I’ve checked, and it is definitely not true that the known world ends a half-mile east or so of the Amagansett Farmers Market. Such suggestions are the result of a conspiracy to make you think that Montauk is somehow not part of the Hamptons, and that it exists in a separate time zone and on a different land mass. After all, it is only tenuously connected to the rest of us by the Napeague Stretch, which has an unfortunate tendency to wash out to sea whenever it rains.
Montauk is pictured on the seal of the Town of East Hampton, and represented, as are the other hamlets, with a seat on the town board. Reports of East Hampton as an imperialistic power and Montauk as a colonized, semi-independent state are greatly exaggerated by its rebellious residents. As if further proof were needed, Montauk is featured in this issue of the magazine, bringing it more fully (and certainly reluctantly) into the cultural orbit of the Hamptons.
At the end of an island, residents of Montauk either look out the sea or look inward. But they are most definitely not looking west to East Hampton or Southampton to set an example for them. Outsiders try. People are building houses there now as big as those in Sagaponack, and investors are converting the once tatty Panoramic View Hotel into “luxury oceanfront residences” with units starting at $2.825 million. But you’ve got to be crazy or a real estate developer to believe that a sprinkling of mega-money will change the character of Montauk.
Montauk history is all about the water surrounding it. The Montauk Point Lighthouse was commissioned by George Washington and completed in 1796. Washington would be proud that 212 years later it is still used as a navigation guide, now with an automated light. Since Washington worried about money personally as well as for the young nation, he will not be turning in his grave at the thought of the lighthouse grounds being rented out for weddings—even though event planning is not known to have been an early American occupation.
The harbor at Montauk is the state’s largest commercial fishing port and one of the world’s great sport fishing destinations—and not just, as most people believe, the world’s greatest source of scary shark stories. Over the years, the fishing industry is what defined the spirit of Montauk and the character of its village. The men and later also the women of Montauk have braved the elements to bring in the catch, and over the years lives have been lost to the sea. It is a strong and sad heritage
Shaggy local bars and rough little seafood restaurants, typical of a small port, have evolved into slightly—but only slightly—more trim and well-mannered places. They don’t follow any fashion. Montauk creates its own style. Add surfers into the mix, and Irish immigrant workers in season, and the writers and artists, and you begin to understand why Montauk is sometimes called “The End” or “The Living End.”
Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey bought, in 1972, a 20-acre oceanfront property in Montauk with five Colonial-Revival clapboard houses. Lee Radziwill rented the main house one summer, before she bought in East Hampton. Peter Beard lives next door. Paul Simon, Ralph Lauren, Julian Schnabel, Robert DeNiro and Dick Cavett have homes on the cliffs of Montauk, and Billy Joel has written about its fishermen.
But the bold-faced names influence the tone of the place less than the place influences them. It seems that celebrities and fishermen, weekenders and locals, all like Montauk the way it is. The gravitational pull of the Hamptons weakens as you go to the extreme east end of Long Island; it is an attraction the people of Montauk can quite readily resist.