When Ted Conklin first walked through the front door, he saw a canvas.
The year was 1971, but inside the neglected brick building, it might as well have been the turn of the 20th century — between the gas lamps, rusted coal stove, outhouses in the back and an all-pervasive layer of dust that he could scoop with a snow shovel.
Still, he wanted it.
Conklin envisioned what the place would become, both the establishment itself — now, famously, The American Hotel — and Sag Harbor, then a depressed village following back-to-back economic downturns, first as a whaling port and then as an industrial hub.
“It hadn’t really been touched since a renovation they might have done in the 1870s — 1900 maybe,” Conklin said of the building. “So I started in on the rebuilding of it, as something that would be functional. I was just in a survival mode for the first 20 years, and now I’m back in survival mode. It’s like being a kid again.”
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