Questions Remain After Fifty Years:
Did a Manor Park Trustee Redesign the Bathhouse to Better His View?

By Seth Goldstein

The Larchmont Manor Beach pavilion is a low-slung structure of red brick and blue locker rooms, only its roof visible from the roadway above. It's a match of form and function: You change clothes in your locker and then head either to the patio or to the exit with nothing in the way of your destination except a trip to the key room.

On a good beach day--sun in view, water clean and temperate--the pavilion sits unobtrusively in a picture-postcard setting presented to a swimmer treading water near one of the floats. Houses, grass, and trees seem to flow into the red brick and blue lockers.

In fact, the image isn't the one swimmers had for Manor Park's first 40 years. In the fall of 1938, a hurricane that devastated the East Coast literally knocked the pins out from under the original gable-and-dormer Victorian bathhouse that had served Manor Beach since the 1890's.

It took 15 years for the Manor Park Society to replace the bathhouse and therein lies a tale of real estate and village politicking which ended with the demise of the wrecked Victorian and the construction of a new pavilion in 1953.

There are no celebratory plans for the 50th anniversary in 2003, except perhaps to note the weathered bronze plaque across from the key room, mounted by 1954's Manor Park trustees. Listed there is trustee F. William Schnirring, who spear-headed the campaign for constructing rather than reconstructing a bathhouse.

The Victorian, its supporting pillars buckled by the storm, was badly damaged but still standing after the hurricane. Many residents wanted it returned to its former glory. Schnirring, though, who lived across the street from Manor Beach, hoped to keep the gift the hurricane had offered him: an unimpeded view clear across the Sound to the north shore of Long Island.

World War II intervened and Manor Park trustees had other concerns when peace broke out, but by the early '50s Schnirring--now a trustee--won his battle. The remnants of the Victorian bathhouse vanished, about the time the turn-of-the-20th century train station, in the path of I-95, fell to the wrecker's ball.

The only physical traces of the original structure are the footings of the pillars, visible under the Manor Beach pavilion deck at low tide. And there is a photo display, mounted by the pay phone (across from the key room). Two black and white pictures attest to the fury of the '38 hurricane as it raged across Manor Park, two more to the damage done to the crippled Victorian.

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