On August 28, 1910, The New York Times published an illustration of a bridge that was supposed to transform the Smith Point area. It was a broad steel-and-reinforced-concrete crossing with a movable center span, part of a much larger development that included a railroad station, an enormous boulevard, Queen Anne cottages, a hotel, casino and clubhouse. Federal permission for the bridge had reportedly been secured, and preliminary work along the shoreline was already underway. That the bridge pictured in the newspaper was never built.
The clipping, preserved by the New York Public Library, carried the headline “New Steel Bridge for Tangier’s Manor.” Its caption said the bridge would cross Great South Bay “between Bellport and Mastic,” connecting the mainland with the beach. In modern terms, the project belonged to the same Smith Point geography where William Floyd Parkway now reaches the barrier island and Smith Point County Park. Suffolk County describes today’s crossing as carrying County Road 46 over Narrow Bay from the Mastic Beach/Shirley area to Fire Island.
It was not simply a bridge proposal. It was one part of an attempt to build an entirely new Long Island resort community called Tangier Manor.
Tangier was a Long Island name long before the development
The name reaches back to William “Tangier” Smith, who was born in England in 1655. As a young man, Smith went to British-controlled Tangier in North Africa, where he became a merchant, militia commander, councilman, alderman and eventually mayor. He arrived in New York in 1686 and accumulated extensive Long Island holdings that became the Manor of St. George. He also served as chief justice of New York’s Supreme Court of Judicature.
The Smith family’s holdings were deeply tied to this section of Brookhaven. In 1718, Richard Floyd II purchased more than 4,400 acres from the Tangier Smith estate. The property stretched north from Moriches Bay and included rights to the Great South Beach, the barrier island we now know as Fire Island.
That is also why Smith Point has its name. One geographical oddity survives today: the mainland Smith Point peninsula and the famous ocean beach are separated by water. Smith Point County Park and its ocean beach sit on Fire Island, while the bridge reaches them from the mainland point bearing the Smith name.
Frederick Quinby arrived with a very large idea
Around 1910, developer Frederick J. Quinby, whose surname also appears as Quimby in contemporary and local historical accounts, became involved in acquiring a large portion of the old Smith holdings and promoting them through the Tangier Manor Corporation. Historical accounts disagree considerably about exactly how much land was involved, but they agree on the central idea: Quinby intended Tangier Manor to be a major resort and real-estate development.
Later local histories describe his goal as creating a destination that could compete with Atlantic City. The 1910 newspaper coverage supports the general scale of that ambition even without the salesman’s language. The infrastructure announced that summer was enormous by the standards of the area.
According to the August 1910 Times report, the plan included:
- A 350-foot-long, 72-foot-wide steel and reinforced-concrete bridge with arches 15 feet above high water and a movable center section allowing larger vessels to pass.
- A five-mile boulevard approximately 200 feet wide running through Tangier to the site of a proposed station on the Long Island Rail Road’s Montauk Division.
- Fifty Queen Anne cottages, along with a planned casino, clubhouse and hotel.
- Residential lots ranging from 50 by 100 feet to 200 by 400 feet, with the development promoted around both Great South Bay and the Atlantic oceanfront.
- Bulkheading and filling work already being reported as underway in preparation for the bridge’s shore piers.
The newspaper even described the proposed bridge as the first connection of its kind between the Long Island mainland and the oceanfront across the bay. The design was presented not as a distant fantasy but as an active development with government approval and construction preparations already taking place.
The resort planned for the beach was even bigger than the bridge
A later National Park Service historical resource study provides another piece of evidence for what Tangier Manor’s promoters had in mind.
Researchers examining an original Tangier Manor promotional brochure found plans for a massive “Association” building on the eastern end of Fire Island. The building was to face Great South Bay with a 290-foot main section and two 400-foot wings extending toward the Atlantic. A central tower was planned to rise 200 feet.
The brochure proposed 225 rooms on each of eight main floors, plus another 600 rooms in towers above the building. Every room was supposed to have an exterior exposure and its own bath. There was to be a 1,500-seat motion-picture theater and, in the middle of the complex, an indoor swimming pool measuring an astonishing 420 by 140 feet. The pool was to be heated and covered with opalescent glass, with palm gardens, tea rooms and lounges around it.
Those specifications come from historical research prepared for the National Park Service, not from a modern retelling. The same study consulted Suffolk County maps and deeds, Brookhaven and Islip tax rolls, business directories, genealogical material, local histories and interviews with longtime residents and historians.
Tangier Manor was therefore not just a proposed neighborhood near the beach. At least on paper, its developers were contemplating a destination on a scale almost completely foreign to the Smith Point that developed afterward.
The paperwork survived. The resort did not.
Some of Tangier Manor made it beyond promotional drawings.
The NPS study found that a Tangier Manor tract, Map No. 655, was filed with the Suffolk County Clerk on April 14, 1911. Brookhaven tax records also show the Tangier Manor Corporation holding property on the barrier beach. But the same records tell a much less impressive story about actual sales. By 1916, the corporation still controlled most of the lots in the tract, with only a relatively small number listed as sold to individual buyers. The researchers concluded that the development did not materialize as originally envisioned.
Local histories describe lawsuits, financing troubles and the eventual collapse of Quinby’s enterprise. Contemporary newspaper archives from 1913 also contain reporting about allegations that the Tangier Manor Corporation was insolvent. The precise financial chronology varies depending on the source, but there is little disagreement about the result: the grand resort envisioned at Smith Point failed. That impressive steel bridge pictured in the 1910 Times went with it.
Smith Point got a wooden bridge instead
This is one of the places where local records do not line up perfectly.
The Mastic Peninsula Historical Society dates Quinby’s first wooden Tangier Bridge to 1911. Other histories describe work continuing for years and place completion of a usable temporary bridge in 1916. A reasonable reading of the surviving accounts is that bridge construction began during the early part of the decade and that a functioning wooden crossing was in place by 1916.
Michael Gillespie, an Irish immigrant who had worked for Quinby, is credited in local histories with constructing the wooden bridge. It was a far cry from the ornate steel crossing advertised in 1910, although it did have a mechanically operated movable section to permit boat traffic.
According to the Smith Point histories, an ice jam in early 1917 destroyed about 200 feet from the center of the bridge, including its movable span and machinery. Repairs and replacement sections followed, but winter weather repeatedly damaged the wooden crossing. The last version was reportedly washed away in 1927, leaving Smith Point without another bridge for more than three decades. Considerably less glamorous outcome than the 1910 rendering.
Did Rudolph Valentino and a caravan of camels cross it?
Smith Point’s wooden bridge also picked up one of the strangest stories in Long Island film history. Local historians have long maintained that Smith Point’s dunes were used by motion-picture companies during the silent-film era and that caravans of horses and camels crossed the old bridge. One well-established local tradition associates that activity with Rudolph Valentino’s 1926 film The Son of the Sheik. Fire Island historians have cited residents’ recollections of the animals and film crews moving through Smith Point.
There is a wrinkle. Film-history sources document desert filming for The Son of the Sheik in Yuma, Arizona. That does not necessarily establish that no secondary work of any kind occurred on Long Island, but it does make the broader claim that the movie’s desert sequences were shot at Smith Point questionable. The Smith Point-Valentino connection is best treated as a longstanding piece of local history whose exact role in the production remains disputed.
One part of Quinby’s idea looks very familiar today
Quinby’s planned boulevard may be the most visible remnant of his vision.
The 1910 Times described a five-mile, 200-foot-wide road leading from the mainland development toward a proposed LIRR station. Local Mastic-Shirley historians identify Tangier Boulevard as an early predecessor to the corridor eventually occupied by William Floyd Parkway.
That does not mean today’s William Floyd Parkway is simply an untouched 1910 Quinby road. The modern county highway was developed and reconstructed much later. But the basic transportation idea is remarkably familiar: a broad north-south route connecting the railroad and mainland communities with Smith Point and the ocean beach. More than a century later, Long Islanders still make essentially that trip.
The permanent Smith Point Bridge finally arrived in 1959
The bridge Long Islanders recognize today came decades after the Tangier experiment. Construction began in the 1950s, and the modern Smith Point Bridge opened to traffic on July 4, 1959. Contemporary Patchogue Advance coverage documented the opening and Robert Moses’ participation in the ceremonies. The 1,216-foot bridge initially charged motorists a 75-cent toll.
The steel bascule bridge carried William Floyd Parkway over Narrow Bay to the barrier island, finally establishing the permanent automobile connection that developers had been trying to create since the Tangier era. Suffolk County still lists the bridge as a movable structure built in 1959.
Smith Point County Park developed on the Fire Island side. When Fire Island National Seashore was established in 1964, the county park was included within the Seashore’s administrative boundaries, but it remained Suffolk County property rather than becoming an NPS-operated park.
The landscape has continued changing around it. Superstorm Sandy opened a breach at Smith Point in 2012 that was subsequently closed, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers later placed roughly 2.5 million cubic yards of sand at Smith Point County Park as part of a major storm-recovery project.
Today the park remains one of Suffolk County’s major beach destinations, with camping and permitted outer-beach access alongside the ocean beach that Tangier Manor’s promoters were trying to turn into a resort more than a century ago.
Another Smith Point Bridge is being built
More than a century after Tangier Manor’s promoters announced their proposed crossing, construction is set for yet another Smith Point Bridge.
Suffolk County has awarded the replacement project to Posillico, with a new 1,812-foot fixed bridge being built immediately west of the existing 1959 drawbridge. Crews began staging for construction during the summer of 2026, including work on temporary marine access that will allow heavy equipment and bridge components to be moved into Narrow Bay.
The new bridge will have 11 spans, approximately 55.6 feet of vertical clearance above the navigation channel and a protected pedestrian and bicycle path. Unlike the existing bridge, it will have no movable section, eliminating the need for bridge openings and the machinery and staffing associated with a drawbridge.
The cost has risen substantially as the project has progressed. Suffolk County put the total estimated cost at approximately $161 million in 2026, including nearly $150 million for construction. About 80 percent of the project is being federally funded, with Suffolk County responsible for the remaining share.
The existing bridge will remain in service while its replacement is built. After structural deterioration discovered in 2025 forced weight restrictions and one-lane operation, emergency reinforcement work allowed two-way traffic to return before Memorial Day 2026.
The new bridge is expected to open in 2029. Once traffic is moved onto it, the 1959 bridge will be demolished, a process expected to take approximately another year.
That makes the 1910 newspaper clipping particularly timely. Long Islanders were being shown plans for a new bridge to Smith Point 116 years ago. In 2026, another one is finally rising beside the bridge generations of Long Islanders have used to reach the beach.
Source list
- The New York Times, Aug. 28, 1910
- New York Public Library Digital Collections
- Fletcher and Kintz, Fire Island Resource Study, National Park Service research
- Historical Society of the New York Courts
- National Park Service, Fire Island National Seashore
- National Park Service, William Floyd Estate
- Suffolk County Department of Public Works
- Suffolk County Parks
- The Patchogue Advance
- New York State Historic Newspapers
- Mastic Peninsula Historical Society
- Ken Spooner, SpoonerCentral Mastic-Shirley historical collection
- Fire Island News & Great South Bay News
- U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
- Silent Film Festival / film-history sources on The Son of the Sheik
Photo: A 1910 New York Times illustration of the proposed steel bridge for Tangier’s Manor, described as spanning Great South Bay between Bellport and Mastic and connecting the mainland with the beach. General Research Division, The New York Public Library. “New steel bridge for Tangier’s Manor, [page 11, detail]” The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1910. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/560bde40-c6c1-012f-d299-58d385a7bc34
