Billy Joel Is Selling the Mansion He First Saw While Dredging Oysters
The celebrated musician has decided to part with the house of his wildest childhood dreams.
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Rukmini Callimachi interviewed Billy Joel for this article, and spent an afternoon touring his property.
A teenager, then known as William Martin Joel, lived in the working-class suburb of Hicksville — his family so limited that they didn’t own a TV. He took a tiring minimum wage job dredging oysters.
The dredge crisscrossed the waters of Long Island Sound, including a bay that curves like a comma and faces some of the most expensive real estate in the United States. From the boat, he could see a stately brick mansion.
“Rich bastards,” he thought to himself. “I’ll never live in a house like that.”
Several decades and dozens of Top 40 hits later, Billy Joel — the oysterman turned piano man — bought that very mansion on Centre Island in 2002.
Mr. Joel, 75, has told that story many times, right down to throwing in the vulgarity, maybe because it’s so unbelievable: “The word that applies is ‘absurd.’ I grew up in a quarter-acre lot house in Hicksville. And I would ride my bicycle up here and take a bike ride and look at all the rich people and cuss them out,” he says.
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