Dan’s Papers September 16, 2011 danshamptons.com Page 22
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street and more than four feet high facing the neighbor’s yard. You cannot bury industrial waste on your property. You cannot build a hog rendering plant on your property. (People in the Hamptons will be amused to know that in many town ordinance booklets this specific thing is mentioned as something you cannot do.) And I don’t know, I think it is probably illegal to sunbathe naked on your property in full view of people off your property, although I may be wrong about that one. Here on the ocean, where the good Lord might taketh away one million tons of sand from your property and sail it out to sea in 45 minutes, you are free to buy one million tons of sand and have it trucked onto your property to replenish what was lost. (You also might wait for a storm
to bring the one million tons of sand back, which is what most people do.) But you cannot hem that sand in with permanent structures to prevent some of it from spilling onto somebody else’s property, or back out into the ocean. Also on the beach, you cannot prevent people from walking along the sand across your property to get from point A to point B. Surfcasters have the right to drive trucks from one point to another. If a seal were to slither up onto the beach on your property it is not suddenly yours, and if you think it is and take charge of it, you can get a big fine from the environmental people. You also can’t build a building or other structure on your beach or dune. In some ways, what the Zweigs have already
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done here seems to come under the heading of self-inflicted wounds. The wooden ladder that comes down to the beach from their home is now piled high with sandbags that presumably the Zweigs put there, maybe to keep the ladder up during the storm, or, just possibly, to keep people on the beach from using it. But now not even the Zweigs can’t use it. As for the view from their home, it looks out at the very poles they have erected. They see the inside. Everybody else sees the outside. Four years ago, the biggest oceanfront land purchase in the Hamptons took place in East Hampton Village when Wall Street veteran Ron Baron bought a 40-acre parcel on the ocean from Adelaide de Menil and her husband Ted Carpenter for $103 million. After the purchase, Baron built a six-foot-high, 504-footlong concrete wall—which he called a retaining wall—parallel to the ocean and a hundred yards inland from it, right on property he owned, but still in the dunes between his home and the ocean. The town ultimately forced him to jackhammer the wall out because it was in “protected” dunes. The authorities of the Village of East Hampton have already visited Mollie Zweig. So has a representative from the State Department of Environmental Protection. I don’t know if the Town Trustees have been down there, but one would expect they will be soon. The trustees defend the right of the citizens to have free and unobstructed passage up and down the beach. The Village defends the right to have no hard structures built on the beach and to have free access up and down the beach for emergency vehicles. They also defend coastal zone hazard laws and dune protection laws. And the DEC has to approve other things that might in some way impact the environment. I am not sure whether the local authorities have the right to come in, even with a warrant, and tear out the steel poles, although maybe they do, in extreme occasions. I know they have gone onto private property—after many warnings were given—to clean up junk that is just left around by a property owner in a way that is a blight on the neighborhood. What they can surely do is issue fines for violations, and I have seen villages out here send ordinance officials out every day to issue summonses to the effect that yes, the violation that was ticketed yesterday is still going on today. (They did that to a foreigner who in the middle of downtown Southampton, kept goats, sheep, geese, roosters and chickens in his yard. I wrote, objecting, but they did it anyway.) These fines can quickly spiral into very large sums. Hopefully, the Zweigs will come to see that they simply made a mistake in not finding out what the laws are, and will take out these steel posts. If they don’t do that and if this matter drags on and on in court for years with these metal poles sticking out of the landscape, it’s my opinion that the Zweigs may become unpopular with the people in town. The first indication of this came from a sign in front of Idoline Duke’s house that says, “The Beaches Belong to the People and My Beach is Your Beach,” written in both in English and Spanish. * * * As we go to press, we have learned that East Hampton Village has issued several summonses (continued on page 24)