Alvin Seymour Lane, retired New York attorney and seasonal resident of Aquinnah, formerly Gay Head, died Thursday, Sept. 13, of heart failure at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York city. He was 89.

Alvin S. Lane was born on June 17, 1918 in Englewood, N.J., the only child of Martin and Nettie Gans Lipschez. His father died when he was four months old, a victim of the influenza epidemic that claimed millions of lives after World War I. Mr. Lipschez was in the silk business in Paterson, N.J. Mr. Lane’s mother, to whom he was very close, died in 1999 at the age of 105.

Mr. Lane and his mother moved from New Jersey to Washington Heights, and then to Brooklyn, where he graduated from Erasmus Hall High School. After graduating from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Mr. Lane enrolled at Harvard Law School. World War II interrupted his education; he joined the Navy in 1942. When he left the service four years later, it was with the rank of lieutenant. A communications officer on the staff of Admiral Raymond Spruance, the commander of the Pacific Fleet, Mr. Lane saw action in major engagements, including the Battle of Midway.

When the war was over, Mr. Lane was assigned to duty at Quonset Naval Air Station, Quonset Point, R.I. His disagreement with a superior about codifying weather reports led to his disciplinary posting to the air station at Martha’s Vineyard Airport, where he spent one long winter. It was cold and dull. He hated the Vineyard and vowed never to return.

In 1946, Lieutenant Lane resumed his studies at Harvard Law School. The college considered him and other men who joined the war effort as members of their original class, so he was Harvard ’43.

He returned to New York city, working in the practice of law, ultimately becoming a partner in Wien, Lane, Klein. The firm’s syndication strategy with the Harry Helmsley firm allowed small investors, with as little as $5,000, opportunities to invest in large real estate projects. Wien, Lane, Klein and its clients prospered.

Wien, Lane, Klein became Wien, Lane, Klein & Purcell; today the firm is known as Wien and Malkin.

In 1948, on a blind date, he met Terese Lyons, a graduate of Brooklyn’s Adelphi Academy and Columbia University. She was employed in book production at the publishing house of Doubleday and Company. She, too, was an only child. They were married in April 1949, a year after they met on that first blind date.

After their wedding at the Pierre Hotel and a honeymoon in Bermuda, the Lanes settled in an apartment in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. They lived in Riverdale for 58 years, in two apartments and two houses, all within four blocks of each other.

Two daughters were born to the Lanes, Mary Jo in 1951, and Judith Lyons in 1953.

The Lanes enjoyed all the offerings of the city, attending theatre, ballet, and opera performances, and visiting galleries and museums. “We discovered you could buy art, and Alvin was a born collector,” Mrs. Lane said. This was in the 1950s, and many of the then so-called modern artists were living and working in New York, some struggling.

The Lanes began to collect the work of both prominent and obscure artists. Mr. Lane was “. . . tactile, he liked sculpture,” said his wife. “We have, over fifty years, acquired a collection of modern sculpture and related drawings that is quite unique.”

The Lanes made friends with many modern artists and dealers, including Alexander Calder, Theodor Roszak, Seymour Lipton and others. Sculptor Louise Nevelson became an especially close friend. The Lanes met Ms. Nevelson through a mutual friend. “We always liked her work,” said Mrs. Lane, “and she was wonderful, like a third grandmother in our family.”

Ms. Nevelson visited the Lanes on the Vineyard, and spent many happy hours with the family.

She found discarded wooden pieces along city streets that she incorporated into her massive sculptures. When she was a passenger in their car, she would often request the driver to pull over so she could pick up some item slated for the refuse wagon. Once, Mr. Lane exclaimed to yet another request to pull over, “Stop! Stop! Stop! I don’t have any more room in the trunk!”

When daughter Judy wanted a dollhouse, Mr. Lane took a woodworking course and built one for her, using a pattern from McCall’s magazine. Both parents worked on wallpapering and furnishing the tiny dwelling, but it was their artist friends who added the finest finishing touches. Theodore Roszak contributed six small paintings, about the size of stamps; Seymour Lipton donated the maquette, or small model, of his sculpture that is exhibited in the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington; and Louise Nevelson created a miniature assemblage, as compelling and intricate as her much larger works.

“Alvin cut up wooden clothespins on a band saw in his basement shop, and then made nine small one-inch balsa wood boxes,” said Mrs. Lane. “Louise filled the boxes with arrangements of small wooden bits, and the result is a masterpiece less than five inches square, which covers one wall in the dollhouse.”

Recalled daughter Judy, “Dad gave Louise a little bag of the cut-up clothespins and another bag of shavings and odd bits from the floor of his shop, along with the little boxes. This was the first small piece Louise ever made, and, when people saw it in her studio, everyone wanted one.”

“Louise made larger versions of the dollhouse wall, two feet by two feet, and they sold very well,” added Mrs. Lane. “Louise was broke, and she said Alvin had saved her life.”

Ms. Nevelson was famous for creating huge pieces of sculpture that only the wealthiest collectors or municipalities could afford. These smaller works were within the budgets of more modest collectors.

In 1995, the Lanes donated the collection of works by Louise Nevelson, Jean Dubuffet, Claes Oldenburg, Christo, Pablo Picasso, Jean Arp, Alexander Calder and David Smith to the Chazen Museum of Art at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

If the Navy had not introduced Alvin Lane to the Vineyard, the woman he married surely would have, and she changed his mind — and his heart — about the Island. He came to love it, and, a month before he died, said it was his favorite place on earth.

Mrs. Lane first came to the Vineyard in 1931, when she was 10 years old. “The polio epidemic closed the New York schools, and I had been in camp in New Hampshire. Since the Cape and Islands had a low incidence of polio, my parents brought me there,” she said. Her grandfather had a business in New Bedford and used to holiday on the Vineyard in the 1870s.

“In 1950, Alvin and I came back to the Island during the summer, and rented an apartment in Edgartown,” said Mrs. Lane. Subsequent summers found them staying at the Harborside Inn in Edgartown, then staying at Lew King’s Blueberry Hill Farm on the North Road. They were shopping for a house to buy, found none, and bought land from David Flanders Real Estate.

The property, on State Road in Gay Head, had belonged to Hope Flanders, and included a peat moss swamp, low-growing underbrush, and a high area which provided a fine view of Menemsha and Chilmark Ponds. In the early 1960s, local contractor Herbert Hancock built the house, which had been designed by a New York architect; Spencer Hilton and Elmer Silva completed the construction.

This rather unprepossessing piece of land became Alvin Lane’s canvas; trees, shrubs and other plantings his palette. He hired landscaper Craig Kingsbury of Vineyard Haven as his man in the field, and set to work. The low swampy area was converted to a pond, with Mr. Kingsbury as overseer. An astounding variety of trees and shrubs, some native and many exotic, was established, and Mr. Lane created an admirable arboretum. The Martha’s Vineyard Garden Club and the Conifers Society of America have toured the grounds.

“Dad said the idea was a Mondrian painting, not the shapes, but the primary colors, the reds, the yellows, the greens,” said his daughter Mary Jo. “He had this creative thing going, wanted to create his own environment,” she added. “In the Riverdale house, he landscaped indoors with sculpture, on the Vineyard, it was outdoors with trees.”

Mr. Lane bought trees from a nursery in New York, and also from John Gadowski in North Tisbury. Mr. Lane educated himself about growing things, with a remarkable intensity of focus and foresight. When the landscaping was completed, he could name every tree on the property. Some 40 years later, he could point out the thriving 40-foot tree that he had brought to the Island in a small pot.

He organized the Gay Head Taxpayers’ Association and was active in the arbitration and agreement with the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah.)

Mr. Lane was a very good, competitive tennis player, and many a lively contest was enjoyed on the court that Ernest Pachico built on the Gay Head property. “He loved the Vineyard for the tennis games with his friends, but he loved the beaches, and he especially loved lobster,” said daughter Mary Jo. “Our happiest times together were on the Island,” said Judy.

“We had a wonderful life,” Mrs. Lane enthused. Great travels took them to Egypt, Greece and Turkey, Africa, to France and England, and to Italy frequently. These trips were not for acquiring art, but for visits to museums and historic places.

Mr. Lane’s volunteer pursuits had him serving as director, trustee, board member or fellow, advancing the interests of Brandeis University, the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, the Lexington School for the Deaf, the Soho Center of Visual Arts, the New York Artists’ Equity Association, the Drawing Committee of the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Ittleson Center for Child Research. Vineyard charities he supported were Camp Jabberwocky, Martha’s Vineyard Hospital, and the Gay Head Library.

At a well-attended memorial service at New York’s Harvard Club on Sept. 20, among the speakers, former partner Robert Gelfman, said, “His abilities weren’t limited to legal matters and art collecting. He had considerable entrepreneurial skills. He, together with Stuart Gold, founded Rapidata, an early and successful startup data processing company.”

Mrs. Lane recalls that her husband, “financed Gold’s brainchild, who ran it. It was like a time-share computer company, where companies could buy time. These were the very early days of the computer. They had these huge machines in the basement of the Empire State Building.”

Mr. Lane’s survivors include his wife of 58 years, Terese Lyons Lane; two daughters and their spouses, Mary Jo Lane and Robert Harris of Charlottesville, Va., and Judith Lyons Lane and Mark Mattson of Oakham; and two grandsons, Ian and Roger Mattson.

The family extends an invitation to Island friends to attend a service to be held at the West Tisbury Cemetery on Sunday afternoon, Oct. 7, at 2 p.m. In lieu of flowers, the family requests memorial donations be made to the Martha’s Vineyard Hospital.