Greenport Motel Featured In Fashion Magazine Spread

The spotlight is on one of Greenport's longtime motels after it was featured in a photo spread in Harper's Bazaar featuring high-profile designer Stella McCartney.

The photo spread is featured in the current issue of the magazine, although the shoot took place in June at the Silver Sands.

According to Terry Keefe, whose family owns the motel — Keefe returns home from Los Angeles every summer to help run the front desk of the mom-and-pop business, just as he's done since he was a kid — the magazine spread represents the first time such a famous designer has been featured at the site.

"It's great," Keefe said.

Over the years, however, offers have come in to shoot at the Silver Sands. "We want to avoid things like horror films," he laughed. The motel, he said, has been used for location shoots for Vogue and Mademoiselle.

Since 1961, the Silver Sands, owned by Keefe's mother Jean Burden and uncle Ed Jurzenia, has offered guests a peaceful vacation by the water, with both rooms and cabins available.

Keefe, a journalist and comic book writer involved in indie film who has been spending summers at the Silver Sands since he was five years old, said the motel was also the site recently for classes offered by the Manhattan Film Institute in July. 

"We're trying to bring out more film-related projects," Keefe said. "The people are here, anyway."

Hollywood has given the  Silver Sands the nod in the past, Keefe said: Indie director Todd Haynes wrote the film Velvet Goldmine while staying there in Room #1 during the middle of the winter for a few weeks in the late 90s. "He eventually directed it, starring Christian Bale," Keefe added.