There is a place in the family record that doesn’t appear on any vital document, that nobody on the site had pinned down by exact address until May 25, 2026, and that the family memory named only by what they called it: the bungalow. 104 Asharoken Avenue, Northport, NY 11768 — a beach house on Long Island Sound, sitting on the slim Asharoken peninsula that separates Northport Bay from the Sound itself, in Suffolk County.
It was the home of Takis and Alina. They were the childless couple in the family — Takis the NYC physician, Alina the Polish-born refugee who had finally rejoined him in 1946 — and the bungalow was theirs. They owned it. They kept it. Each weekend they opened it to John and Ines and the three nieces and to Nene, who lived with them year-round in Washington Heights and came along to the Sound as a matter of course. The bungalow was a childless aunt-and-uncle’s house turned into a nieces-and-nephews summer home. Eftyhia died there in December 1968 because she had been living there with the children’s only summer hosts for years.
Three of the four people who could now describe it from the inside are gone. The fourth, Aline Pepe, wrote it down years ago.
”What place do I miss most?”
Aline’s newspaper column — published while she was a Keene, NY resident, undated in the family archive but written some decades after the events it describes — is the one prose memoir on file of what an evening at the bungalow felt like. It is reproduced here word for word.
What place do I miss most? Without a doubt: My father’s shoulders, when his back was young and I was so much younger.
From there I could see my whole world. There always seemed to be a warm amber glow coming through our beach bungalow windows. I could see my sisters setting the table as my grandmother was busy frying the flounder we’d caught in the sound that day. My uncle would be sitting nearby sipping an ouzo, the light of his cigarette seemingly dancing on air to the melody of my aunt’s piano playing and my mother’s voice singing along.
My father would point to the sky and show me Venus and tell me Greek myths about the constellations while I nuzzled my chin in his hair. The breeze blew.
I’ve traveled quite a bit, climbed some grand mountains, but nothing can compete with that view.
— Aline Pepe, Keene, NY
Who’s in the column
Every named figure in that scene is on this site already. Reading the column in cast order:
- My father’s shoulders — John Lazare Jeannopoulos, then in his 40s or 50s
- My sisters setting the table — Mya Durso (Myriam, the eldest, adopted) and Eftichia “Claudine” Boyhan (the middle sister)
- My grandmother frying the flounder we’d caught in the sound — Eftyhia Karamitrou Jeannopoulos (“Nene”), the matriarch, somewhere between her late seventies and eighty-seven (she died at the bungalow in December 1968)
- My uncle sipping an ouzo — almost certainly Takis Jeannopoulos, John’s older brother, who shared the Washington Heights apartment building with John’s family and would have been at the bungalow weekends
- My aunt at the piano — almost certainly Alina Jeannopoulos, Takis’s Polish-born wife
- My mother singing along — Ines Valda, the French Resistance survivor turned Berlitz NYC director, then known in the household as “Madame Jean”
- The narrator — Aline Athena herself, then perhaps eight or ten years old, on her father’s shoulders
That’s three generations of one apartment-building household, transposed from Manhattan to a sound-side porch on a summer night. The Polish refugee aunt at the piano. The Anatolian-Greek matriarch frying the local fish. The French Resistance survivor singing.
Eftyhia at the bungalow, with three granddaughters
The other survivor of the bungalow on this site is a single faded color snapshot — pink-shifted now from age, but legible in every important detail. Eftyhia (Nene) at the bungalow, with three of her granddaughters. The bungalow porch is visible at the right edge; through the window behind her is what looks like the water.
The eldest girl standing — older, taller, in a white shirt and a long patterned skirt — is most likely Mya. The middle girl smiling broadly into the camera is most likely Claudine (“Effie”). The youngest, in Nene’s arms looking past the camera, is most likely Aline herself — the child who would later write the column reproduced above. Nene is wearing her summer dress, her hair pulled back as Aline described it.
This is the actual bungalow that John would lift Aline onto his shoulders inside. The same bungalow on whose porch Eftyhia would die in December 1968. The picture is undated and probably taken sometime in the early-to-mid 1960s; everyone in the frame would lose her within five or ten years of when the shutter clicked.
104 Asharoken Avenue, Northport
The address is 104 Asharoken Avenue, Northport, NY 11768 — pinned down on the family record May 25, 2026 by Alex. The site is on Asharoken, a slim incorporated village that runs north from Northport along a narrow sand spit between Northport Bay (to the south) and Long Island Sound (to the north). The bungalow sat on the Sound side. The “sound” in Aline’s column was Long Island Sound itself, with the flounder caught the same day off the same beach the porch faced.
The address re-ties a thread that had been quietly orphaned on the site. John Lazare’s documented later home address — 6 Diane Lane, East Northport, NY — sits about three miles inland from 104 Asharoken Ave, in the same town. The family’s Long Island center of gravity was Northport itself: Takis and Alina’s bungalow on the water, John and Ines’s later everyday house inland, all in the same school district. The retirement years of John and Ines were lived in the same town that had held the bungalow for both generations.
What happened to the bungalow
The bungalow stayed with Takis and Alina through both of their lives. Takis died of cancer at age 65 in November 1976, predeceasing Alina. Alina kept the house for the next thirty-three years.
JEANNOPOULOS — Alina, (née Bacho) of Asharoken-Northport on February 16, 2010, in her 90th year. Loving wife of the late Dr. Takis Jeannopoulos.
She died at the bungalow itself, on February 16, 2010, in her 90th year — at the same Asharoken address where her mother-in-law Eftyhia had died 41 years before, where her husband Takis had spent every summer of his American life, where she had played piano on the porch on the night Aline wrote down. 104 Asharoken Avenue was sold only after Alina’s death. That single obituary line also gave the family her maiden name — Bacho — for the first time, and an arrival-to-end arc of seven decades: Łuck 1919 → Le Havre 1946 → Manhattan + Asharoken with Takis until his 1976 death → Asharoken alone, in his absence, until February 2010.
The Polish refugee who played the piano in Aline’s column was, in the end, the last family member to walk out of the bungalow before someone else’s deed was signed at the closing table. The Asharoken chapter and her life closed at the same address on the same morning.