Man buys private islands, only spends one night on one before deciding to sell
Albert Sutton paid just more than $1 million for something that many rich people dream of — a private island. Then he bought a second island, 400 yards away, for $450,000.
The purchases put Sutton, a pathologist turned real estate investor, in the universe of better-known island owners like British entrepreneur Richard Branson and actors Leonardo DiCaprio, Mel Gibson, Eddie Murphy and Johnny Depp.
But Sutton’s islands are not in the Caribbean or the Pacific, as theirs are. His islands are a five-minute boat ride across Long Island Sound from New Rochelle, N.Y., less than an hour north of Manhattan.
The poet John Donne wrote that no man is an island — “every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.’’ But when the continent is a mile away, it is not easy being the man who owns the island.
“I thought I would have great thoughts out here,” he said, standing on his doorstep on Columbia Island, the smaller of the two.
Many of the thoughts he has had in 14 years as an island owner were about money. He said he had spent $8 million on renovations, including solar panels for electricity and a desalination unit for drinking water.
He even imported thick metal “hurricane doors” from Norway.
“They’re blast proof, waterproof, fireproof, everything-proof,” he said.
Sutton’s Columbia Island is one of dozens just off the coasts around the New York City region. Most are smaller than, say, the 413-acre, city-owned Rikers Island, with its complex of jails and troubled history of violence and mismanagement. New York City also owns North Brother Island, 20 acres that were once home to the disease-spreading cook better known as Typhoid Mary.
These spits of land have an unusual symphony of names — Potato Island, Pea Island, Rat Island, Davids’ Island, Tavern Island (“comes complete with a mansion so beautiful even Marilyn Monroe attended parties there,” Elle Decor noted).
“Leaving the mainland is everybody’s island dream,” said Rebecca Kinnear, the editor of Islands.com, a website that typically focuses on islands in warmer places than New York. “When you go to an island, you’re escaping the real world, leaving everything behind for, hopefully, palm trees and a perfect beach. Who wouldn’t want to own that?”
But now Sutton has had enough. He put the two islands on the market in May for $13 million.
“You know, I started in my 70s. Now I’m 85. I’m less adventurous,” Sutton said. “It’s not about me or my wishes or dreams any more. I can dream in a chair.”
Originally, his dreams did not include the larger Pea Island close by, but when it became available in 2015, he bought it as a safeguard.
“It protects whoever is going to own this from having a hostile neighbor or anything like that,” he said.
The one building on Columbia Island was built as the base of a radio transmitter. It once supported a broadcast tower more than 400 feet tall for WCBS-AM (whose call letters when the tower went up in the 1940s were WABC-AM). But the station moved to another tower on a different island in Long Island Sound in the 1960s.
When he heard about Columbia Island, then owned by a nearby yacht club, it was love at first visit. The dilapidated building did not scare him off.
“I was cocky,” he said. “I had done a couple of condos. I said, ‘Yeah, I can do that.’”
But owning an island was different. He had to rip out the ordinary wallboard he first installed, replacing it with concrete backed board that is resistant to water seeping through walls.
And landscaping was a challenge. He first planted honey locusts and shrubs that would do well on the mainland. They died in the salty air. Now he has mulberry and kwanzan cherry trees.
He put in solar panels and two 50 kilowatt generators for a backup.
For all that, Sutton said he had spent only one night on the island.
“It never really occurred to me that, gee, I should spend more time there or get more pleasure out of it,” he said. “I was here to make it beautiful and let it realize itself.”