Happy Summer!! It's been exactly 25 years since I started my first summer on Cape Cod. Boy that makes me feel old. Spending the whole summer (not a week or a month, or just weekends) in a place like this is a whole other life. The Cape is probably more my style, even though my best sister moving to NYC meant I became a Hamptons summer person a decade ago. Ah our first vacation in a year and a half is coming!
I lived in Hyannis Port for three summers in the mid-/late 90s. If I do say so, it was their heyday (post 60s, of course) when JFK Jr. and Senator Kennedy were still alive and out and about. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Andrew Cuomo were still Kennedy adjacent then too. The original Kennedy house in the compound (just west of the pier) is now part of the EMK Institute. Taylor Swift has come and gone. Ethel is still hanging on. Now 02647 is left with the likes of RFK Jr. Sad...
I met my first ex at the West Beach Club while working for a family who was friends with him and lives up Wachusett (they recently traded "school year living" in Wellesley for Jupiter, of course). And with their encouragement, we courted there and at the Hyannisport Club (where Jack and Jackie had their engagement party) and the HP Yacht Club ("the pier", where he was a patron and held court, is infamous for being a weekend paparazzi hangout) and Oyster Harbors with his parents. We dated into the fall, I spent weekends here even after going back to college. September here is the best. He wanted to buy a house in Wellesley and give me his family ring kept at Harry Winston, but I just couldn't. Even when his "friends" tried to talk me into doing it for the hundreds of millions. We decided, begrudgingly on his part, to be friends instead. So I kept visiting for years after. I remember the morning after JFK Jr.'s secret wedding in Georgia, because they never could have pulled it off here, when he told me about his friend finally getting hitched (they were the same age and grew up here together).
My ex-boyfriend passed away last August, after his mother in 2011, and his only brother in 2010. His father is in his mid-90s and lives in Miami. Not surprisingly, he's just put the family summer home (since the 60s) on the market. It's been mostly untouched for decades (that's how the old money rolls), save the new kitchen, this is just how I remember it. (and of course it closed on my birthday...)
The house is named "El Bajareque" (the shack, ironically, sort of) overlooks Nantucket Sound with a big yard sloping down to the Rose Kennedy memorial, Fortes Beach, and the Yacht Club. I would have married his parents if I could have. Though they probably wouldn't have wanted us to buy our own house here, it would have made them "look bad," as this was meant to be passed down. Loved them even if they were a bit too conservative for me. Very Cuban and Catholic (the latter of which HP became a haven for when the Kennedys moved here in the 20s, because the HP club was one of few that admitted Catholics at the time), so I stayed over in the guest room when they were there. A few of his cousins still have houses there. His father's great-grandfather founded Bacardi and the family still owns and runs it out of Miami, Bermuda, and Puerto Rico (since their exile from Cuba the year my ex was born.). He and his brother were adopted, because that's what even wealthy infertile couples did in the 1950s. I never met his brother, he was by then a persona non grata to all but his mother, another HP raised addict, a victim of Fessenden abuse, like so many others. My ex was the "good son" even after getting tossed from Exeter. He redeemed himself at Georgetown and beyond. May he rest in peace.
I spent so many hours on that porch... Ah the memories...
Another hot property on Oyster Harbors (formerly Bunny Mellon's) that has recently hit the market... (and also sold end of summer)
Studying my own family's history, they owned large swaths of the Cape (from Yarmouth to Falmouth), as they (the Hatches) were the first white settlers to buy land from the Indians in the 1600s, so I'll be back...