Page 26 September 7, 2012
DAN’S PAPERS
danshamptons.com
Bull’s (Continued from previous page) concern was that, attached to the back of the original building there would be an addition six feet taller than the original building. “It will stick up. You will see it from the street. And he’s already been to the Town Board,” Lynn told me. “There’s a complete set of plans. You’ve got to see this. When are you coming home?” “We got here yesterday,” I said. “We’ll be away for three weeks. Can you send me the plans?” “Three weeks could be too late.” The next day, from almost halfway around the world—and I’ve always thought this amazing—I received by overnight mail to the Mauna Kea on the Big Island, the plans for the restored Bull’s Head Inn. It did not take me long to have
an opinion about it. I was on the phone to Lynn again. “Lynn, this is the answer to our prayers.” “You won’t join me in opposing this?” he asked. “Lynn, I think this is a good way to save this place. I can’t oppose it. And with sight lines being what they are, you won’t see the attachment in the back of the building from the road.” The home we had come to know as the Bull’s Head Inn was built in 1842 by Judge Abraham Topping Rose of Bridgehampton as the mansion he and his family would live in. A friend of his, Nathaniel Rogers, had already built his mansion across the street. Together, across from one another, their residences would mark
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the center of the downtown. When my dad moved me and my sister and my mother out to Montauk in the late 1950s, we’d pass through Bridgehampton. One of the two mansions, Nathaniel Rogers’ house, was still being lived in by somebody, but was already in disrepair. On its front lawn was a gas station. The owner had rented the front lawn to Mobil! Across the street, also abandoned at that time, was the other mansion. A sign on the street in front of it said Bull’s Head Inn, but the building was vacant. These two three-story homes were quite a mess. The center of Bridgehampton was a sorry place indeed. I soon learned, especially after I moved to Bridgehampton in 1970, that this was not all there was to the broken down history of that center of town. On the third of the four corners there was a sign out front on the curb announcing that here on this spot stood Wick’s Tavern, an important meeting place for the patriots during the Revolutionary War. Behind the sign there was no tavern. There was a second gas station. Wick’s had been cast aside in the name of progress. On the last corner was a row of stores. According to maps I found in the library, that had been vacant land in 1776 and the site of the mustering of the Bridgehampton Militia. The battle that came about to Save the Bull’s Head Inn across the way occurred the very first year I was in that town. And it was a stunner. The Sun Oil Company, parent company of Sunoco, wanted to tear down the Bull’s Head Inn and in its place build a Sunoco gas station. There would be three gas stations on the four corners of the center of town. Sometimes newspapers can change things if they handle it right. The next week, in the newspaper, I announced the founding of the Save the Bull’s Head Inn Committee. The Town Board should not approve the application by Sun Oil Company. They should instead buy the Bull’s Head Inn and preserve it. I put a coupon in the paper. It asked you to cut your Sunoco credit card in half with a scissors, write your name and address on the coupon and send it to the President of Sun Oil Company in Philadelphia, Pa. This act of defiance was explained in the coupon. By enclosing it, you were demanding that Sun Oil back off. Give up on the idea of putting a gas station there. Amazingly, three weeks later, I got a call from Sun Oil in Philadelphia asking me to meet with several of their executives in Manhattan. They had a plan they’d like to show me they felt might satisfy me and my Save the Bull’s Head Committee. At that meeting, they rolled out architectural plans to show me how they would move the Bull’s Head Inn back on the property and put their gas station where they wanted to, facing out on the Montauk Highway. “So now, on two sides of the street,” I said, “there will be beautiful old mansions in the center of town with gas stations on their front lawns?” “Yes. We’d pay to have it moved. And we’d have it set down so it faced the Turnpike on the side. You could enter it from there.” I was speechless. “What do you think?” “I think I should take this set of plans out to Bridgehampton and (Continued on page 34)