Suggested Donation: $10.00 per person

Karl Grossman will speak about the history—and future—of Gardiner’s Island. He will discuss the long-term preservation of the Island as the conservation easement barring development there expires in five years.

 Mr. Grossman is a full-time professor of journalism at the State University of New York/College at Old Westbury and an award-winning journalist. He writes a weekly column in the Shelter Island Reporter and other Suffolk County newspapers and had a long connection with the late Robert David Lion Gardiner, the 16th Lord of the Manor of Gardiner’s Island.
He initially visited Gardiner’s Island and conducted his first interview with Mr. Gardiner in 1971 when Mr. Gardiner welcomed a large camp-out of Boy Scouts on the 3,300 acre island. Privately held by the Gardiner family since Lion Gardiner acquired it from the Montaukett Indians in 1639, it is home to hundreds of bird species, freshwater ponds, lagoons, and a 1,000-acre white oak forest, Bostwick Woods, the largest stand of White Oak in the Northeast.
In 1972, Mr. Grossman got to know Mr. Gardiner further when Mr. Gardiner ran for Congress in the 1st Congressional District, which includes Shelter Island, on the Conservative Party ticket against Democratic incumbent Otis Pike of Riverhead in a protest to Mr. Pike’s effort for federal acquisition of the Island. Mr. Gardiner was subsequently a guest on Mr. Grossman’s weekly TV program on WLIW/21, the PBS station. Mr. Grossman, through the years, did more interviews with Mr. Gardiner on TV and for print.