Real LI

The bad rap on Long Island is that there’s no affordable housing. Not true.

It’s not Lincoln’s log cabin, but this former summer bungalow of logs in Miller Place harkens back to the tranquility of a past era.

The three-bedroom ranch is set in a woody area, where several dozen bungalows were built in the 1930s and 1940s and bought primarily by firefighters, police and teachers who came from the city for the beach, said Carol Wendell, an associate broker at the Miller Place office of Prudential Douglas Elliman Real Estate.

The cabins were made of cedar or redwood logs, because they were inexpensive materials back then and they were trucked in along Route 25A, the agent said.

“It was like $900 for a one bedroom and maybe $1,800 for two bedrooms . . . for the entire house,” said Wendell, who checked with a friend whose father had built some of the bungalows.

The area’s been known by different names, including Pipe Stave Hollow and Laurel, for the mountain laurel bushes that grow there, showing a profusion of small pink or white blossoms.

To Wendell, who has lived in Miller Place for 35 years, the area hasn’t changed much, beyond residents expanding the original log cabins. She used to take her children to the summer bungalow area, a memory that’s reminiscent of a Currier and Ives print.

“I used to take my children on a sled there and have my dog pull the sled when the snow would first fall,” said the agent, who lives less than a mile away. “It’s all hills, small, little, little hills. We’d go out by 10 o’clock at night. The dogs loved the snow. It was great.

“It’s just so serene,” she said of the community now. “You don’t have a lot of traffic. People are more walking than driving.”

The house went on the market last week at $297,500. Much of the inside is original, from knotty pine on the walls and wood floors to kitchen cabinets. The bungalow was built in 1941 and sits on almost an acre.