Ladies Village Improvement Society Fair
Living in towns and villages that are three and a half centuries old means that even our non-governmental organizations have deep roots. The Parrish Art Museum, for example, is celebrating one hundred years. The Wainscott Sewing Society started in the nineteenth century. The Ladies Village Improvement Society of East Hampton has been at work since 1895.
Unlike its rather conservative sounding name, the L.V.I.S. has been and remains an activist group, one that over the years has had a deep impact on the way East Hampton Village looks and feels. Even in the days before environmental legislation or design review boards, the L.V.I.S. managed through community pressure to keep East Hampton beautiful. Flying dust on an unpaved Main Street was a collective problem in 1895, so the ladies raised the funds and paid to have the street watered down regularly. The area around the newly built railroad station was an eyesore, so they cleaned that up. And they haven’t slowed down since then.
Generations of ladies have been working on it—with the assistance of a few gentlemen.
Everyone pitches in. Christie Brinkley and the late Pierre Franey both have recipes in the L.V.I.S. Centennial Cookbook. As a young woman, Jacqueline Bouvier modeled at L.V.I.S. fashion shows. There is a wonderful picture in the archives of a radiant Jackie on a boardwalk runway, with a haircut and in clothes looking less dated than you might expect. As First Lady, she contributed a White House molasses cookie recipe for an earlier edition of the cookbook.
Being one of their unofficial male auxiliary, I do my part by helping out with the L.V.I.S. Fair every year. (This will mark the 102nd annual fair.) For the past fifteen years or so I have made corn relish to be sold in the Food Booth. It started out as a small project, but has grown over the years—to the limit of my endurance and my pots. I like to bottle the corn relish in recycled jars, and Patti Ferrin and other L.V.I.S. members save their jars all year. I do it all the night before the fair, and I believe my efforts go into the category of “once a mistake, now a tradition”. But, like the ladies, the corn relish is now here to stay.
The East Hampton L.V.I.S. Fair truly is an old-fashioned country fair, where you sense that basic elements have not changed very much in the past century. It takes place this year on Saturday, July 25, at their world headquarters on Main Street. Besides food to take home or eat there, there are antiques, used books, plants and flowers, different sorts of merchandise, and activities for kids. And, please, remember to buy some corn relish.
Henry James called “summer afternoon” the most beautiful word group in English. It’s sleek on the tongue as you say it, and suggestive of carefree times. Although James was living at Lamb House in Sussex when he wrote it, for me the phrase speaks of life in the Hamptons—of strolling around at the L.V.I.S. Fair, or watching a polo match at Two Trees, of lazy afternoons on the beach, or just sitting on a bench on Newtown Lane.
Visitors fall in love with the Hamptons and the “summer afternoon” quality of life. Residents like that idea—but wish it were fewer people falling in love. One of the constant topics of conversation of weekend residents is about traffic on the roads and the number of people on the village streets. They are always pointing out how bad it has gotten, and they are fond of comparing it to last year, or a few years ago. Full-time residents, on the other hand, seem more accepting of change. Perhaps we have lived with change for a longer time.
Frank Newbold, who was my partner in the real estate business, recently put it in perspective when he showed me a passage in Venice Observed. A medieval monk, who was not a Venetian, complained about the all the Turks, Libyans and Parthians in St. Mark’s Square. Mary McCarthy, writing in 1956, comments that while Venetians easily stroll in the Piazza San Marco looking at the tourists, with the tourists looking back at them, foreigners, in the tradition of the medieval monk, voice their complaints about other visitors. Some things never change. Whether you are in a gondola, a sedan chair, or a four-wheel drive, parking spaces have always been scarce and people have always been commenting on it.