Dan’s Papers March 11, 2011 danspapers.com Page 20
Rock
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I look at the big furniture and accessory store Pier 1 Imports on Montauk Highway in Southampton and see it when it was built about 1965 as a Starlanes Bowling Alley. Fifteen years later, it got remodeled into a flashing lights disco known as Le Mans. Now it’s been remodeled again as Pier 1 Imports. I was in bowling leagues in that building. I fell in love dancing in that building. As for Ocean View Farms, when we arrived here in the 1950s, there was no building at all there. It was just barren land by the railroad tracks set back about a mile from the nearest road. In fact the road that today borders Ocean View Farms didn’t even exist in 1956. At that time, driving east along the Montauk Highway in Amagansett, you got to the Firehouse (which did exist), made a sharp 90degree turn to the right, went straight down Atlantic Avenue toward the ocean one long block, then turned left on Bluff Road, and then headed on a clean shot straight out toward Napeague and Montauk. Two years after we arrived, however, the State built a sort of one-mile long “bypass” road to do away with those two charming 90degree turns on Route 27, so at the firehouse you could just go straight, curve off a bit to the right and then continue on straight until the old road met back up with the new and then on to Montauk. This new bypass road presented opportunities. In 1965, this entire stretch along the
north side of this new road got bulldozed and cleared for what was supposed to be a huge shopping center of perhaps 40 stores. A paved parking lot was put in. The Amagansett IGA was built, along with the Liquor Store next to it and then the Amagansett Post Office, which moved out of town to be there. Also the V & V Gas Station to the east of the Amagansett IGA was built. But then the project just stalled. East of the gas station, the bulldozed land remained vacant for years and years with nothing on it except, over time, whatever could grow there naturally. I have actual evidence in my yard of what grew there. I live in a home that overlooks the sunset over Three Mile Harbor in East Hampton. It’s a sensational view. But off to one side, cars come up the road and, at night, their approaching headlights shine into my house. Or did. Shortly after I moved there, I thought I ought to do something about those headlights. A peninsula of land juts out into the harbor and on it is sand and beach grass and about 15 or 20-foot cedar trees. I could plant a stand of indigenous cedars such as these along the side of my property. It would block the lights of the cars coming up the road. And then I recalled that on the site of that failed shopping center, hundreds of cedars had grown up and were now 15 feet tall.
Looking into it, I found that the site was now owned by real estate developer Don Claus. I called him up and arranged to get eight cedars dug up, trucked over to my house and replanted along the property line perpendicular to where the cars come up the road. They are there today, doing their job. Then around 1995, a developer named Rudy Principi bought that 26 acres. He wanted to make it into a horse farm. Indeed, he built fencing for an exercise track, a pasture, and then he built a barn. But the town somehow gave him a real hard time for one reason or another—his fault, their fault, I don’t know—and as far as I know no horse ever grazed there. Principi still owns the property. Now he’s made this arrangement with the two rock festival men for the weekend of August 12 and 13. Ocean View Farms it ain’t and never was. And if the town law is about what you can do on old and ancient and preserved farmland, then the judge could rule that the project could proceed. Then again, who knows what the hell it was before I got here? Probably Dick Hendrickson, our weatherman. He’s now over 90. I’ll ask him. I just did. He says he didn’t think anything was there, but there had been a potato field to the west of it. Maybe a few potatoes got hurled over there. We await the judge’s decision.