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I sometimes miss the Sea Spray Inn. It burned to the ground on a wintry night in 1979, so I have been toting around this nostalgia for more than a quarter of a century now. I was not around when the oldest part of the inn, a boarding house on Main Street, was moved to Main Beach in 1901. But I was around in the 1960s and 70s when it was still in its heyday. A rambling shingle structure, painted white, it stood on the east side of the Main Beach parking lot in East Hampton.
Two groups of cottages, one along the dunes to the east (now belonging to East Hampton Village) and another north of the Main Beach Pavilion on the opposite side of the parking lot (now the Bayberry Close condominium) were part to the inn, as was the Sea Spray Annex , a large oceanfront house west of the pavilion.
The weekend lunch at the Sea Spray was a tradition for many of us who lived here. I remember it as a huge buffet (or has it grown is size in my memory?) with lavish tables of salads and meats and lobsters and desserts. In the evening we would eat in the dining room or on one of the porches, and then sit at the bar for some late night conversation. East Hampton, needless to say, was a quieter and simpler place then.
The owner, a man named Arnold Bailey, was a character. We’d now consider him on the radical right, but in those days he was just another eccentric who had a sign mounted to the top of his car saying “Repeal the Income Tax” and distributed flyers with the same message. The Sea Spray was the only commercial structure on the beach in East Hampton Village, and for old timers the fire that destroyed the main building has remained a mystery.
The Maidstone Arms, on a small hill overlooking Town Pond, has a happier history. The site was an Osborne family house and tannery as early as 1660. The original house was destroyed but rebuilt in 1840 in the newly fashionably Greek Revival Style. Later in the nineteenth century, as the summer visitors began to appear, the Osbornes, like other families along Main Street, began renting out rooms and running a boarding house. It became known as the Maidstone Arms in 1924, named after the area in England that was the home of the first East Hampton settlers.
The inn has been owned since 1992 by Coke Anne Wilcox, who is married to the artist Jarvis Wilcox. She is a granddaughter of a Texas wildcatter who made a fortune in his generation, and the daughter of Clint W. Murchison Jr., who founded the Dallas Cowboys football team as well as a large Dallas real estate and construction company. But she did not just coast along on the family money. She got to East Hampton by way of Princeton University, where she graduated cum laude, and Columbia University, where she earned a master's degree in architecture.
The Maidstone Arms has been in the local news lately because of a proposal by Wilcox to turn it into condominiums. It is a sound idea. The reputation of the inn and its location, an easy walk to the center of the village or to the beach, would appeal to wealthy empty nesters with knowledge of East Hampton.
I caught up with Wilcox recently to get the inside story. The conversion engages her interest as an architect and as a businesswoman, but also flows from a lifestyle decision. “Our children have flown the nest and we want the flexibility to follow them around the globe at a moment's notice. Managing and running the inn and restaurant does not allow us such freedom.”
But both she and her husband want to maintain a family home here. “In the best of all possible worlds, we would keep the small cottages for our family and sell the main building, either as a hotel and restaurant or as ten to eleven condominiums.” She still has to get approvals from two village boards and from Suffolk County, so it is hard to say now what will happen. Since the proposal involves a less intense use than the present one that allows 19 rooms and three cottages, it ought to have a chance.