Isaac Henry Green Jr.

The Village of East Hampton's historic-services narrative credits Isaac Henry Green Jr. with bringing the Shingle Style to East Hampton in 1888, when he designed a summer house called Pudding Hill for Dr. Everett Herrick on a rise above Ocean Avenue. A year later he designed the Munroe cottage next door. Both stand in what is now the Ocean Avenue Historic District of East Hampton Village.

Green was a Sayville architect, not an East Hampton one. His South Fork record is small and specific. It matters because it sits at the start of a sequence that local architects followed for the next generation.

Who he was

Green (1859–1937) practiced from Sayville for roughly forty years. A National Register multiple-property form — a document that sets out the historic context for a group of related buildings so individual ones can be listed — covers his work across Suffolk and Nassau Counties from 1879 to 1918. It describes estate houses, middle-class houses, churches, banks and civic buildings, most of them in the Town of Islip.

The form explains how he reached East Hampton. A shingled house he designed for William Terry in Sayville was published in Architecture and Building. Dr. Herrick, who summered in East Hampton, saw it and commissioned Pudding Hill, and further East Hampton work followed. By 1902 Green had also designed the East Hampton electric plant.

The East Hampton houses

Pudding Hill, Ocean Avenue (1888). Built for Dr. Everett Herrick on a hilltop that then looked across open pasture to the ocean. The Village narrative singles out the entrance hall: a stair of several flights, a large landing lit by many-paned windows, raised paneling and ceiling beams. The East Hampton Star wrote in 1889 that the house "combined a bit of seaside-resort architecture with the style of the native old-fashioned houses."

Dr. George E. Munroe cottage (1889). Next door to Pudding Hill. The Village narrative uses it to illustrate a 1903 Architectural Record observation that East Hampton's cottages were "a plain architecture founded on colonial models."

The National Register form also refers to Green houses in Quogue without naming them. See Quogue and its historic district for the setting.

What to look for

• Early Shingle Style: shingled walls, gable fronts, gambrel roofs, wrap-around porches with turned posts, eyebrow windows.
• A colonial vocabulary inside — paneling, beams, small-paned sash — that tied the summer house to East Hampton's older farmhouses.
• Green's Sayville houses, described in detail in the National Register form, are the best comparison set for features that survive on the East Hampton pair.

How to verify an attribution

Start with the National Register multiple-property form, which lists Green's documented commissions and the sources behind them. For the Ocean Avenue houses, use the Village of East Hampton's historic-district materials and East Hampton's Heritage, which the form cites. Then read the Village building department file for permits and certificates of occupancy to separate the 1888–89 houses from later enlargement. A Quogue house credited to Green needs a specific document; the form's general reference is not enough to attribute a particular address.

Considering a Green house?

Request a property brief from The Roebling Research Desk that ties the house to the National Register form and the Village record, and separates the original Shingle Style fabric from a century of change.