Hill are gone, and the Fitzgerald house in Great Neck is a private home. Hours and admission for every Gold Coast Mansion that opens its doors are on the Plan a visit page.