1 minute read
A Ladies Story
By Joe Enright
corporation in order to buy land in Amagansett for erecting and maintaining a public hall. Many cake sales and donations later, they built Miankoma Hall in 1903, using the local Native American word for “meeting place” to identify its new venue for the plays, concerts, dances, exhibits and many gatherings that would ensue.
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Come the Depression, the Ladies sold Miankoma Hall and poured that money into a 3,800 foot concrete sidewalk along Main Street, Montauk Road and Atlantic Avenue.
But the Hall lived on in the hands of the Junior Order of United American Mechanics, then the American Legion, and in 1945, it became the studio and residence of a renowned Japanese-American pianist, Tsuya Matsuki. Born in Salem in 1897, raised in Brookline, she won a scholarship to the London Academy of Music, and returned to the States to begin a lifetime of teaching aspiring teenagers to play more than chopsticks, first for top-line institutions and then as an independent instructor in Amagansett.
A local scribe, Christopher Walsh, penned a marvelous reminiscence of his 1970s lessons with Miss Matsuki on Miankoma Lane, describing her as “the most exotic being imaginable” (East Hampton Star, Oct 25, 2012).
Indeed, Matsuki was a strikingly beautiful woman, the product of a Japanese father and a mother of IrishEnglish heritage. Although she never married, she did have a lifelong companion: Nina Harter was the daughter of a Flatbush professor (Eugene Wendell Harter)–often described by the press as “America’s foremost Gilbert & Sullivan authority.” Nina and “Sue” (as Tsuya was often called), first lived together in the 1930s, in the Prospect
Park South home where Eugene died, not long after the three of them traveled together on a European operatic tour. In a remarkable coincidence, long before Nina and Sue would meet, Eugene chose Amagansett to premiere an opera he composed for the benefit of the Amagansett Field Club. Nina died in 1966 and was buried in Oak Grove Cemetery on Windmill Lane, a short walk from Miankoma Lane. In 1990, Tsuya Mitsuki shared the same gravestone with her lifelong friend.
