Ah, if I were a rich man…

By Colin W. Sargent

Dateline: Wednesday, February 17, 1965

The fire was spotted 3.4 miles away by a lookout at the Fletcher’s Neck Life-Saving Station in Biddeford Pool. 

By the time the screeching ladder trucks and pumpers reached the 33 wave-splashed acres of Hoyt’s Neck, the billowing plumes of acrid smoke and 40-foot-high flames had engulfed the hilltop palace. “Granite Point,” commissioned in 1913 by Manhattan stockbroker, financier, railroad owner, and dabbler in the new-fangled movie industry Crawford W. Livingston, Jr., was one of the most significant summer “cottages” in the Northeast. Now it was the eye of an inferno.