Josh Sapan has slept here too — as often as his schedule permits. But 33 years ago, when Sapan learned of Milford’s many charms from a friend, he knew nothing about the town’s past. Still, he was sufficiently captivated to buy a waterfront cabin.
It was enough that he could look out his windows after dark and see no illumination but the moon, enough that the Delaware rolled along mere steps from his door.
“I just love houses on rivers and I really love this house,” said Sapan, 67, the president and chief executive of AMC Networks, a Manhattan-based company that owns and operates cable channels including AMC, BBC America and SundanceTV. “I don’t know what it is. I find it quite magical, if that’s the right word.”
Sapan had yet to learn that novelist Stephen Crane had camped out for a summer in Milford with friends and published a satirical newspaper during his stay, that Milford was the birthplace of the conservation movement, and that in the 1950s and 1960s, it was the red hot center of the science fiction writers’ universe, even figuring in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater,” because several big names in the genre, notably literary agent Virginia Kidd, had settled in town.
Now, three decades later, Sapan is fully conversant with the rich cultural and literary history of Milford. And somewhere along the way, he’s become one of the town’s biggest boosters, guiding a visitor around the Hotel Fauchère, which dates back to the middle of the 19th century, and the recently revitalized Milford Theater, a former silent movie house that’s now a venue for special events like the annual Readers & Writers Festival. Since its founding four years ago, the annual event has attracted large crowds (average attendance is 1,000) and the likes of Alan Alda, Gloria Steinem, biographer Patricia Bosworth and thriller author Lee Child.
“Josh loves Milford the way I do,” said Sean Strub, the town’s mayor and owner of the Hotel Fauchère, where Carnegie, Henry Ford, Evelyn Nesbit — the notorious “Girl in the Red Velvet Swing” — Robert Young and Leachman all checked in for a spell.
In fact, Sapan is doing his bit to add to the town’s luster. Perhaps because he knows a lot of creative people who know a lot of other creative people, perhaps because he likes to share, and perhaps because he’s a staunch proponent of the “love me, love my house” philosophy, his cabin has become something of a retreat for writers, photographers and composers.
“Certain people are finicky about certain things. I’m probably finicky about something but I’m not finicky about the cabin,” said Sapan, who is in residence several weekends a year. He’s sometimes there with his wife, Ann Foley, a former television executive, sometimes with the couple’s children and sometimes with college pals.
During the summer months, Sapan rents the cabin out to friends and friends of friends, strictly by word-of-mouth. The rest of the year, out go the invitations to stay there free of charge. “The more it’s filled the better. I love it when people go there,” he said.
Guests have included Colum McCann, winner of the National Book Award in 2009 for his novel “Let the Great World Spin,” who checked into the cabin on four separate occasions in the last two years, sometimes for as long as 10 days at a time, to work on his new novel “Apeirogon,” due out in February.
In 1994, when Frank McCourt was a summer renter, he wrote the first part of his Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir “Angela’s Ashes” out on the porch — there’s a historic plaque acknowledging this achievement affixed to the side of the cabin.
The cabin, built in the 1940s and decidedly unprepossessing when Sapan bought it — “really teeny and funky” is his description — has been renovated twice and provides all the comforts of home with none of its distractions.
During the first go-round, Sapan winterized the 1,000-square-foot structure that was built in the 1940s, opened up the kitchen and put in a fireplace using stones from a nearby creek. Later, he had the ceiling ripped out exposing the rafters, added a sleeping loft, redid the sleeping porch and added a bathroom. Wisely, he didn’t touch the built-in day beds. Depending on where guests choose to flop, they can have a view upriver or down.
The décor hews to the rustic theme: wood stools, leather sofa, Ikat patterns. The sole outlier is the rolling desk chair that McCann bought during his first stay and left behind after his last. “Architecturally and design-wise it’s not to my liking,” said Sapan, who tucked the chair in a corner of a bedroom upstairs.
Once he gets going on something, just try and stop him. That’s why there are so very many throw pillows. “I went crazy,” Sapan said. “For a year or two I kept buying them.”
No one is complaining. Certainly not McCann, who knew immediately that here was a place he could work. “You look out the large plate glass windows and you feel like you’re part of the river, carried along by it,” he said.
“One of the joys of being there was the absolute sense of isolation; you feel completely removed from the world, and yet it is a 10-minute walk to a fine restaurant or a good bar,” continued McCann, who met Sapan through a mutual friend at a dinner party in 2016. At some point in the course of the evening he was offered the keys to the cabin, to say nothing of the keys to Sapan’s car. (That generosity is noted in the acknowledgments of “Apeirogon”: “My deepest thanks for the cottage in Milford, Pennsylvania — what a place to work.”)
“I loved the sense that I was walking into a home where Frank McCourt had written,” McCann said. “There was something so welcoming about that: Come in, McCann, have a glass of whiskey, not too much, mind you. You’ve got writing to do.”
Like McCann, Ellen Frey met Sapan through a mutual friend at a party, in this instance a gathering in 1991 to watch the Oscars. He told her he had a house in Milford; perhaps she’d be interested in spending time there. Intrigued, Frey checked out the cabin with her boyfriend, one Frank McCourt, “and we thought ‘Yeah, of course,’” she recalled. “It was a peaceful and joyous place to be.”
Neither of them knew about Milford, Pennsylvania, “but Frank knew he had a book in him,” said Frey, who married McCourt under a tree outside the cabin in August of 1994. “He started writing ‘Angela’s Ashes’ in October of that year. I remember distinctly, sitting with a friend on the lovely deck with that spectacular view of the Delaware and having a glass of wine. Frank read us the first couple of pages of the book and we toasted it because we thought it was spectacular.”
At one point, she and McCourt tried to buy the cabin. Sapan wanted to hang on to it, so they bought elsewhere in town.
Some months back, one of Sapan’s AMC colleagues, Lary Tuckett, was invited to use the cabin. A photographer, Tuckett left behind some moody black and white pictures of the Delaware. He had been preceded by Sapan’s friend Bruce Wolosoff, a classical composer.
“I know Josh wants to make his cabin an artist’s retreat,” said McCann. “It’s a great idea but it’s also a terrible idea, because I want to keep it a secret.”
This article originally appeared in
.