Off Off Season: report to Gotham Magazine
A well-mannered fireworks display over Lake Agawam was the showiest of our New Year’s celebrations. With 350 years of local history behind us, it seemed fitting to take the millenium in stride, so when the new century finally lumbered into the Hamptons, on the heels of televised reveling from around the world, it was a quiet and subdued affair. Last summer everyone was concocting ambitious plans for celebrating, but when the clock started seriously ticking, a lot of Manhattan people hit delete on lavish trips and elaborate parties—and headed east. Local seafood and liquor stores reported extremely strong sales of caviar, oysters, champagne and other Hamptons essentials. The New Year, from all reports, was spent mostly in small groups at the homes of friends and family.
The first hours of the millenium also brought the first of the winter’s series of curious appearances and disappearances. Two thousand people showed up at Montauk Point to watch the sunrise, many of them Asian-Americans, particularly Koreans, who have a tradition of ceremonies honoring the sea. Parking lots at the point and the approach road to the lighthouse were filled with cars and tour buses. Local officials, though caught totally by surprise, opened the gates to the lighthouse in a welcoming gesture.
If January 1, 2000 was tranquil and spiritual, the next unexpected appearance was decidedly boisterous. A slightly less than armored division of dump trucks, cement mixers and huge sixteen wheelers surrounded Southampton Town Hall later in the month to protest a proposed suspension of new building permits. The protestors stopped short of going mano a mano with the Town Board, but certainly made their point. Moratoriums, upzoning, groundwater supplies, and participation in the state’s Pine Barrens Protection Act were the winter’s hot topics. Southampton and East Hampton town governments immersed themselves in indecision making for months, and while the smoke has not quite cleared after the many hearings and proposals, both towns have enacted moratoriums on new subdivisions but are allowing building permits to be issued on existing ones.
Continuing the winter’s fireworks, eight electric poles on Main Street in Water Mill came crashing down in an unplanned sound and light show during a storm—and the focus now shifted to spectacular disappearances. The Sag Harbor-North Haven Bridge, which was undergoing complete reconstruction, was the next victim of this devastation demon. One pleasant morning, most of the bridge took a suicide dive into the bay, and then, perhaps in sympathy but otherwise unrelated, a work trailer self-detonated. “The bridge collapses, the trailer explodes, and it’s only 10 to 12:00,” complained the Sag Harbor mayor, who was looking for the coffee wagon. Needless to say, work will continue into the summer.
From the clamorous to the clandestine: Rare, antique silver pieces from the Gardiner mansion on Main Street in East Hampton were spotted by a sharp-eyed curator at Christie’s. Robert Gardiner, in Palm Beach, was not aware they had gone missing. When you have so much patrimony in your family, I guess there is always another historic knickknack in the cupboard.
Most unwelcome appearance of winter: deer ticks are surviving and multiplying due to mild weather during the winter. They are exceedingly small and very fierce as carriers of Lyme disease, the scourge of the Hamptons.
Second most unwelcome appearance of winter: Dutch elm disease has returned. This nasty killer of our beautiful old trees has staged a comeback after being contained for almost a decade. The East Hampton Ladies Village Improvement Society is raising $600,000 for a three year program to fight back. For information: www.lvis.org
[sidebar]
Deconstructing Kathleen’s Cookie
Take some sugar, flour, butter, and chocolate chips; add some union busting, colliding business philosophies, legal maneuvering and lots of press. Bake and you’ve got a legendary Hamptons cookie wrapped in an entrepreneurial morality tale.
Kathleen King started by baking cookies for her parents farm stand, then opened her store in 1979, bought her building in 1982 and went into local history and local hearts. She sold a two-thirds controlling interest to the non-local Weber brothers. They moved most production to Virginia and prevented the Southampton bakery from unionizing, provoking last summer’s picketing. In February they fired part owner Kathleen, this time provoking a sick-out. They also accuse her of moonlight baking and selling directly in Southampton. Watch for protest signs and a second summer of the brouhaha. Squabbles aside, the rest of us now worry about where to get the real thing.
