Billy Joel is selling the house of his wildest childhood dreams

A teenager then known as William Martin Joel lived in the working-class suburb of Hicksville — his family so limited that they didn’t own a TV. He took a tiring minimum-wage job dredging oysters.

The dredge crisscrossed the waters of Long Island Sound, including a bay that curves like a comma and faces some of the most expensive real estate in the United States. From the boat, he could see a stately brick mansion.

“I’ll never live in a house like that,” he thought to himself.

Several decades and dozens of Top 40 hits later, Billy Joel — the oysterman turned piano man — bought that very mansion in 2002.

Joel, 75, has told that story many times.

“The word that applies is ‘absurd.’ I grew up in a quarter-acre lot house in Hicksville. And I would ride my bicycle up here and take a bike ride and look at all the rich people and cuss them out,” he says.

In early October, a team of real estate agents and publicists working on his behalf held an open house to sell the property. The listing price is $49.9 million.

It’s a crowd that is a world away from the one Joel used to inhabit, his identity and music closely tied with the working class.

Hicksville, where he grew up in the 1950s and ‘60s, is less than 15 miles away from his mansion. When President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, his mother sent him to a nearby store to rent a TV. He returned with the TV on a dolly, explained his biographer Fred Schruers.

Although Joel’s family didn’t have a television set, they did have a beat-up Lester upright piano, and his mother insisted he take lessons, Schruers said. Eager to go out and play with his friends, Joel resented practicing, so he learned to imitate the style of Beethoven just well enough to make his mother think that he was following the sheet music, he said.

He tried to embed those modest musical roots into the property when he first bought it by naming it “MiddleSea” — a reference to its location in the middle of the sea, on a spit that juts out into the water. But it’s also a double entendre referring to the note of middle C, the first key that beginning piano players learn.

“If it’s not for me being able to take piano lessons, I probably would never have been able to afford a highflying property like this. So, I named it after the first note which I learned on the piano, which was C,” he explained.

The expansiveness of the grounds is hard to put into words, so I walked from one end of the property line to the other. At a brisk pace, it took me nine minutes and three seconds, almost the same amount of time that it takes me to walk seven city blocks in Manhattan.

Guests and Joel get around in golf carts — electric ones, his property manager is quick to note.

A sandy beach, stretching over 2,000 feet, graces the edge of the property.

On Long Island’s “Gold Coast,” as the area is known, “it’s rare to find a property with 200 feet of beach,” said Emmett Laffey, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices, who is representing Joel in the sale of the property.

The singer still owns other property in the area, including a home in Sag Harbor, but his base is now in Florida, where his two youngest daughters, ages 7 and 9, are enrolled in school.

That’s one reason he’s selling. There’s also a more mundane concern: taxes. At $567,686, the yearly taxes on the property are more than the median sales price of a single-family home in the United States.

“It’s not cheap, let’s put it that way,” he said.

The home first went up for sale last year. A renovation that involved replacing all the bathroom fixtures, putting in new marble floors, revamping the kitchens and redoing the brick walkways and patios, was still underway.

Tarps covered certain rooms, and it didn’t show well, said Laffey. It was taken off the market and re-listed in September after the renovations were completed, with a bump in the price tag, which had been $49 million.

To market a property at this price point, an “elevated open house” was apropos. Liveried waiters served shrimp and goat cheese hors d’oeuvres, as classical music poured out from a property-wide speaker system.

“This is so nice,” said one. “Gorgeous,” said another, as the mansion on the hill came into focus. “What a view,” said a third.

What they toured was actually a restoration. Joel’s property manager, Chad Nuzzi, discovered blueprints and plans, dated 1913 and signed by George Bullock, a railway magnate, in a tucked-away closet.

In the years that followed, Joel said, he worked to reconstitute the original estate — re-creating a piece of land of Gatsbian proportions.

“I love this property. I don’t think there’s a property as beautiful as this,” he said. “It’s got that Gatsby sense to it, which I dreamed about as a little boy. When I hand over the keys, there’ll be some regret.”