A shark’s mouth, a Big Duck and a Casa Basso

Few people who pass inside the giant shark’s jaws at Atlantic Seafood recognize it as a portal into another period in American history, a point where affordable automobiles and an open road beckoned American families, when a vernacular art form was born to counteract the speed with which they passed through towns and help commercial enterprises survive the Great Depression.

Cars and commerce have been a part of our culture since the 1920s, and while merchants have been using pictorial signage since the time of the ancient Egyptians, the popularity of motorcars prompted a significant revival. When Martin Mauer, owner of the Bruno Duck farm in the Upper Mills section of Riverhead, designed and built his Big Duck, he was charting new design territory: the beginning of duck architecture, an art form still taught in architecture schools.

The often illiterate patrons of medieval shopkeepers and tradesmen were guided by easy-to-recognize pictorial images that corresponded with the goods or services sold. A cobbler might hang a boot, the baker a loaf of bread, a tailor a needle and thread.  One of the vestiges of these displays, the barber’s pole, represented the part they played as medical practitioners with the stripes signifying bloodletting: red for blood, blue for veins and white for bandages.

By the 1920s, merchants in California were using gigantic and often whimsical three-dimensional objects outside their shops to catch the eye of drivers. On vacation with his wife, Mauer was concerned about his business surviving the depression. He needed something to set his farm apart from the competition. The moment they saw the large coffee cup and saucer outside a café, he knew he had the answer.

Back in Riverhead, he set about designing a large duck. He wanted it to identify his products and house a shop in which they could be sold. The result was a 20-foot-high, 30-foot-long and 15-foot-wide duck.

Two theater set/prop designers from NYC were hired along with a carpenter who would create a mesh armature on which four layers of white Atlas cement were applied to create the body.  Fittingly, a pair of Model T taillights became the eyes.

Outside his duck farm on Route 25, the big bird housed a store selling eggs and duck products. It marked the beginning of “duck architecture,” an innovative building design from the Modernist period of art and architecture whose outward appearance advertises wares sold inside.

The June 1931 opening made local headlines. VIPs from Atlas Cement Company visited and used a photo of the duck on their promotional calendar for 1931. Popular Mechanics featured a story on the duck. Steamships—the favored mode of transatlantic travel at the time—used photos of the duck on menus featuring their LI duckling entrees. In time, it became a local landmark, taking its place among other roadside structures that proliferated along roadways, the giant hotdogs, hats, shoes coffee pots.  In the post-war era, as families moved to suburbs and looked for entertainment and tourist options, miniature golf courses, drive-in movies, motels—hotels for motorists—and fast-food stops followed. Sinclair Gasoline stations had a giant green dinosaur posted outside. McDonald’s introduced its “golden arches” in 1953. In Center Moriches, a shark’s mouth formed the Main Street entrance to Atlantic Seafood.

An area well-known for its boating, fishing and recreational water activities, visitors and residents were served by Lassen’s Hi-Way, Cerullo Brothers, Silly Lilly marinas in East Moriches and Skidmore’s in Center Moriches, where boat rentals, supplies and snacks were sold. On Main Street, Chet Wilcox sold bait and listened to tall fish stories. A sign outside a house opposite Belleview Avenue offered smoked eels for sale. And just down the road, George, owner of a popular swap shop, made lobster traps, before the shop transitioned to a seafood restaurant and market around 1979.

Another familiar landmark, The Casa Basso restaurant, opened in 1928 on the site once occupied by famed sculptor, wood carver, architect, painter and potter, Theophilus-Brower (1864-1932).

Brower created the castle as a pottery studio, basing his design on a castle he’d seen in Seville.

He created two important and familiar WW I memorials. The first, dedicated in 1922, sits in front of the school on Main Street in Eastport; the second, dedicated in 1923, memorializes the names of 21 servicemen and nurses from East Moriches who died during the war.

For New York, restaurateur M.L. Basso’s restaurant he created a series of colorful figures in dynamic poses, including a pair of dueling musketeers. A popular destination for decades, it remained a family-owned establishment until it was sold in 1958.

Martin Mauer eventually moved his big duck to a second duck farm in Flanders, where it has outlived its original purpose and achieved landmark status. In 1987, it was officially placed on the National Register of Historic Places. Today, it has transcended its function as a commercial market, becoming a local touchstone for the community and a symbol of the East End of Long Island.

With land prices soaring, the threat to the few remaining examples of duck architecture grows. A movement among architects and preservationists seeks to save the last of the drive-in movie theaters, rental cabins, roadside attractions like miniature golf courses and iconic displays now considered by scholars like John Margolies, author of “The End of the Road: Vanishing Highway Architecture in America,” to be ‘”part of a beautiful and intense expression of American individualism and the free enterprise system used by the small businessman who was not an artist.”