Tuesday, April 23, 2024
Oyster Bay residents were rubbing shoulders with the stars as the Arty and Evans-Sheppard families won gold at the 65th Annual New York Emmy Awards on Oct. 6 in two separate categories for documentary short films on their home and family history, respectively.
The Arty family of Oyster Bay had already made headlines in local and national newspapers thanks to the effects of matriarch Jaime, who has been continuously documenting the ongoing process of renovating the family’s 1834 mansion on her Instagram and Facebook accounts. The house has a storied history and was owned by a well-known local judge and abolitionist William Townsend McCoun as well as Theodore Roosevelt III, the eldest son of the famous president.
Arty explained that an editor from Newsday named Estelle Lander reached out to her and expressed interest in making a short documentary piece on the family’s story. She and her husband Frantz discussed the history of the property, as well as the exhaustive process of turning it from a crumbling wreck to a livable and lovely home.
“Being an African American family, the fact that the previous owner of this house was fighting to end slavery and was on the good side of history was just incredible to us,” Arty explained. “I didn’t realize that people, you know, would find any of that remotely interesting, but they loved it.”
The program, which was titled “Restoring an 1834 Mansion in Oyster Bay” and debuted on Nov. 21, 2021, was selected as a finalist in the Historical/Cultural – News (Single Shift) category.
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