Jerry Seinfeld and Louis C.K., proving laughter is the best fund-raiser. (Getty Images)

While those whose homes and lives were destroyed by Hurricane Sandy might not feel much like hearing jokes, two of comedy's most famous names plan on raising money for Long Island's victims with their gift of laughter. And they actually plan on going to L.I.!

Recent Saturday Night Live host Louis C.K. has announced that he'll be performing on November 17 at St. George Theatre. (You can buy tickets on his website.) Scalpers are extremely discouraged, because come on, people, don't be assholes.

Mr. Seinfeld has also added a date--December 19, to be exact--at the NYCB Theatre in Westbury, L.I., during his winter tour. He's donating the proceeds from that night, as well as two of his other New York shows, to Hurricane Sandy relief efforts.

Good for them. Seriously. It's one thing to give money to help rebuild a decimated area (which, don't get us wrong, is awesome. Keep donating!) It's another to actually go there--and by consequence, make your fans travel as well--to see the devastation firsthand.

"Christian Grey is watching us," announced Divalysscious Moms founder Lyss Stern, to the hundreds of women gathered outside Carlyle on the Green in Bethpage, Long Island, waiting for a luncheon Monday to celebrate E.L. James's bondage erotica trilogy Fifty Shades of Grey. The series, recently released in paperback by Vintage. has sparked everything from an SNL skit to jewelry to sex workshops at erotic boutiques. The women, who paid $85 to hear the British author, had read every page—in many cases multiple times—and were quick to point out purple dresses among them, like the one worn (and removed) in the books.

Upon entering, we were greeted by couches draped with lacy black panties, feather boas and torn jeans, along with quotes from the book on mirrors, such as, "Miss Steele, I do believe you're making my palm twitch." Alongside a Fifty Shades Freed (the final book in the trilogy) cake, were tables adorned with handcuffs and more quotes, including, "I don’t know whether to worship at your feet or spank the living shit of you." But the talk in the room wasn't so much about masochism as movies, with strong opinions about who should play Anastasia and Christian (definitely not Twilight stars Kristin Stewart and Robert Pattinson was the consensus).

After speeches by Stern, personal trainer Kristen James (no relation), and How to Get Your Husband to Have Sex With You author Logan Levkoff ("We are all sex goddesses"), Ms. James the author entered the room from a side door to thunderous applause and a shout of "Where's Christian?" Ms. James, dressed in a black-and-white-polka dot blouse and black pants, not looking at all like a diva, sat down to greet her fans.

The author said her motivation for the series, which started out as Twilight fan fiction, was to explore what would happen when someone into the BDSM lifestyle met someone who wasn't. She seemed a bit shy, copping to wanting to have dinner with Oprah—and all her new fans—giggling through a few answers. "I'm completely stunned by the crazy reaction to these books. I've been reeling."

She went on to answer questions like whether she'd prefer a mountain getaway or a beach house ("beach house, with a cabana boy and fully stocked liquor cabinet") and said that most of her research happened online, though her husband was happy to help with the hands-on aspects. "If my computer ever gets confiscated by social services,” Ms. James joked, “my children will be taken away from me. It's amazing what you can find. Once, one of my editors said, 'This is not possible' and I said, 'I'll send you the YouPorn video.'"

Bay Port teacher Cindy Campanella, 34, said that everyone at her job, including her boss, is reading Fifty Shades. Yes, it's raunchy, but, in her opinion, tastefully so. "I've been married 10 years and it made me think of when we first started dating,” said Ms. Campanella. “My husband will say to me that he can see me blushing across the room." He hasn't read the books, but he has reaped the rewards of her reading, she reported.

In the lobby, Joy of Moi vibrators were selling for $100 and $125, but one passerby scoffed at the selection. "Everybody's looking for ben wa balls," she tossed over her shoulder.

Ms. James (the trainer) was hawking her 50 Shapes workout, inspired by the books. "The conversation with my friend quickly went from what are they doing to how are they doing it," she explained, noting the use of bondage equipment like spreader bars. "The entire pelvic floor needs to be trained to enhance orgasms. I have an exercise called the dirty diamond, to help your endurance."

Cathy Devine, 40, of Deer Park, bought the entire trilogy for two friends who she felt could benefit from it. "It sparks conversation, whether at Costco—where I met a therapist buying it for her client—to a school event."

For Manorville mom Diana Melton, 35, Fifty Shades is her first foray into romance novels, and fellow readers include her mother, mother-in-law and grandmother. "My mom sent me a text saying we all have to get silver balls,” she said. “I'm happy for her. But my husband said, 'Who does that?" And I said, 'Everybody does it now.’"

Whether E.L. James has changed what America is doing in its bedrooms (or dungeons), she's certainly made a splash. A woman at our table had read the whole trilogy three times, but said after today she was done. "Unless she writes a fourth book from Christian's point-of-view. That one I'd read."

Laura Cerrano gets her feng shui on

Most of the sights and sounds at this morning’s event in Long Island City were pretty standard fare for a groundbreaking: guys in shirts and ties, wearing hard hats and holding novelty shovels, a massive back hoe parked in the back of a lot prepped for excavation.

A less ordinary sight however, was the young woman in a dark skirtsuit pacing the edges of the earthen lot, chanting quietly and gently tossing grains of vodka-soaked rice while development executives looked on appreciatively.

As bizarre as the sight may sound, it is almost surely a sign of things to come on the home front.

“Everyone can benefit from good energy,” said Eric Benaim, President of Modern Spaces. His company has enlisted the services of “Certified Feng Shui Consultant” Laura Cerrano of Feng Shui Long Island to advise them on every facet of the design and construction of Vista Court, a 15-story residential building on Purves Street just south of Northern Boulevard.

But Modern Spaces' decision went beyond simple good vibrations. The firm, like so many other developers in the city, wanted to attract that most auspicious tenant-of-the-moment: the Chinese.

For Modern Spaces, the plan to attract those buyers is quite literally from the ground up. Aside from providing advice on how units should be designed, placement of windows and balconies, doing away with the fourth floor of the structure entirely (“that will be more of a re-naming,” admitted Ms. Cerrano), one of Ms. Cerrano’s contributions to the project was today’s ceremony that prepared the lot for excavation.

That lobby light is feeling the shui.

The ceremony included burying small red baggies filled with objects that represented the five elements, the burning of sage, and, finally, the rice ceremony which necessitated Ms. Cerrano to pour 99 drops of Smirnoff Vodka onto a bowl full of uncooked rice, before adding the mineral cinnabar and stirring the mixture with her middle finger 99 times. “I offered her Ketel One,” joked Mr. Benaim who added that Ms. Cerrano was very specific about her brand of vodka.

After completing her prep, Ms. Cerrano educated the audience on how sprinkling the rice along the perimeter of the lot would feed the ghosts and spirits that inhabit the space and provide positive energy for its future tenants.

As The Observer watched Ms. Cerrano stroll carefully over the uneven, cement-cragged ground, we wondered what brokers in SoHo were doing at that moment to attract what’s left of the European buyer’s market. Maybe some ouzo would do the trick.

tmcenery@observer.com

O'Donnell.

Little, low-budget, independent films every week, every month, all year long … that’s what keeps the dying movie business from its own burial, six feet under. A Little Help, written and directed by Michael J. Weithorn, is a benign slice of life about suburban angst on Long Island. It’s not much, but thanks to the noble efforts of a very good cast, I’ve seen worse.

Jenna Fischer, whose colorless role on TV’s The Office has always left me underwhelmed, plays a dental hygienist named Laura with a mounting pyramid of domestic problems in this dull little picture, which is undeniably well meaning but can, at best, be called only unremarkable. Laura is married to Bob (Chris O’Donnell), a good-looking drone who sells real estate.  They have an obnoxious, overweight 12-year-old son named Dennis (newcomer Daniel Yelsky) who is angry, precocious and terminally surly. Laura would like Bob to do something about Dennis, but he is rarely home, feigning important night meetings and working overtime. They haven’t had conjugal relations in months and Laura suspects another woman. Her social life centers on unbearable family dinners with her jealous older sister Kathy (Brooke Smith), their nagging parents (guest stars Lesley Ann Warren and Ron Leibman) and Kathy’s embattled, stoner husband Paul (Rob Benedict) whom Laura should have married years ago. No wonder Laura drinks too much and Paul hides on the lawn smoking pot. And no wonder Bob drops dead from a heart attack. (Sorry to lose Chris O’Donnell so early in the film.)

No longer a miserable wife, Laura is now a miserable widow who is sinking fast. Her meddling mother pries into her finances, her sister demands that she hire a lawyer to sue her doctor for misdiagnosing Bob’s chest pains, and Dennis, to get sympathy and attention, tells everyone in school that his father was a fireman who died in the terrorist attacks of 9/11 while rescuing victims. The movie drags on, passing the time with irrelevant scenes (Kathy’s son takes a guitar lesson from rock and roll recording star Dion and plays an immediate duet on one of his hit songs) and superfluous dialogue (Laura has a patient who lost a filling eating popcorn at the fights and says, “I felt kinda silly worrying about my toothache and meanwhile, there’s a guy in the ring bleeding from both ears”). Eventually Laura makes an appointment with her brother-in-law to relieve sexual tension by consummating their long-postponed date between the sheets, but another crisis interferes when the teachers and students in Dennis’s school expose his lies and all hell breaks loose. No longer able to cope, Laura is already addicted to cases of Budweiser; can Librium be far behind?

The writing is uneven but you do get a sense of what makes the characters tick. I could have done without the scene in which mother and son stage a shouting match, repeatedly screaming “You suck!” and “No, you suck!” The actors are sincere (especially Ms. Fischer, who plays frustration well) and the direction has a complacent rhythm, but 1 hour and 48 minutes is too long for a movie in which nothing much happens. You need patience to get through it, and my own patience ran out long before the final unconvincing resolution. A Little Help is obviously not a movie with guaranteed appeal for the masses.

rreed@observer.com

A LITTLE HELP

Running time 108 minutes

Written and directed by Michael J. Weithorn

Starring Jenna Fischer, Chris O’Donnell

2/4

Back in April, The Observer took a look at Lands End, the Long Island home that is said to have inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby. It is, or was, a well-known if rundown manse that has since been demolished to make way for a set of new waterfront mansions. "Have you seen the place?" developer Bert Brodsky asked us on a tour of the property. "It’s a drop-dead unbelievable house on a spot not to be believed! It’s just a special piece of property."

He and son Lee chatted up Curbed yesterday, revealing new renderings for the planned homes, as well as some interesting details about how they think they can actually turn the vitriol aimed at them for destroying this literary landmark into a marketing boon:

It will certainly be a challenge to change the thoughts of many that feel that the developer simply tore down a historical property—something that was a very difficult decision to make. We hope to convey the message that he is preserving the locale by building beautiful homes worthy of this special site and its historic significance. Furthermore, we are looking for owners also worthy of being part of this—[those] who will also appreciate it.

Of course we would acknowledge its history, which is a very important component to all of us. Furthermore, the developer understands and has accepted the challenge to honor its past by creating a contemporary environment and building residences worthy of its pedigree.

Besides, who wants one pedigreed mansion when you can have half a dozen?

SLIDESHOW: Gatsbyesque or Grotesque? >>

mchaban [at] observer.com | @mc_nyo

Some financial-services firms, in particular, said Robert Sammons, vice president of research services at Cassidy Turley, are finding "there's a cultural and collaborative need to have your base in Manhattan." There's also ready access to the young talent many of these companies crave. Among the most tremulous of rumors is one that has UBS moving its massive Stamford operations, including a 103,000-square-foot trading floor, back into the city.

Nevertheless, the outer markets are plotting their own steady if slow recovery. Many suburban tenants are starting to see modest growth in their businesses, and realizing, not uncoincidentally, that they can't expect to get office space for next to nothing. Rents are up, even as some vacancy rates stagnate.

"Overall, it's an improving marketplace, with some healthy evidence of recovery through the region," said Ed Tonnessen, an executive managing director in Jones Lang Lasalle's Stamford office. "But the activity is not raising all boats with that tide."

Long Island

"The market is starting to pick up," said Michael Aievoli, a principal in Newmark Knight Frank's Long Island office. "Landlords are lowering the asking rents from three years ago." The problem last year, Mr. Aievoli said, was that tenants "thought there was a fire sale."

Now both sides are coming to terms more often. It doesn't hurt that Long Island's unemployment rate dropped to 7.8 percent in the first quarter of 2011; a year earlier, it was at 8.3 percent.

Most of the leasing action is in Melville and Garden City, with the growth of the collections industry--always flush in times of economic turmoil--cited as a key driver. Education and health services companies are also adding more jobs, with business services and transportation playing a role, too. Cassidy Turley's Mr. Sammons said the Long Island market has been "the most stable of the suburban areas," due to very little new construction in Nassau and Suffolk counties, though Nassau has "government debt issues" that may curb future development.

The vacancy rate in Nassau and Suffolk combined was 10.3 percent as of the end of the first quarter, according to CoStar. This is a slight improvement over the fourth quarter of 2010, and a clear sign of a stabilizing market.

Still, major office deals of the first quarter weren't so major. One of the biggest was MBS Insight's 31,561-square-foot sublease at 265 Broadhollow Road in Melville. Two under-30,000-square-foot deals of note were Guardian Life Insurance's 26,000-foot deal at 250 Crossways Park Drive in Woodbury and Winthrop University Hospital's 13,000-foot lease at 1000 Franklin Avenue in Garden City.

Most of the movement is from companies already in the area. Suffolk is "typically less expensive than Nassau," Mr. Aievoli said. As a result, some tenants in Class B space in Nassau are trading up to Class A space in Suffolk. Chuck Tabone, managing principal of Newmark Knight Frank's Long Island office, adds that space in Nassau County is "relatively tight" since "no one's building new buildings."

Northern New Jersey

Northern Jersey actually consists of two distinct office markets: the Hudson waterfront and everything else. The Hudson Waterfront area "acts as a relief valve for New York City," Mr. Sammons said, particularly for the financial services and insurance industries. That market, he said, has "tightened up over the last few quarters." The rest of the area, in contrast, is "relatively stable," he added, with tenants "moving around but not shrinking or expanding."

For northern New Jersey--including Bergen, Essex, Hudson, Middlesex, Morris, Passaic and Union counties--the average office rent rose to $24.25 per square foot in the first quarter, the highest in five quarters, according to CoStar.

The Hudson Waterfront submarket had an availability rate of 9.2 percent for the first quarter of 2011, according to Newmark Knight Frank; as compared with a 13.5 percent vacancy rate for Northern New Jersey as a whole, per CoStar data.

One interesting development has been the conversion of some Hudson Waterfront office space to residential developments, a function of the slack commercial market in recent years.

The biggest first-quarter deal in the Garden State was the leasing of 127,865 square feet at 95 Columbus Circle Drive in Jersey City to Quality Technology Services. But the most talked-about move of the moment is that by electronics giant Panasonic, which announced on April 19 that it will relocate its North American headquarters from Secaucus to a yet-to-be-constructed building on Raymond Boulevard in Newark. The state's Economic Development Authority provided a $102 million transit hub tax credit to keep the global corporation from moving out of state, perhaps to Brooklyn.

Meanwhile, the company's current landlord, Hartz Mountain Industries, has filed an appeal to halt the move. While Newark Mayor Cory Booker called the deal "historic," the town of Secaucus has raised objections, claiming the tax credit was unfair to towns hurt by the transfer.

Westchester

With its aging office parks, many built in the 1980s and 1990s, Westchester County offers limited options for tenants seeking Class A space. On the other hand, its highway system is "unparalleled," according to John Goodkind, a managing principal at Newmark Knight Frank. In particular, the corridor along I-287 has shown significant leasing action. However, Westchester County's overall vacancy rate rose slightly to 11 percent during the first quarter, as compared to 10.9 percent in the fourth quarter of 2010, according to CoStar.

"Downtown White Plains has had a pretty good run in the last year," said Ed Tonnessen, an executive managing director at Jones Lang Lasalle, "with real rent growth, stability and recovery." The average rent rose slightly to $24.95 per square foot, per CoStar. But Mr. Tonnessen added that the rest of Westchester remains a "tenant-favorable marketplace."

Nonetheless, northern Westchester accounted for much of the quarter's leasing activity. Easily the biggest deal of the quarter was Pepsi Bottling's renewal and expansion at 1 Pepsi Way in Somers. Connecticut had attempted to lure the headquarters of the bottling division to Danbury in late 2010. Instead, it is taking over the entire 540,000-square-foot building where it's now located. In other news, My Publisher is leasing 31,594 square feet at 400 Columbus Avenue in Valhalla.

In lower Westchester, Guggenheim Partners rented 31,142 square feet at 4 Manhattanville Road in Purchase.

On the negative side, Starwood Hotels & Resorts is moving 800 employees and relocating its headquarters from Westchester Avenue in White Plains to Stamford. "It's not a dynamic market by any means," Mr. Goodkind said. "It just sort of keeps percolating."

Fairfield County

Southwestern Connecticut's office market easily supports the Gold Coast moniker often applied to the area as a whole. Fairfield County, for whatever reason, still holds some cache, particularly for high-end financial-services clients drawn to Greenwich and Stamford. Easy access to Metro-North makes downtown locations closest to the railroad the most desirable.

While rents remain high, as much as $40 to $42 per square feet coming out of the recession, the vacancy rate continued to rise to 12.8 percent, according to CoStar. In a "disturbing" trend, said Mr. Goodkind of Newmark Knight Frank, leasing by hedge funds has "slowed up" in recent quarters.

The first quarter's big deals included cosmetics company Beiersdorf, which leased 46,125 feet at 45 Danbury Road in Wilton. New York City-based Chelsea Piers rented 41,700 feet in Stamford, with plans for a sports and entertainment complex. The aforementioned Starwood Hotels & Resorts' move from Westchester to 17,316 feet at 333 Ludlow Street in Stamford was spured in part by more than $90 million in tax incentives offered by the state. Most surprising, perhaps, is Design Within Reach's cross-continental move of its corporate headquarters from San Francisco to Stamford. The contemporary-style furniture merchant is renting 28,000 feet in the former Yale & Towne lock factory building being renovated as part of the Harbor Point redevelopment project.

"Quality is in demand with quality rents," said Mr. Tonnessen of  Jones Lang Lasalle. "It's not startups" but rather "companies that have weathered the storm" that are improving Fairfield's prospects.

Indeed, "stability" is the watchword of the outer-office leasing market in 2011 so far. While leasing numbers are off market bottoms, there are some markets that are farther from the bottom than others.

"Not everybody went out of business a year ago," said Newmark Knight Frank's Mr. Aeivoli. "You're still seeing renewals, but you want to see more expansions."

realestate@observer.com

Yet if Lands End could be seen today by the eyes of F. Scott Fitzgerald, he would squint in a lack of recognition. Soon he would squint and see nothing at all. Developers have already begun pummeling away at the column-bedecked palace to make space for a five-home subdivision. Goodbye, Gatsby; hello, Seagate at Sands Point.

It’s the climax of years of bitter squabbling and debate, fights that pitted owners past and present at each others’ throats. The commodification of the Jazz Age legacy has been a boon to Great Neck developers for ages, but as Lands End goes, so goes an era of Long Island real estate. It’s the death knell for a rot that began in the 1930s, when Robert Moses’ freeways delivered the shabby masses to what had been a millionaires’ playground. Since then, the dismantling of the zone that inspired East Egg and West Egg has made those who tear down old houses very, very wealthy.

There’s one little thing, though, that’s been swept mostly under the rug during the Lands End saga. The house, it turns out, actually has nothing to do with The Great Gatsby.

There’s no firm evidence Fitzgerald ever visited. Lands End doesn’t match the description of the Buchanan household as described by Nick Carraway. No cheerful red-and-white Georgian mansion. No French windows. No sundial-jumping lawn rolling right off the beach. It’s not, as it’s usually touted, a Stanford White—the architect was shot in the face before the plans for the house were drawn up. When Gatsby’s outstretched arms tried to tickle the fuzzy remnants of a green light, it wasn’t coming from Lands End. The house lies on the other side of the peninsula, making it impossible to see from Gatsby’s presumed abode in Great Neck. And there’s the issue of timing. The book was published before Herbert Bayard Swope—the playboy newspaper editor who turned the property into the site of Gatsbyesque weekend bacchanals with all-night croquet, cocktails and extramarital cavorting—even bought the property.

But the myth still persists and, in a way, it supersedes the truth. There are curious details that some see in the distance and cling to as proof. In dealing with the Fitzgerald legend, those who tried in vain to save the house from the wrecking ball and the lot from its ordained McMansions had to dip into revisionism and blur fact and fiction.

Can’t repeat the past? Why of course you can, old sport.

VIRGINIA KRAFT PAYSON SOLD Lands End to Burt Brodsky, the man who arranged for its demolition, in 2005, for $17.5 million. The original asking price was $50 million. Ms. Payson’s rules of negotiation were firm: She did not want the acreage split into new houses.

“They misrepresented themselves,” Ms. Payson told The Observer, reached on her horse-racing ranch in Kentucky. “I would not show it to any developer. He said that his life’s ambition was to live in that manor, but it was very clear at the closing that they had no intention of living in it.”

Ms. Payson, a thoroughbred breeder who runs a training center called Payson Stud, lived in the house for 23 years. She kindled its hearth long after the death of her husband, New York Mets owner Charles Shipman Payson. And since she relinquished ownership of the house to Mr. Brodsky and his son, David, Ms. Payson has become increasingly bitter over their decision to raze it.

Not that anyone’s noticed. In their coverage of the destruction of the house on Hoffstots Lane, the New York Post and Newsday both referred to her as “the late” Ms. Payson.

“I am not only alive and well but angry and disgusted,” she told The Observer. “They are the most awful people I have ever heard of, and that includes terrorists and dictators. They have taken a work of art and permitted it to be totally decimated.”

The plans for the subdivision passed through the planning board with little friction, said Randy Bond, Sands Point village clerk. This may be because the house is in horrid shape. It stood the past few years uninhabited, until it became uninhabitable.

“It was in pristine condition when I left,” Ms. Payson said. “He let it fall apart. He stripped everything out that he could sell, which is sacrilegious. I went by the house perhaps two years after we sold it, and that’s when I realized how he was going to get around the town’s objections. Broken windows, storming in—it’s sinful.”

The loss of a Gold Coast house is tragic to those who cherish local history, but Ms. Payson’s raucous complaints belie the disingenuous retelling of Lands End’s Fitzgerald connection. The supposed tie to The Great Gatsby was referenced repeatedly by Sheldon Good & Co.—who shopped the house for Ms. Payson at its steep price—despite the evidence stacked against such claims. One ad: “F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a masterpiece here.” Another: “The inspiration for Tom and Daisy Buchanan’s home.”

“It is not the house in The Great Gatsby in any way, shape or form,” said Alfred Allen Lewis, who published a biography about Swope. “The house is simply a place he lived in and everyone had a good time, and it has no other significance in the world. Saving this house is a ridiculous thing.”

“There’s always been a great legend about what’s accurate and what may simply be a folklore story,” said Mike Fine, who worked with Sheldon Good on brokering the deal between Ms. Payson and the Brodskys. “We included that information because that’s part of the history of the home. We’re not taking sides on the accuracy, because there are many different theories.”

Ms. Payson doesn’t consider the Fitzgerald narrative of Lands End to be a “theory.” When speaking to The Observer, the facts, or lack thereof, never tempted her to waver.

“Historians have always said that it’s the house in Gatsby, and so do I,” she said. Dissenting opinions, she said, are put forth to “justify all they have done.”

Bert Brodsky’s dissenting opinion is that Ms. Payson is delusional, vain or both.

“The lore is that Gatsby was written about it, that it’s East Egg, that it’s Stanford White—that’s L-O-R-E,” he told The Observer. “She went with the L-O-R-E. It’s exciting to say she lived there! To say, ‘I lived in the same house as Daisy!’”

A QUICK TOUR of Lands End as it would have been in its prime: 20,000 square feet, 25 rooms, 10 baths, 10 fireplaces, 10 bedrooms, a pool, a pool house set below a terrace with gut-punching vistas of the sound, a seven-car garage, a guest house, a greenhouse, a vegetable garden, separate quarters for the caretakers, a tennis court, a tennis house and enough empty space on its 14 acres to play croquet with the entire New York Yacht Club.

“Have you seen the place? It’s a drop-dead unbelievable house on a spot not to be believed!” Mr. Brodsky, in realtor mode, said before broaching the topic of his choice to knock it down. “It’s just a special piece of property.”

The Observer had in fact seen the place—or at least what’s left of it. On Friday, April 8, we hopped on the Long Island Railroad to Port Washington and met up with Cliff Fetner, construction manager on the project. Mr. Fetner spoke in a muted Long Island honk. With his glasses and baby-blue sweater, he looked more a quiet neighbor than a man who demolishes houses for a living.

Sitting shotgun in his silver Mercedes, we zoomed around until the town—where the main strip is neglected during the cold seasons and “summer” is a verb, not a noun—got folded over by reams of sycamore, the once clear road fully ensconced in foliage. Then Mr. Fetner made a right.

“Here’s an example of what’s going to happen,” he said. The sedan caromed through a decade-old development, near-identical houses lining both sides of the road. It was once the estate of William Averell Harriman, the governor of New York. Each lot had 2 acres, and the values of the homes ranged from a few million to a few tens of millions.

“I don’t like to use the term ‘subdivision,’” Mr. Fetner said, rounding a turn. “I prefer the word ‘enclave.’”

We exited the subdivision, pinballed on tight angles and soon reached the last bit of solid ground before we reached the water, and the peeling white wood of Lands End loomed before us. By the entranceway, once gilded and enviable, were stark warnings of fanged dogs hung on a rusted electrical fence. Mr. Fetner jiggled his key in the gate, and we walked in. Cracked pavement wound past the blob of vine growth swallowing the greenhouse. The caretaker’s cabin was just a stump of its old structure. 

The house itself was in a similar state of disrepair. Ms. Payson commissioned a regiment of yearly paint jobs to combat the wear and tear of rain and ocean, but the Brodskys didn’t bother with such conditioning—or any conditioning whatsoever—and so the Doric columns had rotted, molted under sickly perspiration, the sidings eaten out, all of it faded to a soggy spin on off-white.

Yet there was Swope’s great green lawn that extended seaward in the specter of the mansion’s bulk. It was where Dorothy Parker would come with the Algonquin Round Table and plunge into benders. After one grueling string of parties at Lands End a hung-over Parker coughed up this threat: “I wouldn’t go back to the Swopes’ to see King Kong unzip his fly.” The lawn witnessed croquet matches between Harpo Marx and Harold Ross; meetings between John Hay Whitney and David O. Selznick that secured funding for Gone With the Wind; pre-dinner jaunts with Edward and Wallis, Duke and Duchess of Windsor; the re-creation of the life of Aristotle Onassis for the film The Greek Tycoon; and later photo shoots with Madonna and Kate Moss.

Mr. Fetner unraveled a blueprint on the hood of his Mercedes. Like the acreage, the view of the water will be parceled out evenly between the five houses, arranged through a process that the construction manager called “vista easement.”

Inside, the kitchen lay wrecked, as if a hurricane had blown through, empty apart from stacked beams and a single container of mayonnaise. The ballroom spilled open to the right, its chandelier gone, the wallpaper torn and cracked, the tin ceiling’s skin tarred and pockmarked, as if infected by a virus. From there The Observer walked gingerly—the floor might collapse at any moment—and arrived at the grand staircase, which led up to the row of bedrooms and high parlors. The house had been so battered by the elements that it assumed the eerie look of a long-sunken ship, every inch waterlogged and warped.

“It’s not about need, it’s about want,” Mr. Fetner said, sizing up the excesses the house once welcomed. “Who lives like this! People in Japan need shit. This? Nah.”

We walked to the backyard, where the full panorama of the sea unfolded ahead of us. Bushels of purple shells, picked up and left by seagulls, spilled out of the half-crescent pool house and leaked down into the muck-clogged swimming pool. Rubble lay strewn across the terrace. Sand dollars were cracked. The view was spectacular. Mr. Fetner took a step toward the ledge and pointed across the sound.

“When it’s clear, you can see the people walking across the water,” he said. “The house just sits here taking it all in.”

He twisted his neck to look at Lands End.

“It’s gonna take a few days to knock it down.”

THE CONFUSION REGARDING the Lands End legend came about through a mix-up of Swope’s houses. When Fitzgerald was writing The Great Gatsby in a rented split-level in Great Neck, he would finish his days on the porch of the Mange, the home of sportswriter and humorist Ring Lardner. A few houses down East Shore Road, on the backside of Great Neck that lips the mouth of Manhasset Bay, Swope owned a house more modest than his later Sands Point mansion, though certainly no less debauched.

“It was party all the time,” Mr. Lewis, Swope’s biographer, told The Observer. “People were out there every weekend. Supposedly there were two sets of servants—one to work all day and one to work all night. The card games were the big numbers, and the guests were everyone who was anyone.”

Scott and Zelda, of course, partook.

“More than once, on Monday mornings, when the staff were going out to clean up things, they would find Scott Fitzgerald asleep on the lawn,” Herbert Bayard Swope Jr. told Croquet World in 2005. (He died in 2008.) “They’d wake him up and send him home.”

Fitzgerald scholars agree that the author modeled West Egg on Great Neck. But there’s no evidence he ever visited Lands End. Steven Goldleaf, a professor at Pace University who made a documentary about the writer’s relationship to Long Island, called this “a kind of obvious mistake for people to make.”

“Sure, Swope invited Fitzgerald to all these fabulous parties which were inspiration for the book,” Mr. Goldleaf told The Observer. “But not at that house.”

Sands Point historian Irmgard Carras has spent the past month swatting off writers and residents who asked why these people are tearing down Daisy Buchanan’s house.

“They tried to make that ‘the Great Gatsby House,’ but it’s not visible from Great Neck,” she said. “You go over to Great Neck and try to see it, and you cannot. You cannot see Lands End.”

One can, however, catch a glimpse of the house from Kings Point, the northernmost tip of the Great Neck egg. This fact makes Ruth Prigozy—professor of English at Hofstra and executive director of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society—a believer in the myth of Lands End.

“The two of them”—Fitzgerald and Lardner—“used to sit on the porch and drink and look across the water, and when you look across the water, you can’t see Lands End,” Ms. Prigozy told The Observer. “But they used to go to parties at Kings Point, and you can see Lands End from there. I think that he would see Lands End, and that he was there a couple of times. I think he was tremendously impressed by it.”

There’s also Monica Randall, author of Mansions of Long Island’s Gold Coast, and her fervent claims that the deniers simply haven’t talked to the right people. Her research, decades ago, gave her access to the butlers and caretakers who staffed Lands End in its heyday. She claims that before they died, these witnesses possessed the real story.

“There were hundreds of people still alive, and they were still pretty sharp,” Ms. Randall told The Observer. “Those are the people I pestered relentlessly. I would follow them around with a notebook and camera. This had to be captured—well, Fitzgerald already captured it, but people think it’s fiction! To this day, people think that book was fiction. They were all real people. I have a list somewhere …”

She trailed off, shuffled papers for a second and then admitted she didn’t know where her list had gone.

THE BULLDOZER ARRIVED at the driveway of 15 Hoffstots Lane on the morning of Saturday, April 16. It rolled down to the water’s edge, and after it raised its massive metal appendage over the house and toward Long Island Sound, the demolition of Lands End began. The claw barreled into the brittle walls, wedged forcefully through the windows, and ravaged the structure until the fatigued frame collapsed like a Jenga tower. The stairs disassembled and unfolded as the rooms were crushed, floor upon floor amassed as a pile of rubble.

“Of course, it’s sad,” Mr. Fetner, who presided over the spectacle, said. “It was a great house and a great part of the time. But nobody’s interested in living in a home like that. We’ll build magnificent homes again, just for today’s society.”

And when the five homes of Seagate at Sands Point go up, the millionaire owners won’t see the Jay Gatsbys and the Herbert Bayard Swopes and the Virginia Kraft Paysons. But they will still be there. The plot where Lands End once stood tall now only has history, its old facts and old fictions, an existence borne back ceaselessly into the past.

“If and when I go,” said Ms. Payson, “I will come back and haunt every one of those houses.”

nfreeman [at] observer.com | @nfreeman1234

Yesterday we made note of the fact that businessman Randy Altschuler is gearing up for another run for Congress against incumbent Democrat Tim Bishop, and then today reported how the Bishop camp is already throwing potshots. 

Now Altschuler is out with some potshots of his own, with a spokesman sending along a statement accusing Bishop of a.) playing politics, b.) going negative and c.) doing the bidding of Nancy Pelosi.

Says Altschuler spokesman Christopher Maloney:

"It's unfortunate for taxpayers and families in Suffolk County that Tim Bishop's lack of seniority in Congress affords him and his staff plenty of down time to continue baseless personal attacks against Randy Altschuler.

"The constituents who pay their salaries remain hopeful they will wake up, step out of campaign mode, and fight to protect jobs and control the unrestrained deficit spending which they have championed during their eight years in Washington.

"It's no surprise that Tim Bishop and his flacks want to spend today, the one year anniversary of his vote to pass Obamacare, talking about anything but his blind loyalty to Nancy Pelosi."

Maloney took issue with Bishop's spokesman Jon Schneider's assertion that Bishop has an advantage since 2010 was such a Republican year, arguing that it remains unclear what kind of year 2012 will be, and that the Republican nominee could be boosted by the lack of a primary challenge.

Yesterday, G.O.P county chairman John Jay LaValle told The Politicker that it was the party's goal to get behind a candidate early on.

The Glen Cove-based company provides a simple, free web-based video chat service where up to 12 people can join a video chat room.

The Facebook app the company released in August is killing it. The app already has 2.4 million users, making Tinychat the most popular video chat app on Facebook, according to TechCrunch:

It's easy to see why it became so popular - the application is designed to spread virally among Facebook friends, as you can invite online contacts to join you in a live video chat in a snap, through Facebook Chat, without the need for your friend to have the application installed.

The best part about this success story is that the two-year old Tinychat is 100% bootstrapped -- apparently that's possible in the suburbs!

ajeffries [at] observer.com | @adrjeffries

In other words, life on the outside remains precarious, something to watch.

"The overall market is starting to see real activity. It's starting to see more and more people looking at space," said Cory Gubner, president and CEO of RHYS, a commercial real estate services firm in Stamford, Conn. "That's a big change from three to six months ago. We always say when there's smoke, there's fire. There's a lot of smoke right now."

Long Island

"In Long Island, vacancies have been stable since the beginning of 2009; rents have only fallen 5.5 percent from the peak," said Aaron Jodka, senior real estate economist at research giant CoStar Group. "The availability rate has also stabilized. That has to do with an overall stronger economy. It didn't fall as hard."

Long Island has a strong presence of education and health care companies, which have weathered the downturn better than industries that are more dependent on the stock market. These "slow-and-steady" tenants have led to a more stable leasing market, said Mr. Jodka.

Major leases in the first quarter of 2010 included JPMorgan Chase's 15,199-square-foot lease at Atria West in Nassau County and Hub Insurance's deal for 7,015 square feet at 1393 Veterans Memorial Highway in Suffolk County.

The vacancy rate is just under 10 percent in Suffolk and Nassau counties, among the lowest in the tristate region. Asking rents are generally more expensive than in New Jersey, but less than in Westchester and Fairfield counties.

And in perhaps a sign of the region's viability, Jones Lang LaSalle opened a new office in Melville, in Nassau County, at the end of February.

New Jersey

Northern New Jersey, particularly along the Hudson River, has long been known as Manhattan's back office. The area's access to public transportation, including the PATH train and Amtrak, have been an asset, and tax incentives led to an office boom in the 1990s.

But now, the nearly 93 million square feet of Class A and B office space throughout Northern Jersey have a vacancy rate of over 22 percent, due to a lack of jobs, according to Paul Giannone, managing director at Jones Lang LaSalle. The state's major industries include pharmaceutical, telecommunications and financial services companies, none of which have been hiring extensively since the downturn.

New Jersey as a whole has long teetered as California East, and that should continue through 2010.

The state's northern part has a 13.5 percent vacancy rate overall, according to CoStar. And while that number has stabilized, the availability rate is increasing.

"It's a very weak climate for office space," Mr. Giannone said. "It will be a tenant's market for the foreseeable future."

Activity has increased, but 80 percent of deals that Mr. Giannone has seen are lease renewals, often with tenants consolidating space and moving into spaces that are 10 to 20 percent smaller than existing buildings. Cheaper rents, averaging about $24 per square foot, have allowed some tenants to "trade up" to Class A space, but these rates are not enough to support significant new development, which has stalled in this decade. Seventy-five percent of the office buildings in northern New Jersey are 15 to 20 years old, but developers and investors have renovated older office buildings to attract new tenants.

One exception is 111 Wood Avenue, a 250,000-square-foot new development in the Metropark office complex in Iselin. The developers broke ground on the project at the start of the downturn, but decided to continue building. There has been some interest in the building, but no leases completed, said Mr. Giannone, who is involved in the project. It is expected to be completed in September.

By then, the market probably still won't have fully recovered, but any progress is highly dependent on job creation. Godspeed, Governor Christie.

Westchester

The vacancy rate in Westchester rose to 17.6 percent at the end of the first quarter, up from 15.9 percent in the fourth quarter of 2009, according to Cushman & Wakefield. Part of this change was the availability of more than 80,000 square feet at 113 King Street in Armonk. The property is being marketed as a corporate headquarters building by Cushman & Wakefield.

Leasing activity is definitely up. Major deals in the fourth quarter included Allen System Corp.'s leasing 26,394 square feet at 287 Bowman Avenue in Port Chester and Avon Products' leasing 21,670 square feet at 44 South Broadway in White Plains.

Westchester is comparable to its neighbor, Fairfield, in terms of unemployment, with 5.7 percent fewer jobs compared to the peak. Rents are slightly lower overall.

The county is home to many law firms and diverse professional services, which aren't as vulnerable to stock market swings. "They can be more resilient, depending on business models," said Mr. Jodka of CoStar.

"We've done a couple hundred thousand square feet of deals in the last four months," said Jeff Newman, an executive vice president at Malkin Properties. "I think companies with expiring leases are seeing this is the last opportunity to lock in value."

Malkin Properties has seen the law firm Eckert Seamans expand twice at 10 Bank Street in White Plains, and Fifth Street Capital and Pearson Education have also recently signed leases. The building is near the Metro North train station, and again, convenient access to transit-particularly into New York City-is a major asset to outer-market properties.

Fairfield

The office market in Fairfield County centers on Stamford, a nexus of financial services and home to the headquarters of the Royal Bank of Scotland, as well as to the capital markets division of UBS AG. It was hard hit by the recession, and the leasing market is still the weakest compared to nearby areas, with a vacancy rate of 26 percent, said Mr. Jodka of CoStar.

But there are signs of life, with a "surge" in leasing in the last two quarters that included tenants outside of the financial industry. Nestle Waters moved from Greenwich to 165,000 square feet at 900 Long Ridge Road in Stamford. Priceline.com also took 69,822 square feet at 800 Connecticut Avenue in Norwalk, and Knight Capital subleased 66,485 feet at 33 Benedict Place in Greenwich, according to Cushman & Wakefield.

Another major lease came last week at High Ridge Park in Stamford, with computer security companies Protegrity Corporation and McAfee signing leases there. But 148,000 square feet are still vacant. The on-site amenities, including a cafe, reasonable operating costs and proximity to affordable housing in nearby towns were all cited as reasons for the lease.

"A suburban location like High Ridge Park is attractive to someone who's commuting from Danbury, Trumbull or Shelton," said Steve Baker, a senior director at Cushman & Wakefield, the broker for the property.

Activity has even spilled over to the construction industry.

"Two thousand ten has been a nice rebound," said Thomas Durels, CEO of Malkin Construction. "We're seeing a very nice pickup. We have some projects that were diverted in 2009, and are moving forward in 2010; 2009 was an anomaly. My expectation is that 2010 reflects a more sustainable level of activity." The company has two schools under construction, along with a multifamily unit called Metro Green in the south end of Stamford.

In the same area is Harbor Point, a major new development that will include two office towers totaling around 500,000 square feet and apartment units, with three residential buildings slated to open next month. But developer Building and Land Technology has yet to secure any commercial tenants, and the two office towers' fate is uncertain. (The company did not respond to requests for comment.)

BY ALL APPEARANCES, the outer office leasing market has escaped the abyss in 2010. But for those looking for peak levels anytime soon, don't hold your breath.

"I don't know what normal is anymore," said Mr. Gubner of RHYS. "The market has been so weird. Two thousand seven couldn't be normal; 2009 can't be normal because it was horrible. I think we've hit bottom and started the upturn."

rli@observer.com