Note Type
Cataloging NoteNote
Images need captions and dates.Note Type
Historical NoteNote
William Shannon Gosman, who was born in Amagansett in 1940, is a member of the family who opened a small food stand catering to commercial fishermen at a dock his father ran on Montauk Harbor beginning in 1943. Over time, Gosman’s Dock grew into a sprawling complex of restaurants, shops, a commercial dock, wholesale fish processing facilities, and a retail market, all set on the waterfront.
Bill Gosman grew up in Amagansett and in a residence at Gosman’s Dock called the Round House during a time when Montauk boasted any number of colorful characters, especially at the fishing docks, as well as a relatively unsupervised environment for young people. He was a witness to the aftermath of the Pelican disaster as well as the growth and heyday of sportfishing on Montauk Harbor, not to mention cultural and socioeconomic changes in general. The Montauk of his youth, including his own labor at the commercial dock, presents a hardscrabble contrast to what seems to be a more white-collar Montauk in his retirement years.