Dan’s Papers April 15, 2011 danshamptons.com Page 18
Cars
(continued from page 15)
homes and schools in Springs. It’s easy enough to say this is all about bigotry. And it is certainly easy enough to say that the government has no business regulating what goes on in people’s homes. But you can also argue, as I did in the earlier paragraph, that this can also be about health and safety. You need only to be reminded of the terrible fire that killed six children, the children of African-American farm workers, who were living in dreadfully crowded conditions in a broken down migrant worker camp on a potato farm in Bridgehampton. At the time, the priority was to get the potatoes to market before they went bad. It was 1955, and it was a different time. But it is certainly something to think about. The history of what is either bigotry or safety in regulating overcrowded and dangerous conditions in the Hamptons is a long one. It is surely something to think about. In 1859, Southampton Town forced the Shinnecock Indians to live on reservations, without benefit of any services or rights. In 1879, a rich man from Brooklyn named Arthur W. Benson bought all of Montauk from stem to stern from the original English settler families and then paid each of the Montaukett Indians living on it $10 to get out of town. They were told the Montauketts were re-assembling in Wisconsin. Train tickets were given to Montauketts to go there and they all took them. In the 1920s, when wealthy WASP industrialists built massive summer homes in the
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Hamptons, they put into their deeds that the homes must never be sold to Jews, Negroes or entertainers. Billy Joel, when he and his wife Christie Brinkley bought one of these homes in the 1980s, had to use some subterfuge to make the purchase because the house being sold to him had such a clause in its deed. “I was two out of three,” he told me at the time. A similar subterfuge was used in the 1970s when the Jewish Center of the Hamptons was founded on Woods Lane in East Hampton. The purchase was made to overcome this restriction by having a friendly Christian buy the property, delete the clause and then resell it to the Jews. In the 1970s, overcrowding in residential zones became a problem because of the arrival of “groupers” in Amagansett and Westhampton Beach. These were young white partygoers, mostly college educated and professional, who came here in such numbers they practically turned these local communities into an upscale version of the Jersey Shore. They had very little money. And so they rented homes in “groups” of 20 or 30, went to the beach all day, partied all night and sometimes trashed the premises. What is now Atlantic Beach in Amagansett was known at that time as “Asparagus Beach.” Nobody was lying on blankets. Everybody was standing upright, holding drinks and yakking away wall to wall. The towns cracked down on the homes these people rented when there got to be so
many in a neighborhood that the quality of life was compromised for those living near them. That’s when the “number of cars seen in the driveway” law came into existence. It became the law’s way to gain entry. Many tickets were given out and the level of this sort of thing dropped off dramatically. In the 1990s, a second crackdown against “groupers” took place in Southampton and Quogue, where the problem, like yeast, began to rise again. It was during the administration of Supervisor Vince Cannuscio, as I recall. And when people got awakened at five in the morning by ordinance inspectors who stepped over them sleeping on wall-to-wall mattresses in the living rooms, the problem once again subsided. In the 1980s, East Hampton Town passed a really strange law involving artists’ studios, mostly in the hamlet of Springs, where some of the prominent artists who enjoyed life in that community had sold their houses and studios and had moved away as prices of homes went through the roof. The new owners, well-to-do enough to buy the homes, were not artists, but just ordinary citizens, and they put bathrooms and kitchens in these detached studios and used them either for guesthouses, or, in some cases, rentals to help pay the rising real estate taxes. The new law said you could not have a bathroom or kitchen in an artist’s studio. It was (continued on page 22)
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