Issuu

N OW H E R E E LS E Fighting Fake Farms The Original Land Baron Cocktail Chatter Trailer Park Luxe Round Swamp Dynasty

PLUS: Sarah Koenig Peter Beard Carl Safina Scott Bluedorn

july 2016 volume 1

the east hampton star magazine

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T H E O L D F A S H I O N E D W AY

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OUT HERE

FINEST KIND Although a potent symbol of South Fork culture, only occasionally these days do baymen launch their boats through the surf to net their catches. Haul seining, the traditional and once prevalent method of fishing off the beach, was banned by the state in 1990, ostensibly to protect striped bass populations. But gill-netting, another form of commercial fishing, continues, although permits are few and quotas are limited. Launching boats and men and nets through the waves is a team effort among friends and family and, it being so rare an event these days, often feels like a bit of a reunion and a celebration. Tara Israel, a photographer from Springs, shot this picture on the beach in Amagansett a few falls ago, shortly after a team of baymen, including Paul Lester (in the bed of the truck), set a net. Comments Israel: “That’s Jim Mangano’s dog in the foreground.” 6

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â€¢ JULY 2016

CONTENTS

July 2016

VOL 1

“

. . . the world is much bigger than we know, yet much smaller than we think.”

OVER THE HEDGE Going With the Grain

Summerpop

Sole Survivor

Hollywood comes calling for a true fishing tale 17

One Small Thing

No more balloons! 19

Battle of the Beach

Artificial dune unveiled to mixed reviews 20

Chill! It’s Montauk Hope for peace

• JULY 2016

Real Estate

The highest and (probably) lowest prices

266,000 and counting 17

True Crime

Police blotter

Surfing and religion

PETER BEARD

14 EAST ILLUSTRATED 15 THE WHEELHOUSE 22 HAPPENINGS

Changes are afoot on the restaurant scene

The Great Rosé Panic

Plenty of time to gather ye rosés while ye may

Drink Me!

Hive Mind

6 OUT HERE 12 CONTRIBUTORS

The Kitchen Shuffle

Spanking mint for the cocktail of the summer Sweet living — and saving the world one bee at a time

Table Talk

Getting a seat where everyone wants to sup and be seen

32 THE BEE LIST From knife-sharpening to lip balm, sea salt to bikinis, East End entrepreneurs have been busy as bees 34 NEIGHBORS Museum curator Andrea Grover

LEFT, THE EAST HAMPTON STAR FILES; RIGHT, MICHAEL HALSBAND

BOUNTY

16 FIELDVIEW LANE, EAST HAMPTON

Guiding you home. From this modern East Hampton mansion to beachfront Montauk bungalows, discover the Hamptonsâ€™ ďŹ nest real estate and the best agents to guide you there.

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CONTENTS

> 34

Waking Up at Lazy Point By Carl Safina

HABITAT 61

Fighting Fake Farms

Scott Bluedorn, Maritime Cosmologist By Biddle Duke

Salt of the Earth: 50 Years at Round Swamp By Amanda M. Fairbanks, with photographs by Michael Halsband

“

OUTSIDE 64

That Wily Mistress Photo essay by Andrew Blauschild

How do we ensure that this land remains in farm use? Everyone just assumed it would.”

• JULY 2016

FICTION 70

Fred Stelle’s surf-side cool at Ditch Photographs by Philippe Cheng

Agriculture’s last stand By Michael Shnayerson 46

Trailer Park Luxe

Maritime Cosmologist

Dating Tips for the Unemployed and Unsuccessful By Iris Smyles

HALCYON DAYS 77

Look Back

The Land Baron of Brigadoon

He dined with movie stars and changed East Hampton forever By Irene Silverman

BOOKISH 80

Serial ’s Sarah Koenig

The podcast medium’s first superstar reveals what’s on her nightstand

LEFT TO RIGHT, PHOTOS BY ANDREW BLAUSCHILD, TARA ISRAEL, SUNNY KHALSA

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CONTRIBUTORS

Michael Shnayerson is a long-time contributing editor to Vanity Fair, and the author or co-author of seven books on subjects that range from mountaintop coal mining (Coal River) to an unauthorized biography, in 2015, of New York Governor Andrew M. Cuomo (The Contender). He’s lived in the Sag Harbor area for over 25 years.

Amanda M. Fairbanks gave up her native sunny southern California to live “back East.” In addition to her work for The East Hampton Star, her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Newsweek, and The Atlantic. She now lives in Sag Harbor with her husband, Sudhir Venkatesh, and two young children, Theodore and Violet. Amanda writes about Round Swamp Farm in this issue and could happily survive for weeks eating only its cinnamon rolls. Peter Spacek (EAST Illustrated, page 14) writes: “I’m a dude with a pen and a big bottle of ink. I use both to graphically comment on life out here, with a particular passion for things aquatic.” A wave chaser, fish catcher, clam raker, gatherer in general, paddler, and sailer, he knows what he draws. He also scrimshaws (google it) on old discarded surfboards, reinventing a mostly lost art form. More of Spacek’s stuff can be seen at DitchInk.com. Carl Safina is the author of various books on the ocean, animals, and human beings’ relationship with the natural world. His publications include, among others, the award-winning Song for the Blue Ocean, Eye of the Albatross, and The View From Lazy Point; A Natural Year in an Unnatural World.

Durell Godfrey, whose photographs and illustrations are throughout this issue, was a long-time Condé Nast illustrator and is a contributing photographer for The East Hampton Star and EAST. The author/illustrator of Color Me Cluttered, a coloring book for grown-ups, Durell was born with the acquisition gene and has probably taken a picture of just about everything on the East End over the last 20 years. Surfer, photographer and artist Andrew Blauschild (That Wily Mistress, page 64) lives in Springs but is a fixture in Montauk where, when the surf’s good, he wrestles happily with the question: “Do I make pictures or do I surf?” Clients include Ralph Lauren, Wu Tang Clan, and Oscar de la Renta, and his work has appeared in dozens of publications, including Surfing, The New York Times, Conde Nast Traveler, and Wax magazine. 12

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Biddle Duke Editor David Rattray & Helen Rattray Publishers Alex Coulter Art Director Levi Shaw-Faber & Bess Rattray Associate Editors Michael Shnayerson & Michael Halsband Editors at large Walter Bernard Design Consultant CONTRIBUTING WRITERS & EDITORS Colleen DeBaise Joanne Pilgrim Amanda M. Fairbanks Carl Safina Jack Graves Mark Segal Baylis Greene Irene Silverman Carissa Katz Iris Smyles Jennifer Landes Taylor K. Vecsey Lang Phipps Christopher Walsh FOOD EDITOR Laura Donnelly CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS Andrew Blauschild Sunny Khalsa Philippe Cheng Doug Kuntz Dell Cullum Morgan McGivern Sunny Guo John Musnicki Tara Israel Scott Rudin ILLUSTRATORS Durrell Godfrey Peter Spacek ADVISERS AND FRIENDS Philippe Cheng Geoff Drummond Gretchen Vater Carissa Waechter GRAPHIC DESIGN Matt Charron Paul Friese Jordy Mark SALES Min Spear-Hefner Jane Bimson John Wyche Dan DeSmet Zach Zunis BUSINESS MANAGER Robin Kuntz PR AND MARKETING Chelsea Audibert Russell Bennett Everything else, which is a great deal EAST (2016, No. 1) is published four times a year, in July, August, September, and November by The East Hampton Star, 153 Main Street, PO Box 5002, East Hampton, NY 11937.

Find us at www.easthamptonstar.com/EAST Subscriptions and circulation: EAST is distributed as an insert in the East Hampton Star on the applicable publication dates and at select locations around the East End of Long Island. To become a subscriber please call: 631-324-0002, reach us via email at classy@easthamptonstar.com, or go to www.easthamptonstar.com and click on subscriptions. We welcome your letters, comments, queries, ideas. Send them to EAST, P.O. Box 5002, East Hampton, N.Y. 11937 or editor@ehstar.com

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EAST ILLUSTRATED

PETER SPACEK cartoon

â€¢ JULY 2016

THE WHEELHOUSE

WHALE OFF!

Y FRIEND DAVID RATTRAY is descended from a long line of East Hampton and ’Gansett shore whalers,

poets, businessmen, eccentrics, artists, and newspapermen, notably the owners and operators of The East Hampton Star, whose magazine this is. The skeleton of the 54-foot right whale taken by David’s great great-grandfather off Amagansett on George Washington’s birthday in 1907 once dominated the Hall of Ocean Life in the American Museum of Natural History. David’s great-grandfather Everett Joshua Edwards captained the last whaleboat to take a right whale off these shores. A photo of him appeared in Vogue in 1937, in a portrait taken by Arnold Genthe for an article titled “The Handsomest Man I Have Ever Photographed.” I’m not sure I’d call David the handsomest man I have ever met, but he does have a fine chiseled look. (And he signs my paycheck.) It’s shore whalers I’m thinking of these days as we make the first issue of the magazine. When I came along a year ago with a sketch of an idea Everett Joshua Edwards, to start a magazine for The Star — beautiful, authentic, local far right (in short, The Star in stunning pictures and carefully edited words) — I might as well have said: “Whale off!” Because it was a whaler, a poet, a man happily haunted by the past who is deeply committed to the community his family has called home for 14 generations, who responded. “Assemble the crew, let’s make chase!” David said. The right whale is an apt metaphor for a good magazine in the digital era: big, slow, mesmerizingly beautiful, and . . . verging on the edge of extinction. The sense of setting off into some unknown is also appropriate. My teammates, Levi Shaw-Faber, Bess Rattray, and Alex Coulter, sometimes seem like Neil Armstrong and his crew to David’s Mission Control. “Are we close?” I’ve asked about the cover, the logo, the story list. “No, way off. Keep going!” comes David. We’re also a bit of Columbus to David’s Spanish crown. We have succeeded in returning with gems about this place we love: the lyrical Carl Safina in this first issue, on watching tide and time pass on Lazy Point; Amanda M. Fairbanks, writer, and Michael Halsband, photographer, on the amazing family that made Round Swamp Farm; Amagansett’s Irene Silverman on the legendary Evan Frankel; Andrew Blauschild on surfing; Michael Shnayerson on saving food farming here. The logo — the name and look of the words EAST — on the cover were a test. Nothing worked. Then we found a sketch made in the summer of 1880 by none other than the artist Thomas Moran. Moran signed the piece and added a description: “East Hampton . . .” We copied the “East” and tried that for a while. But an initial attraction to the “EAST” in The Star’s original logo, hand drawn in the early 1900s, burned on, and eventually won out. Because even as EAST observes and celebrates this region as it is today, we are rooted in the past. We intend for EAST to stand out as the magazine for people who feel easternmost Long Island is home — could be your only or your second or third home, but home. We’ll make it stunning, like the communities it serves. In four issues this year, we (thanks to our advertisers) bring to you the people, the stories, the feeling that bind us here. “Spring on!” David might well have said, relieved that the logo hand-wringing was over, words his forefathers used to encourage whaleboat crews through the surf. After whaling ended in 1918, Everett Edwards used to go to his daughter’s barn where his 28-foot New London–built whaling boat was stored and “just sit down for a while.” No barn, no whaling boat, but we hope you’ll sit with EAST for a while. — Biddle Duke, Editor

ILLUSTRATION BY DURELL GODFREY

• JULY 2016

OVER THE HEDGE

GOING WITH THE GRAIN B

MICHAEL HALSBAND

RIAN SHOPFER AND PATRICK FLEURY describe learning to build wooden surfboards as something akin to finding religion. “The experience quite literally changed my life,” Fleury said recently of his apprenticeship at the Grain Surfboard’s barn in York, Maine. Working with the wood, learning the skills, the patience it took, the final product, all that, “changed my life.” Through a partnership with Grain, Shopfer and Fleury, who are brothers in law, are bringing the art of wooden surfboard building to the South Fork. They will offer workshops through the summer to learn the unique craft and make boards. Students will use wood sourced from mills and forestlands in Maine and use only hand tools. Full classes cost $2,675, and include meals and the promise of having a fine board at the end. Classes are held at their barn space at 11 Indian Wells Highway in Amagansett. More info at grainsurfboards.com

Final touches: Grain’s Brian Shopfer

UST HOW BIG is the summer population

out here? The only thing anyone knows for sure is that no one knows for sure. And, astonishingly, nobody is even counting. Yes, the U.S. Census decennial provides one kind of number, but it is at best a snapshot of who is here in April, which is, of course, a tiny proportion of the population on, say, a sunny Saturday in July. Suffolk County has done some guesswork. County planners estimate Southampton and East Hampton will top 380,000 on a sunny day this summer. But that’s guesswork. They calculate that more than 266,000 people spent the night in East Hampton and Southampton during the height of the season last year. East Hampton’s share was more than 95,000 overnighters, enough to push the number of people per square mile into urban territory. And that’s leaving out day-trippers. 16

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Summerpop 266,000 and counting

Montauk is a case unto itself, enduring the largest bump in population from winter to summer. The hamlet surges from about 3,400 people to past 27,000 — more than the number of year-round residents in the entire Town of East Hampton and a 682-percent increase. Other potential sources of data simply aren’t forthcoming: the railroad, state Transportation Department, utility companies, and house-rental sites such as Airbnb are mum. This is a big deal. Consider the fact that ambulance companies — a service

run almost entirely by volunteers — might only have about 20 active members each to come to the rescue of, well, who knows how many weekenders dialing 911. Water quality in the area is suffering, too; there is next to no sewage treatment on the East End, and just about everything that gets flushed down the drains eventually ends up in the groundwater or bays. (There’s a reason lobsters have died off in Long Island Sound.) We’re all familiar with the traffic, the garbage, the noise. The questions few seem to be asking, yet, is when will it all be too much and how can local government control it? — David Rattray

OVER THE HEDGE

Anthony Sosnicki and John Aldridge, gearing up the Anna Mary

MICHAEL HALSBAND

Sole Survivor

A book deal is in the works and Hollywood has come calling for the true story of a colorful Montauk fisherman's rescue at sea

HREE YEARS AGO, IN THE EARLY

hours of a July morning, John Aldridge lost his footing on his lobster boat, the Anna Mary, and fell into the ocean several miles off Montauk. For half a day, he kept himself afloat, using his boots and then lobster-pot buoys, dodging sharks and pecking birds, while the Coast Guard mobilized a search by air and sea. Anthony Sosnicki, the captain of the Anna Mary — who was sleeping on the boat at the time of the accident — coordinated the efforts of dozens of Montauk fishermen who joined in the hunt for his business partner and lifelong friend. It was a story of ingenuity and determination, as well as the loyalty of a tight-knit fishing community wrestling with the pressures of its second life as an increasingly gentrified and bustling summer resort. At first, it drew the attention of Paul Tough, whose January 2014 coverage in The New York Times Magazine read like an adventure novel and captured the unique

perspectives of everyone involved. Hollywood came calling next. Rachael Horovitz and Harvey Weinstein, both parttime Amagansett residents, bid on the Times piece together to produce it as a film. Aldridge and Sosnicki are working on a separate book project for Weinstein Books, to be published in April of 2017. The film is expected to follow the release of the book, Sosnicki said recently. As of last month, Horovitz said Jeff Pope, who wrote the script for “Philomena,” a 2013 film that starred Judi Densch, had “written a terrific script and we are

now talking to directors, hoping to shoot next year.” Addressing early rumors that Matt Damon and Ben Affleck were being courted for the leads, she said that while both were aware of the film, neither were committed to it. “We think Matt and Ben would be perfect, but it’s to be determined.” The producers intend to select the director before casting the film. Nancy Atlas, a fixture on the South Fork music scene, wrote a ballad based on the story and played it last summer for Aldridge and Sosnicki at Montauk’s Surf Lodge. Horovitz said she hopes it can be used in the film, but it’s too early for those decisions, as well. In describing Pope’s script, Horovitz said it unfolds as it happened. “Jeff spent a ton of time in the area, and with John and Anthony, to get at the heart of their world.” He also worked with the Coast Guard and others involved to render their stories accurately. In that spirit, they intend to film as much as they can in and around Montauk. The account of the rescue would be compelling no matter where it occurred, “but it is extremely meaningful to me that we’re going to tell the story of the East End and the struggles of the community that John and Anthony are a part of.” On a sunny day on the Montauk docks in late spring before their first offshore run of the season, the banter between Sosnicki and Aldridge is about getting the rigging done right, complaining about the thumb of government fishing regulators on their backs, and summer fun ahead. The talk turns to the writing project, movie and film negotiations and the publicity appearances ahead, and Sosnicki remarks: “That’s work. Maybe it’ll put something away for retirement. But that’s definitely work. “I just want to go offshore and go fishing,” adds Sosnicki. “That’s not work!” — Jennifer Landes

ONE SMALL THING . . . HERE’S A SMALL GIFT WE CAN GIVE the ocean, the birds, the fish, ourselves: Hold the balloons. As a powerful recent exhibit at the Montauk Oceans Institute and Surf Museum so perfectly illustrated, plastics and

other garbage are killing our oceans, and choking fish and birds. Balloons are chief culprits. Balloons look happy for a few hours, then they either go to a landfill (to never decompose) or they’re cut loose into the sky (ille-

gally, since this is littering) with many ending in the ocean and, eventually, in the gullet of some seagull or migratory bird, killing them. Try paper lanterns instead. And, if you must celebrate with balloons — but, really, at this point, why? — don’t let them fly away. Those few moments of wonder can lead to an eternity of woe. —EAST • JULY 2016

Kid Fest

@GuildHall Every Wednesday in July & August!

LIVE THEATER PERFORMANCES Kids $14 ($12 Members) Adults $18 ($16 Members)

Photo by Way2Much

Soul Street Dance The New Art of Hip Hop July 13 at 5pm Photo by Keith Barker

Duffle Bag Theatre’s Interactive Fairy Tale: PETER PAN

Ages 5 and up

Back by popular demand with new material featuring BBoying, Popping, DJ-ing, Beat-Boxing and more!

July 6 at 5pm Ages 3-9

THE 2016 EAST HAMPTON ANTIQUES SHOW SATURDAY, JULY 23 10 A.M. – 6 P.M. SUNDAY, JULY 24 10 A.M. – 5 P.M.

A Preview Party Pirate School Photo by Richard Termine

PINKALICIOUS, The Musical

July 20 at 5pm Ages 2-7

Photo by David Engel

July 27 at 5pm Ages 4-9

Featured in New York Magazine’s “Best of NY: Kids!” And come in costume!

Based on the book PINKALICIOUS by Elizabeth Kann & Victoria Kann Music by John Gregor Lyrics by John Gregor, Elizabeth Kann & Victoria Kann

Check out pre-show Kids Workshops at GuildHall.org

The John Drew Theater In the Dina Merrill Pavilion at GuildHall 158 Main St East Hampton Tickets at GuildHall.org; 631.324.4050 Theatermania.com or 1.866.811.4111

FRIDAY, JULY 22 6 – 8:30 P.M. MULFORD FARM MUSEUM 10 JAMES LANE EAST HAMPTON, NEW YORK To Benefit The East Hampton Historical Society

info@easthamptonhistory.org www.easthamptonhistory.org

OVER THE HEDGE

DOUG KUNTZ

Battle of the Beach

Artificial dune unveiled to mixed reviews

ERHAPS THE SANDS OF TIME WILL

be kind to the beach in Montauk. So far this year, though, it’s been pretty ugly out there. The final touches to the hamlet’s new sandbag seawall (a.k.a. a manmade “dune” intended to protect the downtown business district from storm rise) was completed in late May, but — despite the undoubted best

intentions of those who engineered the thing — its unveiling has been anything but celebrated. “An abomination” and “disgraceful” are two recent descriptions offered by the head of the Montauk Citizens Advisory Committee. Part of the problem is the age-old conflict between the might of the ocean and the feeble efforts of man:

This is a war that just can’t be won. A bit of bad weather over the late spring stripped away the covering layer of trucked-in sand, which was supposed to mask the sandbags, exposing the yellow grit and geotextile sacks underneath; industrial pavers, not just awkward to walk on but potentially a hazard, made a main entrance the beach look plain awful. Diane Hausman, who heads up the advisory committee, told town officials that the wooden staircases over the new sandbag dunes are narrow and difficult to navigate, adding that motel customers are already complaining that the steps discourage them from heading out for a swim or a stroll. The Downtown Montauk project, designed and implemented by the Army Corps of Engineers, a federal agency, has been fraught with woes since the beginning. Hundreds of surfers and residents turned out last November to halt it (left), furious that the beach — not to mention a huge primary dune, a natural bulwark against the very storm waters the project was supposed to be keeping at bay — was being excavated in an effort that they believed was patently futile. Would this injection of a hard structure into the soft beach only result in more radical erosion on either end of the strip, and in front of it? That’s been the result of similar projects elsewhere, and experts say it will disrupt the natural, littoral flow of sand. The project went ahead anyway, even as 18 people engaged in civil disobedience and were arrested at the work site as November turned into December. Meanwhile, the East Hampton Town Board was between a rock and a hard place: They inherited this plan from a previous administration, and apparently felt that, despite the intense public outcry, they couldn’t simply hand back millions of dollars in federal aid. What if they did manage to halt the project, and then a hurricane came screaming in? Well, the Army Corps of Engineers now says its work is done. The Town of East Hampton — which, with a little potential help from Suffolk County, is responsible for maintaining the “dune” — is left holding the sandbag.

— Biddle Duke & Bess Rattray • JULY 2016

Chill! It’s Montauk Hope for peace

ONTAUK IS THE END AND, for many

who live here, the best: the final vestige of that groovy, creative intersection between the unpretentious South Fork beach and working town and New York’s creative edge. But ask any Montauker these days about their wishes for the summer, and most will say the same thing: peace. Montauk has always been a workhard-play-hard kind of place. (Remember the bumper stickers that called it “a drinking town with a fishing problem”?) In recent years, however, things have gotten way more crowded and way more out-ofcontrol. Many saw the summer of 2015 as a tipping point, the noisiest, most obnoxious, aggravating, and unruly ever. The scene prompted withering coverage in The New York Times, The New York Post, Newsday, and Vanity Fair. The horror stories were legion: public drunkenness, trashed rentals, house par20

• JULY 2016

ties spilling out onto neighbors’ lawns, marauding crowds of revelers wandering into traffic, beaches littered with morning-after debris, music pounding out of hotels and nightclubs, and bros urinating everywhere. After things reached fever pitch over Independence Day weekend, hundreds of exasperated Montaukers turned out at a community meeting in mid-July to say “enough!” “We’ve had it,” said Perry Duryea III, a member of a well-known Montauk family, who took out a full-page ad in The East Hampton Star to send an open letter to the community articulating his concerns. “We’re just maxed out.” Another Montauk resident, Bill Akin, spoke out sharply at the meeting: “Up until recently, every new arrival to the Montauk society has contributed something valuable, but this new influx of bingedrinking hedonists adds nothing to our town. Simply put, they are a human equivalent of an invasive species, and we need pest control.”

But it’s the dawn of a new season, and there’s a glimmer of hope. East Hampton Town officials have vowed a crackdown. Although there’s been vocal resistance (and it’s not clear yet how it will all shake out), new rules on rental housing — requiring owners to register with the town — are expected to give officials greater authority to shut down illegal group houses. The town says it’s going to target the out-of-control partying by boosting the presence of public safety officers, too. “We will put resources in play to proactively address the qualityof-life violations such as noise, open alcohol, public urination, litter, taxi license violations, beach fire regulations, etc.” East Hampton Town Police Chief Michael Sarlo said earlier this year. Gone are the days when the wildest Montauk party was a half-dozen commercial fishermen, back from the Grand Banks, boozing and brawling at Salivar’s. But maybe, if we’re lucky, people will look back at 2015, shudder, and say it was the worst it ever got. — EAST Staff

SCOTT RUDIN

OVER THE HEDGE

TRUE CRIME FROM THE SAG HARBOR AND EAST HAMPTON POLICE LOGS 1 > An anonymous caller early Saturday morning reported a “subject laughing loudly” on Madison Street in Sag Harbor. An officer who checked the area reported finding no sign of laughter. 2 > A man on Toilsome Lane called police on Friday at about 1:55 a.m. when he awoke from a deep sleep and thought he heard people in his driveway. No people were found on the property, only several deer. 3 > In what has become a routine call, a concerned citizen reported a seal in distress on Main Beach in East Hampton. An officer went to the beach and reported that the seal in question “appeared to be normal, and resting.” The same officer was sent back to the beach a couple of hours later, after a report was received that the seal was being harassed. The officer found several people near the seal and told them that federal law requires individuals “to stay 150 feet away from any marine mammals.” The onlookers left

the beach, and the seal, in peace. A third call about a seal in possible distress on Main Beach was received Sunday morning. By the time an officer got there, the seal was swimming away. 4 > A small plastic bag containing a white powdery substance was found in the Pierson High School parking lot on April 19 and turned over to police. The powder tested negative for narcotics. Police believe the bag may have contained crushed breath mints. 5 > A caller reported last Thursday morning that the Town Pond swans were out on the Main Street roadway, obstructing traffic. When police arrived, the birds were back in the pond. 6 > A Glover Street woman called police Friday evening to complain that her neighbor had dirty water in his swimming pool. She was concerned the pool might be a breeding ground for mosquitos bearing the Zika virus. The officer noted the woman appeared highly intoxicated, and told her dirty pool water was not a police issue.

COURTESY OF COMPASS

Home, Sweet Home

What your money can buy Three lots on Lily Pond Lane for $110 million, left, or a house in Springs for $300,000, above

EAL ESTATE IS THE INDUSTRY here.

Depending on who’s talking, annual sales exceed, what . . . $4 billion a year? That’s what a new real estate magazine, Shelter, is saying, anyway. Whether that’s precisely correct — give or take a billion — the dollar amounts can be mindboggling. During the last year’s fourth quarter, the average sales price of a South Fork home was nearly $2.4 million, according to the Elliman Report put out by Douglas Elliman Real Estate. And since January, more than three quarters of residential sales have averaged $1 million or more, according to Douglas C. Feinberg at Douglas Elliman.

What will your budget get you? Here are two ends of the spectrum: • 93, 97, and 101 Lily Pond Lane Oceanfront between Main and Georgica Beaches. In early 2014, Scott Bommer, the founder of the hedge fund SAB Capital Management, purchased the adjoining Lily Pond Lane properties for $93.9 million. In late January, he sold them for $110 million to Michael S. Smith, who made his fortune in natural gas. According to Ed Petrie of Compass, who brokered the deal, it was the second largest residential sale in New York State ever and the fifth largest in the country. With

284 feet of oceanfront, the combined parcels total 6.4 acres. Several houses are also included, one of which is a five-bedroom summer place built in 1914. • 78 Richardson Avenue Less than seven miles away is a twobedroom 1,200-square-foot “artist’s cottage” in Springs, which sold in January for $300,000, according to Christine Saar, an associate broker at Brown Harris Stevens. It was originally listed for $375,000. It’s a short walk from Maidstone Beach and Gardiner’s Bay. A “fixer-upper,” the house was built in 1969 and sits on .09 acre. — Amanda M. Fairbanks • JULY 2016

HAPPENINGS

The Dreams and Despairs of Peter Beard The idiosyncratic Montauk pioneer celebrates his art and his crusade in a rare solo show at East Hampton’s Guild Hall. By Michael Shnayerson

E WORKS OBSESSIVELY every night, often till the sun comes

over his compound: the farthest-out home on Long Island’s South Fork. Hours later, after a restless sleep, Peter Beard walks out to the edge of the bluff, sits on a boulder, and watches the birds wheel and keen over the sea. “I always feel better,” he says, “when I’ve done a bit of this.” At 78, Beard isn’t letting up after a half-century of gorgeous, idiosyncratic art chronicling his two lives in Kenya and Montauk. Photographer, painter, and writer, he still mixes his media like a witch doctor, conjuring the bold, mesmerizing journals that have made his name. Portraits of proudly naked tribal women dominate the African ones, collaged with feathers and dried leaves, and even his own blood, old sepia-toned images or newspaper clippings, hand-written prophecies about the natural world. 22

• JULY 2016

The Montauk journals feature pictures taken long ago of famous friends who came to stay, from Jackie Onassis to Truman Capote. Now, in his first solo show in l5 years, Beard has put 50 of his artworks from both worlds on the walls of East Hampton’s Guild Hall, from journal pages to huge mixed-media portraits. It’s a hell of a show, from one of the South Fork’s most enduring — and dashing — artists. With British movie-star looks and a liberating trail of old money (tobacco on his father’s side, railroads on his mother’s), Beard first went to Kenya in l955. Inspired, he bought land adjacent to Karen Blixen’s famous coffee plantation. There, he bore witness to the start of the end for big game, as Africa’s human population exploded and animal habitat declined. A grim Cassandra, he scoffed at conservationists fighting to save as many elephants as

HAPPENINGS

Our cover is an unintended self-portrait by Peter Beard, whose current retrospective, Last Word from Paradise, is currently at Guild Hall. “He was trying to take a photograph of Minor, the bush baby, in the mirror of his hotel room,” reports Nejma Beard, his wife. “Minor would launch himself from bed to wardrobe to P.B.’s shoulder (as bush babies are wont to do).” Finally, the little creature slowed down enough for Beard to snap one in the mirror. It was taken at the New Stanley Hotel, in Nairobi, in 1968.

Jerry Hall and Elephant Skull, Montauk 1976/2012, far left, Gelatin silver print, digital print, paper ephemera, found objects (butterfly, feather) collage, watercolor, gouache, colored inks For Zara With Love, Summer 1987/2012, left, Gelatin silver print with digital print collage, watercolor, gouache, colored inks Images © Peter Beard, courtesy of Peter Beard Studio and Art + Commerce www.peterbeard.com

possible: That would only destroy them all. Better to cull the herd and draw up a seat for the inevitable apocalypse. That dark view suffused The End of the Game, his 1956 classic on the decline of the natural world. Montauk began for Beard as weekends with Lee Radziwill, his inamorata of the early l970s. The couple stayed on an old oceanfront property bought by Paul Morrissey, Warhol’s filmmaker, for $225,000 in 1972; earlier this year it sold for about $50 million to Adam Lindemann, an art collector. “Lee and I had this dream,” Beard explains. “She had these aunts, the Beales, who were being bullied by the Town of East Hampton. We were able to get through that door, and found an

absolutely fabulous, eccentric couple, and we made them our project.” With Jackie Onassis’s help, Beard said, he and Radziwill lined up the documentarian Albert Maysles to tell the Beales’ story. It became the fabled movie Grey Gardens. Beard bought his own six-acre estate on the bluffs at Montauk, nabbing it just in time from Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe. To its several cottages, he added a windmill moved from Ditch Plain. “Instead of the African plains,” Beard says of Montauk, “it had the vastness of the ocean.” Both were primitive landscapes, both imperiled. (continued on page 74) • JULY 2016

HAPPENINGS

Fireworks Summer 2016

DURELL GODFREY

Fireworks aren’t just for the Fourth of July anymore. Here’s where to find them.

No Junk in His Trunk

• JULY 2016

WHATWELIKENYC.COM

n East End tradition in its 19th year, Melet Mercantile’s Epic Yard Sale is returning to Montauk on July 2 and 3. Bob Melet, the owner of Melet Mercantile — both a SoHo showroom and Montauk outpost, offering hog-end antique and vintage clothing, accessories, furniture, books, records, art, and all kinds of cool ephemera — uses the yard sale as his “end-all clear-out for each year.” But unlike many yard sales, Bob Melet’s has no junk. His collections are a continual source of inspiration for the art and fashion worlds, and it is not uncommon to see a Cynthia Rowley or Julian Schnabel browsing the racks. Fur coats, yoyos, and old bicycles were among the items at least year’s sale (right). The Epic Yard Sale is held at Bob Melet’s beach house, near Ditch Plain, Montauk. The sources of Bob Melet’s vast holdings are a bit of a mystery, and he likes to keep it that way. “Where I get it and how I get it is the big question. It’s a result of all of my travels from a lifetime of finding stuff.” For those who would like see who wears this stuff and how they wear it, Bob Melet is hosting a fashion show Saturday, July 2, at 4:30: Customers are invited to Melet’s house to show off their purchases from that day or from years past. “You never know who or what is going to be there,” he said.

Farmers’ Markets EAST HAMPTON FARMERS MARKET

MONTAUK FARMERS MARKET

136 North Main Street Nick and Toni’s parking lot Fridays 9 AM-1 PM

Village Green, center of town Thursdays 9 AM-2 PM

HAMPTON BAYS FARMERS MARKET

SAG HARBOR FARMERS MARKET

St. Mary’s Church 165 Ponquogue Saturdays 9 AM-1 PM

Bay and Burke Streets Breakwater Yacht Club Saturdays 9 AM-1 PM

HAVENS FARMERS MARKET

SOUTHAMPTON FARMERS MARKET

Shelter Island Historical Society 16 South Ferry Rd. Saturdays 9 AM-12:30 PM

25 Jobs Lane Southampton Cultural Center Sundays 9 AM-2 PM

HAYGROUND SCHOOL FARMERS MARKET

SPRINGS FARMERS MARKET

151 Mitchell Lane Bridgehampton Fridays 3-6 PM

PECONIC LAND TRUST

Ashawagh Hall 780 Springs Fireplace Road Saturdays 9 AM-1 PM

LIVING WELL: THE BEST REVENGE

COURTESY THE EAST HAMPTON HISTORICAL SOCIETY

nyone who’s read their F. Scott Fitzgerald will recognize the Murphys: Sara, the heiress of the Ault and Wiborg printing ink company of Cincinnati, and Gerald, the scion of the Mark Cross leather goods company of New York City. They met and fell in love in East Hampton, and became the models for Tender Is the Night. Their extraordinary lifestyle at Villa America in Antibes inspired Picasso and Hemingway, too. This season, the East Hampton Historical Society is adding a little Roaring Twenties romance to its programing with ”Living Well Is the Best Revenge: A Jazz Age Fable of Sara and Gerald Murphy.” Running at Clinton Academy on Main Street from July 9 through October 9, the exhibit will feature evocative personal memorabilia from the family, including costumes, paintings, jewelry, furniture, and rare home movies, along with photos and letters from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale. (And, yes, Sara Murphy was a Wiborg of Wiborg Beach.)

The Murphys and their children, East Hampton

While the Peconic Land Trust is busy conserving working farms and natural lands, we also offer fun, family friendly Connections programs on conserved lands throughout the East End, including our. . . Quail Hill Farm | Amagansett Bridge Gardens | Bridgehampton Agricultural Center | Southold Join us! www.PeconicLandTrust.org 631.283.3195 The Trust does NOT collect or distribute the CPF 2% real estate transfer tax.

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> • Tutto Il Giorno — of Southampton, TriBeCa, and Sag Harbor — is opening in the Dave’s Grill location in Montauk. Gabby Karan and her former business partner/chef, Maurizio Marfoglia, have parted ways, with Marfoglia taking over the Sag Harbor location and changing the name to Dopo La Spiaggia (“after the beach”). 468 West Lake Drive, Montauk. Dopo La Spaggia, 6 Bay Street, Sag Harbor

EAST Bounty section editor LAURA DONNELLY loves to eat and drink and seek out the new, the different, and the very local. She was raised to never speak with her mouth full (and to smile and say “thank you!” even when she’s thinking, “This is the worst thing I’ve ever tasted!”). An East End food-media personality who appears on radio and TV, Laura made the pies for the Waitress movie, once helped Alec Baldwin lose weight, and has written for numerous national publications.

HE MOST BALLYHOOED NEWS on

the restaurant front is Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s takeover of the kitchen at Topping Rose House, the big, white inn on Main Street in Bridgehampton. Here’s hoping this superstar chef’s talent for French-Asian–style cooking will work wonders with our local scallops and cauliflower. 1 Bridgehampton–Sag Harbor Turnpike, Bridgehampton • Another one bites the dust: Montauk has said “ciao” to Ciao by the Beach (which was one of the flashpoints for noise complaints last summer). The spot is now home to the more tranquil-sounding Arbor, whose owners are promising to serve a huge variety of beers and wines by the glass, as well as fresh, locally sourced meals. 1240 Fort Pond Road, Montauk

• But, wait, you’re thinking: Where does the Tutto Il Giorno news leave Dave’s Grill, one of the best restaurants in Montauk? Don’t freak out. David and his wife, Julie, have taken over the former Fishbar location. Now it’s Dave’s Gone Fishing. 467 East Lake Drive, Montauk • What’s hop-ening in Southampton? The Southampton Publick House, a popular microbrewery and tavern, has hop, skipped, and jumped to the location that, for decades, was the family pub the Driver’s Seat. Now you can people-watch while you sip your house-brewed Double White Ale on the sidewalk patio. 62 Job’s Lane, Southampton

taurant with Peruvian influences. When the sun goes down, way down, Kozu will turn into a nightclub called Beach House. 136 Main Street, Southampton • Jue Lan Club, a glam Chinese restaurant with a mood and interior said to be modeled after a secret arts club in 1930s Shanghai, replaces Circo’s. In the wee hours, Jue Lan Club’s owners promise “our nightlife programming will fill a void in the Hamptons hospitality scene.” Gulp. 268 Elm Street, Southampton • We’d heard that the old Nichol’s spot on Montauk Highway, west of East Hampton Village, was a decrepit teardown after Winston’s brief time there. But now it is going to be the Service Station (“Pull in and fill up”). 100 Montauk Highway, East Hampton • In Water Mill, the Greenwich has taken over Red Stixx. They call it a new American eatery. (Is new American food still a new thing?) The menu hadn’t been released by press time, but they do say a D.J. will be spinning on Friday and Saturday nights. 1020 Montauk Highway, Water Mill

The Kitchen Shuffle

PHOTO BY PHILIPPE CHENG

• The new owner of Arbor — a private-equity tycoon who is reportedly the 854th richest person in the world! — also took over Montauk’s beloved Duryea’s. Gone are the days of B.Y.O.B. and sloppy lobster rolls. Now, it’s Champagne and rosé to accompany your mochi ice cream. 65 Tuthill Road, Montauk

As ever, restaurant news is hot stuff — and many changes are afoot on the dining scene. Here’s a survey of who, where, and what’s cooking.

• Grey Lady, which also operates in Aspen, Manhattan, and Nantucket, has taken over the Harbor space, and is serving what it touts as New England fare: chowder, flounder, and suchlike. (One question: Will their clam chowder be authentically Bonac, with hard clams, milk, and pork fat?) 440 West Lake Drive, Montauk 26

• JULY 2016

• Meanwhile, Union Cantina, a high-end Mexican restaurant, has moved into the Southampton Publick House’s former digs. 40 Bowden Square, Southampton • Also in Southampton, Zach Erdem of 75 Main has taken over Nammos Estiatorio and turned it into Kozu, a Japanese res-

• Finally, over on the Rock, a popular local chef, Peter Ambrose, has opened Endless Summer Grille in Shelter Island Heights. Here’s to mini lobster rolls on Old Bay seasoned potato buns! We’ll see you there. 26 Sunnyside Drive, Shelter Island Heights

— Laura Donnelly

The Great Rosé Panic

Are wine shops in for another “rosé shortage?” No worries: There’s plenty of time to gather ye rosés while ye may.

VERY SUMMER, one of the New York newspapers declares, “Rosé Shortage in

the Hamptons!” This throws many consumers into a panic. The people who fall for this Chicken Little–ish proclamation are no doubt the same ones who refer to our towns and villages as “the Hamptons.” But every wine merchant, winemaker, and restaurateur laughs mightily at this falsehood, and then sells more rosé. Michael Cinque of Amagansett Wines and Spirits hosts a blind rosé tasting at his house every Memorial Day. His guests are chefs, artists, wine columnists, winemakers, and dedicated oenophiles. (The winemaker’s wines are always slipped into the mix to see if they can identify their own.) Cinque stuffs everyone with fried chicken and potato salad from Brent’s, a useful blotter before the long afternoon of very difficult and serious work commences. The results are always surprising and revealing. Quite often, the trendy, expensive Provençal rosés come in far behind some of our locally produced wines. Cinque is amused by the rosé shortage rumors, but cautions against falling for the “Coca Cola–style” bottled rosés. “Everyone is in the rosé business now. They back trucks up to the tanks and just fill them up. I want to know the man who makes the rosé. The consumer should look for estate or domaine-bottled wines.” Why are rosés so popular in summer? They have been popular in European countries for decades, when hot weather calls for something light and refreshing. Martin Cabrera, a partner at Navy Beach in Montauk, agrees that there is never a shortage — and they sell a lot of rosé. When Navy Beach first opened, they had two rosés on the wine list, now they have 25, many sold in magnums and mathusalems. Chimene Visser MacNaughton, owner of Wainscott Main Wine and Spirits, has an entire “Wall o’ Pink” as she calls it, to reassure customers there will not be, nor has there ever been, a shortage of that lovely and light wine. She says wines such as Domaine Ott and Whispering Angel, “which have harnessed the PR and marketing forces of a thousand suns,” may run low by the time the wearing of white ends, but this seldom happens. She treats these wines as a full category, giving them up to a third of the selling space in her shop. She has never had a shortage, and sets aside some of the finer bottles, such as those from Bandol (considered to be the Grand Cru of Provence), to age for a few months or a year in order for customers to experience the best flavor from these best-in-class wines. Besides Bandol, she recommends Sancerre, and cool-climate wines like those from Long Island, as well as rosés made from Austrian grapes like Zweitgelt. “So, to debunk: No shortage and certainly no crisis!” Roman Roth, the winemaker at Wolffer Estate Vineyard, even answered our inquiry all the way from Mendoza, Argentina, where he was working on the final blend of their Finca Wolffer 2016 rosé — “Which is delicioso!” Wolffer produces three rosés: Gold Label, Summer in a Bottle, and a Reserve White Horse rosé called Grandioso. Unlike his ultra-calm colleagues, Roth says there is a possibility they will run out of rosé this season. His Summer in a Bottle won the Michael Cinque tasting last summer, so you’d better panic now! — L.D.

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lar a year or two ago, especially with those who’d just returned from Positano or Capri, where it was all the rage and “oh, so-o-o-o refreshing!” Thanks to “Sex and the City,” the Cosmopolitan experienced an extended decade of fame. The Moscow Mule (ginger beer, vodka, and lime served in a teeth numbing copper vessel) was making the rounds in 2015, as was the Dark and Stormy (a similar concoction with ginger beer, dark rum, and lime). You used to go into a bar and be greeted by an unpretentious bartender named Vinnie or Joe. (Well, technically speaking, you can still go into a bar and be greeted by Vinnie and Joe, at the American Hotel and Rowdy Hall, respectively.) But bartenders these days have been promoted to mixologists, and their altars are anointed with tinctures and shrubs, bitters and syrups, emulsions and infusions, eyedroppers and spray bottles with herbal, vegetal, citrus, chili pepper, shiso leaf, umami, and you-name-it flavor-infusing possibilities. These are craft cocktails, and you shall receive yours with Eucharistic adoration in a chosen chalice with really cool, big square ice cubes! Cocktails are no longer an art, they are a science. “Mojitos are so five years ago,” said a friend recently. Yes, but they are also delicious and refreshing, and therefore, I think, immune from trends. So are Southsides, a similar drink, popular with the country club set: a mixture of lemon or lime juice muddled with mint and simple syrup, made into sodium pentothal with vodka, rum, or gin. Kyle Fengler is the mixologist at the Bridgehampton Inn. He changes his cocktail menu every two weeks and says he worries more about naming his cocktails than the actual recipes themselves. Recently, there was the Wildrose, a mixture of botanical gin, muddled rosemary, a fresh cranberry reduction (probably harvested from the bogs of Napeague, knowing this guy), lime juice, and ginger beer. There’s Forbidden Fruit, Into the Wild, and the Jungle Dragon: “Bright, herbaceous, with a hint of fire, this dynamic libation pairs Owney’s rum from Brooklyn with habanero-infused Laph28

Drink Me

PEROL SPRITZ was ever so popu-

• JULY 2016

Spanking the mint: the cocktail of summer 2016 Kyle’s Blueberry Buzz 3 oz. Prairie Vodka (or similar mellow and sweet vodka, cornbased distillates are great) 1 oz. St. Germaine Elderflower liqueur 3/4 oz. 50/50 demerara sugar syrup 3 wedges of lime, from a 1/6 cut (total juicing yields approx. 1.5 oz. juice) 2 wedges of lemon, from a 1/6 cut (same yields as lime) 3 sprigs of mint, reserve one for garnish. 6-8 oz. fresh blueberries, (reserve 3 for garnish) Ice for chilling and dilution

LEVI SHAW-FABER

Tools: mixing glass, shaker tin, Hawthorne or fine mesh strainer, muddler, cocktail picks

roig Scotch whiskey, as well as muddled coriander, green chartreuse, fresh lime juice, and a splash of demerara syrup.” My mind has never been so boggled, I think I’ll have another. . . . The Bell and Anchor in Sag Harbor offers classic cocktails like a “Proper Negroni,” Sazeracs, and mai tais. They like to play with hot and smoky mescals. Some restaurants, like Almond in Bridgehampton, have bottled cocktails at the ready. I confess I am a cocktail geek. I have infused gin with turmeric and picked buckets of beach plums to make a cordial. I read David Arnold’s Liquid Intelligence like it was Fifty Shades of Grey, and have learned that a pinch of salt heightens the flavor of many a drink. Last summer at the Bridgehampton Inn I tried Kyle’s Blueberry Buzz. When you muddle fresh blueberries, all you see, at first, are purple skins and green-fleshed mush. Within a few hours, however, the concoction has turned the most glorious magenta-pink. Kyle only makes his Blueberry Buzz when Halsey Farm’s blueberries are in season. For the rest of us, all you need are limes, blueberries, and mint (everyone should grow some). For friends who don’t drink alcohol, simply make a virgin version of the blueberry, lime, and mint mixture with club soda. This will be your cocktail of the summer! — Laura Donnelly

In a mixing glass, muddle the lemon and lime together. Add the blueberries in two batches, muddling each thoroughly. Add the mint, and muddle gently. Add vodka, St. Germaine, and demerara syrup, then fill with ice. Seal tin to mixing glass and shake thoroughly for approximately 10 seconds. Strain into a double old fashioned glass with fresh ice, either using a Hawthorne strainer, or a fine mesh for a clearer finished drink. Spank the extra mint to release the aromatics, spear 3 blueberries on a cocktail pick, and garnish before serving. Here’s a simpler version of the above.

Blueberry Blush 2 oz. vodka 1 lime, sliced in half 1/4 cup mint leaves, plus more for garnish 1/4 cup blueberries 1/2 Tbsp maple syrup Muddle all ingredients together; refrigerate for a few hours. Shake with ice, strain into large glasses, filling glass about 1/4 full. Add ice, top with club soda, and garnish with extra mint leaves.

EAST MAGAZINE 1/2P H.qxp_Layout 1 5/5/16 11:29 AM Page 1

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Hive Mind The threat of colony collapse and the benefits of hives to humans and nature has raised bee consciousness. These two East End beekeepers live for the liquid gold. Mary Woltz, the bee whisperer. Harvesting honey, at right

PHOTOS: DURELL GODFREY

ONEYBEES AND THE HONEY they

produce are truly one of nature’s greatest miracles. Honey is one of the few foods that cannot be chemically reproduced. Honey does not expire. Ever. All bees live on nectar and pollen, and it is estimated that at least a third of our food supply depends on insect pollination. The number of beekeepers on the East End is growing, and they can teach us a lot about these hardworking girls in our midst. Peter Solomon has been a beekeeper for 38 years and he tends to seven hives next to his house, Swan Cove, on Hook Pond in East Hampton. His fascination with insects is what led him to beekeeping, and he harvests honey once a year, approximately 250 pounds from three hives alone, and leaves almost as much behind for the bees themselves. He keeps two chairs outside the hives so he can sit and observe, watch and learn. 30

• JULY 2016

“They’re not smart, but they’re brilliantly instinctive,” he says as he slowly, and gently checks each hive, making sure the worker bees (all female) are collecting pollen, feeding the babies, building honeycomb, and tending the queen. There is one queen per hive, and all she has to do is whoop it up with a bunch of drones (the dudes), then lay approximately a thousand eggs per day. The drones’ job is to mate with queens from other hives, after which they promptly die. The queen bee can live four to seven years, which is about 57 times longer than her worker bees. Honeybees are gentle, and not inclined to sting, but you should never stand in front of a hive. Stand off to the side. If you do get stung, rub the spot vigorously, recommends Solomon, and apply vinegar with Accent, that meat tenderizer that nobody buys anymore unless they are expecting an encounter with a jellyfish. Some beekeepers provide sugar water for the bees, but Solomon is reluctant to do that: He feels it is only useful if they need supplements or medicine. He believes pesticides are what have reduced our bee population, so he keeps his severalacre property as pesticide-free as possible and grows a great deal of mint and other herbs, which can be detected in the flavor of Swan Cove honey. If Peter Solomon is a traditional and experienced beekeeper, then Mary Woltz, founder of Bee’s Needs, based in Sag Harbor, is the bee whisperer. She tends to 62 hives in 14 locations across the South Fork and doesn’t even wear the protective gear that most beekeepers layer on before tending hives. “Getting stung goes with the territory, but it never stops hurting,” she admits, not sounding terribly concerned. She fills her smoker with herbs and pine needles before lulling the bees with it, in order to inspect the hives. Smoke has been used for centuries to calm bees, but exactly how it works wasn’t understood until the 20th century. It is now believed that smoke masks the alarm pheromone released by guard bees when the hive is disturbed.

Woltz is trained in biodynamics, and that informs everything she does. “Every flower helps bees pollinate your food!” This gentle bee whisperer calls her bees “the girls” and speaks in a soothing voice as she lifts each tray from her hives behind Marder’s Nursery in Bridgehampton.

Each queen has a name. There is Pansy and Paloma and Fatima and Pretty Polly. Liberty is the queen of a swarm she captured on the Fourth of July. Woltz agrees that colony-collapse disorder is a serious concern for us all. She believes it is partially the result of ongoing problems like the varroa mite that halved the bee population in Europe, as well as loss of habitat for the bees, and pesticides. Mary harvests her honey several times a year, and the colors and flavors are distinctly different from season to season. Her honey has won the “Good Food” award from Slow Food Nation two years in a row. She also makes lightly scented lip balms and hand salves from the girls’ beeswax. Her unfiltered, unheated honey and other Bee’s Needs products can be found at many local farmers markets, health food stores, and wineries, and at Marder’s. “I sell honey to support my bee habit.” — Laura Donnelly LOCAL BEE PRODUCTS > Ronald Reagan enjoyed a teaspoon of bee pollen every morning on his toast, and he was full of vim and vigor with a full head of hair! Bee pollen contains vitamins, amino acids, protein, and more. It is the most complete, single food on earth. > Beeswax can be turned into candles, soaps, salves, balms, and lipstick. It can be used to grease cookie sheets, waterproof shoes and boots, prevent rust on tools, lubricate wood on windows and sliding doors, make crayons, and coat cheeses because of its low melting point. > Many East End beekeepers sell their wares locally. Ask for it at farmers’ markets and stores: The Southampton Soap Co. makes soaps, body creams, even a dog shampoo; Bee’s Needs makes honey, lip balm, salve and other products. Among the other many honey mavens is Don Sausser’s Apiaries, in Water Mill, whose honey is widely distributed. Or, start your own hive, and harvest your own.

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Table Talk

What´s in a number? Quite a lot, when it comes to securing a hotly vied-for spot at a packed restaurant.

ILLUSTRATION: DURRELL GODFREY

O RESTAURATEURS, IT’S JUST A

number, but to guests, it is the Holy Grail, the ne plus ultra, the apogee of achievement. What is it? Just a table, a table with four legs and a couple of chairs, maybe a cloth and a sprig of flowers, salt and a pepper grinder if you’re lucky. Come summer, the hottest tables at the hottest restaurants will be vied for, bribes will be attempted, reservations will be made far in advance. All for that Saturday evening in August when that table exudes a palpable aura. That table makes you feel like you’ve arrived, you are somebody, you are exactly where you should be. Where are these lusted-after tables, and why are they so desirable? Nicole Castillo of Wordhampton, a public-relations company based in East Hampton that represents most of the best restaurants on the East End, says it depends on the person. Once upon a time, everyone wanted to be in the front room of Nick and Toni’s, but now their more famous guests, like Paul McCartney, prefer the back rooms, once considered Siberia. Julie Berger, Nick and Toni’s general manager, agrees, and says Table Number Seven, in the middle room, is now the “power table.” It has a lovely view out the windows, is a perfect vantage point to watch the goings on in the room, but is tucked into a corner for the unapproachable factor. It can seat from two to five comfortably. Rest assured, the front room is still chockablock with swells, but frequently that part of the

restaurant also resembles a parliament of flammulated owls, what with all the neckswiveling going on. Kirk Basnight of Red Bar Brasserie in Southampton — perennially popular for its deep banquette, buzzy atmosphere, and candlelight — says his two most-coveted tables are Number One and Number Thirteen. “They’re ideal for anyone who wants to be out in public, but in a private space.… That’s why some of our famous guests like those tables.” Claudia Fleming, the pastry chef ex-

traordinaire and co-owner of North Fork Table in Southold answers without hesitation: “Literally and figuratively, it’s Table Number Sixty, next to the fireplace. Other than that, everyone likes to be in the front dining room — but we don’t get any celebrities. We’re a schlep!” That’s not really true anymore, and not just because the North Fork has become more and more fashionable; North Fork Table has come to be regarded as one of the best restaurants on Long Island.

Certainly, one of the most iconic establishments with a genuinely storied past is the American Hotel in Sag Harbor. There are a number of rooms to dine in, the Drew Room, the Atrium, the main dining room, the front bar and lobby, and the front porch in season. The table at the American Hotel doesn’t need a number, it is simply the table under the moose head. This is the table where the likes of Willie Morris, Wilfred Sheed, and Truman Capote broke bread and perhaps a few martini glasses. Nowadays, you still see plenty of artists and writers hanging out there, playing backgammon, drinking classic cocktails, or waiting in line for the tiny lavatory with an old-school, high-tank pull-chain toilet. Some wag occasionally places a cigar or cigarette in the jaded old moose’s mouth. At the Bridgehampton Inn, owner Sybille van Kempen says the in-demand tables change with the seasons. In July and August, it’s usually Number Twenty, on the enclosed porch. At restaurants with a water view, tables closest to the view are most coveted. This is true at Scarpetta Beach at Gurney’s Resort and Spa in Montauk; Navy Beach, also in Montauk, and Bell and Anchor and the Beacon in Sag Harbor. David Loewenberg, co-owner of Bell and Anchor and Beacon, has a favorite table at Beacon, where almost all the tables have a water view, but he is reluctant to say, ”because then everyone will want to sit there.” The seating at this special table? The original banquettes from Bemelman’s Bar at the Carlyle hotel. “It’s a perfect spot to watch the circus,” Loewenberg says. Here’s a hint: The number for this topsecret table at Beacon is the atomic number for the chemical element Bromine. It’s also the retired jersey number of Mike Richter of the Rangers. We leave the rest to you. — Laura Donnelly • JULY 2016

THE BEE LIST

COLLEEN DEBAISE, who runs the online business-news-buzz website, The Hampton Bee, will

be sleuthing out a selection of fun stuff and fantastic services for each issue of East. Colleen, also a former small-business editor for the Wall Street Journal, lives in East Hampton and chose the common newspaper-industry name “Bee” (think Sacramento Bee,) because bees are emblematic of the hard-working East End entrepreneurs she loves to champion. Send suggestions to editor@thehamptonbee.com. • LIP BUTTER

Montauk Juice Factory

If you’ve spent the day surfing and need to soothe your dry lips, try this coconutoil-based lip balm, available for $11 at MJF’s South Etna shop. While there, you might also try a juice (our personal favorite is Green Mama, a green blend heavy on cucumber). MJF was started by brothers Bret and PJ Caretsky and Madi Murphy. 12 South Etna Avenue, Montauk www.montaukjuicefactory.com • KNIFE SHARPENING

Sharp Hamptons

Ask any cook: A dull knife can really put a damper on an evening in the kitchen. Greg Hollman, who started Sharp Hamptons last year, does old-fashioned knifesharpening at farmers market (Springs, Southampton, East Hampton), charging in the range of $6 to $12 per blade; he also makes house calls. www.sharphamptons.com

• BABY RASH GUARD

Pink Chicken

It’s never too early to get your little ones on a surfboard — or, at least, super-protected from the sun’s damaging rays with this $44 nylon/spandex top. Pink Chicken, the children’s boutique started by Stacey Fraser, opened its new location in Amagansett Square over Memorial Day weekend. www.pinkchicken

• TOTE BAG

Navy Beach/Georgica Bag Co.

• KNITTING CLASSES

Black Sheep Knitworks

This season, Navy Beach restaurant in Montauk is selling a limited-edition $150 tote bag, made by Georgica Bag Co. of East Hampton, with a portion of proceeds benefitting the Navy Seals Foundation. Navy Beach Restaurant, 16 Navy Road, Montauk

Christine Clark opened her tiny knit shop in East Hampton over the winter. She charges $25 an hour for knitting lessons, or stop in to her cozy space to buy needles, yarns, or alpaca wool. 47 Newtown Lane, East Hampton www.blacksheepknitworks.com 32

• JULY 2016

THE BEE LIST

• SEA SALT

Amagansett Sea Salt

Steven (pictured) and Natalie Judelson of Amagansett collect sea water, bucket by bucket, from the Atlantic Ocean and harvest these distinctive flakes through a solar evaporation process.They gave up big-city law careers long ago, all the more reason to support them. Buy the salt, $9.95 for a 1-ounce sampler, online or at farmers markets. www.amagansettseasalt.com

• TEENY “KAILEIGH” BIKINI

Kaileigh Swimwear

Homegrown beach girl Ariana Jasuta launched her cheeky swimwear collection last summer. If we could fit into any of her swimsuits, we’d gladly shell out $88 to $92 per top and bottom. www.kaileighswimwear.com

• MEYER LEMON LEMONADE

Sweet’tauk

The first sip makes you pucker, the second sip makes you want more. The not-too-sweet allnatural drink is $3.99 a bottle and was invented by Deborah Aiza, who concocts the juices using organic ingredients like Meyer lemons, hibiscus, and strawberries. 34 South Etna Avenue, Montauk www.sweettauk.com

• TRAVELER BACKPACK

Pilgrim Surf and Supply

This Amagansett surf shop, originally out of Brooklyn, has partnered with a Japanese brand called Nonnative to produce this lightweight, minimalist daypack, which sells for $255. While at the shop, feel free to pick up a hand-shaped surfboard. Amagansett Square, Main Street, Amagansett. www.pilgrimsurfsupply.com

• JULY 2016

NEIGHBORS

Hello, Sailor ANDREA GROVER describes coming home to Long Island as a return to

her “primordial soup” — which makes sense for the salt-water-loving impresario of an ongoing art exhibit entitled Radical Seafaring. By Jennifer Landes WHEN SHE JOINED THE STAFF OF THE PARRISH ART

Museum in 2011 as an associate curator, her instructions from Terri Sultan, the museum’s director, were straightforward: “Do what you do well.” Sultan knew Grover from Texas, where they traveled in the same arts circles. Grover made it her objective to connect the Parrish to South Fork communities, especially if that meant bringing programs and events to the people. In a few short years, the Long Island native, Sag Harbor resident, and self-described hyperactive mother of two has worked her way to the center of the conversation, becoming an indispensable catalyst for the East End creative scene and an advocate for local artists. From the radar station at Camp Hero in Montauk to the Hallockville Museum Farm in Riverhead, she has initiated and commissioned projects that bring together farmers, foodies, filmmakers, architects, brewers, merchants, designers, and, yes, artists — people she now considers friends. Her latest enterprise, Radical Seafaring (on view through July 24), is a captivating adventure into floating art projects, dating from 1968 to the present. Among its diverse group of 25 artists are Robert Smithson, a Land Art pioneer who created Spiral Jetty in the Great Salt Lake in 1970; Vik Muniz, an internationally famous contemporary Brazilian artist, and Courtney Leonard, who grew up on the Shinnecock Reservation.

Photo of Andrea Grover at the Greenport Boat Yard by Sunny Khalsa

• JULY 2016

Aside from the job offer, what brought you back to the South Fork? I’d lived away for 18 years in Chicago, Houston, and Pittsburgh, and though each city held its appeal, it was time to come home. My mom had an aneurysm in 2008 and miraculously recovered (the neurologist called her “the Admiral” for her hardiness), but that was a signal that I needed to spend more time with my octogenarian parents. They both have a wealth of knowledge about the good things in life — gardening, cooking, travel, and boats — and I wanted my girls, Lola and Gigi, to hear their stories. And I was craving salt water and swimming. On the first summer I was back on Long Island, my brother took us out in his boat to Jones Inlet, and we all jumped off the flybridge into the Atlantic. It was like returning to the primordial soup — totally exhilarating and rejuvenating. What inspires you by living here? I am fascinated by how this semi-rural area has practically the same ratio of creative people as a major city. There are accomplished authors, artists, chefs, architects, designers, filmmakers, and visionaries all sharing this tiny sliver of moraine. How does one build an artistic community? By letting artists lead the way. Artists see the future and they are life’s greatest product-testers. In Houston, I founded Aurora Picture Show, a nonprofit cinema housed in an old church building. Aurora was small, but our activities had reverberations across the country because it was a laboratory for artists. And we did many things first, long before the general population caught on. The playful and inventive culture of Aurora was important to its success. There was an attitude of being able to accomplish anything without restriction, from converting innumerable outdoor sites into one-nightonly screenings and installations, building FM transmitters for spontaneous drive-ins, and hosting programming

• JULY 2016

on boats, in swimming pools, and private homes. I still let artists and audiences lead the way. Most of my activities at the Parrish are co-created with members of the community and involve storytelling and meaningful interaction. Projects like Parrish Road Show, where an artist is invited to present a temporary exhibition or installation offsite at the location of their choosing, and Platform, where an artist is asked to consider the whole museum as a potential site for their work, are aimed at putting artists at the helm. Artists are the ones who challenge the status quo. It can be uncomfortable at first, but it keeps us alive and growing. And, to not give them agency is to miss out on seeing the future. The intersection of art and science is a recurring theme in your work. Has that relationship changed in recent years? When I was a research fellow at Carnegie Mellon just before coming back East, I was studying the history of artists working in industrial and scientific environments since the 1960s. . . . The notion of marrying art and science (or art and industry) was very popular in the 1960s. I think we’re in a similar period now with the Maker Movement and the STEM to STEAM initiative. Institutions of higher education are moving from disciplines to interdisciplinary with the invention of new hybrid degree programs. It’s become obvious that you cannot innovate without creativity. What are some of the defining features of East End artists working here today? The creative community here is much tighter and more familial than anywhere else I’ve lived. This has everything to do with the small size of the population, but also with the geography of the East End — the width of the island here is only five or six miles. As such, it has more of an island culture sensibility. One of the challenges that needs to be addressed is the integration of communities (economic, ethnic, geographic), and how to prevent youth flight from the area. Young people are a lot like artists in terms of innovation, and we can’t afford to lose that population. 36

• JULY 2016

What inspired Radical Seafaring? How much came from your father and his work on the water and your mother being an artist?

How have your husband, Carlos Lama, and your children adapted to living here? What are your favorite things to do?

Radical Seafaring was inspired by the increasing number of artists’ activities on the water. I was just an observer creating a database that eventually became the exhibition. I was definitely attuned to this work because of my upbringing. My dad started out as a commercial fisherman at 12 years old, despite the fact that his father and grandfather had been in the musicalaccessories business for two generations. He preferred to work on the water, and he was a born thrill-seeker. He made extra money as a waterskiing entertainer at Jones

I like to call Carlos my trophy husband because he quickly meets people and knows the names of every parent and child at our children’s schools. He’s now the manager at Innersleeve Records in Amagansett, which has breathed life into the vinyl scene here with live music on the weekends. Carlos also sings with a number of local bands and performed for the David Bowie tribute at Stephen Talkhouse earlier this year. Lola and Gigi are thriving, too. We landed at Sag Harbor Elementary initially (my oldest daughter is now at Pierson Middle School), and we were blown away by how well managed, progressive, and utopian that little public school is — it’s the best school we’ve ever encountered in the three states we’ve lived in since the girls were born. Lola had the female lead in her Pierson Middle School production of “Shrek” earlier this year, and Gigi is known for her fashion sensibility that is even has a hashtag: #gigilamastyle. When I have time off, the family and I love to travel, RV, or roadtrip to see artist friends across the country. There was a great sentiment expressed in the book Moonwalking With Einstein, that if you fill your life with activities, you actually feel like you’ve lived longer.

Artists are the ones who challenge the status quo. It can be uncomfortable at first, but it keeps us alive and growing. Beach Theater, trained by pioneer Bruce Parker. He raced boats, and looked for any opportunity to test his courage. My dad entered the Army during World War II as a U.S. Paratrooper, and upon return from Japan, he bought a small marina in Freeport and started a boat business. My mother was a painter and sculptor who poured her creativity into the family business and her children, and all five Grover kids worked at the boat yard. My dad began building Groverbuilt boats in the 1970s based on the very seaworthy Verity Skiff of his own childhood. In 1985, he outfitted one of his boats with two twin 65HP Evinrudes and a 9.9 Evinrude and crossed the North Atlantic, making him the first person to cross the Atlantic using outboard motors. My oldest brothers each joined him on one leg of the trip (changing co-pilots in the Azores), and my mother used her creativity to design some of the safety improvements that helped them survive a hurricane and 2,800 miles of open ocean.

Has there been anyone here that you’ve become close to that has completely surprised you, someone you never thought you would have known, let alone befriend? Well, when we first got here we reconnected with Laurie Anderson, who had presented at Aurora Picture Show, in Texas. (Laurie was NASA’s first artist-inresidence at the time.) When we arrived back East, Laurie needed extras for a movie, and we ended up having cameos in her incredible film essay, Heart of a Dog. Becoming friends with someone Carlos and I both idolized in our youth was pretty magical. Laurie is the epitome of the artist/inventor — constantly expanding her practice and showing us new ways of seeing the world.

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August 28 - September 4

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PATRICIA PALADINES

waking up

â€¢ JULY 2016

at Lazy Point by

Carl Safina

Carl Safina, a vaunted naturalist, has searched the world for the right words, the right images, the right stories for his appeals to our common human dignity. In his books and articles, his television series and podcasts, he shows us how the world could be, and should be: We need nature, and now more than ever, nature needs us. He always returns here, to this spit of sand that marks the dividing line between New England and the Mid-Atlantic. This place we love and call home, and where Safina, on his morning walks, sees the whole world so clearly.

â€˘ JULY 2016

periled it is. I sought my healing in a sort of reassurance, that nature still carried on, that it retained its pulse. I was looking at a house, but I was looking for a place. I walked across the street, over a low dune, and got a glimpse of the water. A five-minute beachwalk took me to where a broad, shallow bay communicates with ORE THAN A FEW YEARS

ago, I became the “owner” of a beach cottage that had fallen into such disrepair I could afford it. One can own an apartment or even a house in the ‘burbs, but when a place is already old, and it sits amid dune grass and wild beachplums, and a box turtle comes confidently seeking the blackberries it has enjoyed for decades, you feel — at least I feel — like the property has many owners and I’m just their newest tenant. I’d hoped to find a home in a certain South Fork fishing village. Well, it was turning into a resort. The next town was unaffordable, too. So one day I ended up down a road along a marsh popular with mosquitoes, looking at a dilapidated summer cottage with missing windows and a square hole in the roof where a skylight should have been. It certainly was bright and airy, but some of the inner walls had been torn from the studs, freeing a bloom of insulation and leaving wires in a puddle under that skylight hole. Better houses have been demolished. I dismissed the house as a wreck, out of the question. This wasn’t about getting a little

wider water through a fast-flowing channel that I was sure would hold fish. The house said I’d be crazy. The place said I was home. My hero, the great writer Peter Matthiessen, later told me that the name of this spot derived not from appreciation of a peaceful locale, but from ne’er-dowell squatters who’d first established a presence here. I like the name, and whatever it’s called, I like the place. It’s called Lazy Point. Every beach walk is a product of the present and the past. Strolling today, I reach for a large time-blackened oyster shell uncovered by wind. It speaks across time from when they grew wild, abundant, and big. So it whispers a little reminder of how the world was, how it is supposed to

Sometimes when I’m thousands of miles from home, I run into migrants I’d last seen here. They all remind me that the world is much bigger than we know, yet much smaller than we think. house and finding myself in the solitude and peace. It was, though, partly about getting reacquainted with rhythms that come naturally. And it was partly about applying some healing to a kind of heartbreak for a living world so vitally unaware of how im40

• JULY 2016

be, perhaps how it should be. With binoculars, I swivel my gaze across the water, scanning several loons glossy with new plumage. red-breasted mergansers, heads war-bonneted with ragged crests, sit scattered across the bay.

On the far shore a seal rests gracefully bowed, head and rear flippers up off the sand, air-cooling. This daily morning walk is how I take the pulse of the place, and my own. The daily miraculous seldom gets attention. We are too busy, insecure, and — mainly — blind to the exquisite. Those urgent things mistakenly called “the real world” — though they are entirely artificial and simple — intrude continually on the real real world. All real things are wondrous, complex beyond comprehension. In a real place, the mysteries of the ages pile thick with enduring truths and intricate beauties. Mysteries notwithstanding, Lazy Point is a good spot in which to wake up. Waking to such beauty is like finding a private invitation on an unlocked door. That

door opens to a room bigger than human time. Step inside, you can easily spend a life. All are welcome though few notice their invitations. It’s become the most exclusive party around. The sun here comes out of the sea and returns to the sea — a trick that’s hard to pull off unless you live on some narrow bit of land with its neck stuck out. You can watch the points of every dawn and sunset migrate across the horizon a little each day. On a coast ruled by a wandering sun and twelve full moons that pull tides like the reins on chariot horses, a year means something. Seasonality here isn’t just a four-season march. The year here beats the syncopated rhythms of perpetual migrations, rivers of life along the leading line of coast. Birds, of course, and fishes, and also migrating butterflies, dragonflies, whales, sea turtles, even tree frogs and toads and salamanders whose migrations move

them merely from woodland to wetland and back. Each has its schedule, dances to its own drum. Getting tuned-in to the migrants’ urgent energies turns “four seasons” into a more complex suite of what life is and does, how life comes and goes. Time has been called an arrow, but natural days and years, like these, take on a circularity. Circular time. This is perhaps time as the animal perceives it, each day replayed with all major elements the same and every detail different. Circles of time like pearls on an unbroken chain of being. Time and tide. Ebb and flow. Many a metaphor starts in water. As did life itself.

ETAPHORS ASIDE, THE EAST

BIRD PHOTOS THIS PAGE: CARL SAFINA

end of the East End is a defiantly reared-up, jutting jaw of land, exposed to the open ocean on the south, exposed on the north to the full-face force of all nor’easters. Bulldozed here tens of thousands of years ago by the thrust and withdrawal of massive ice sheets like the one now melting in Greenland, Montauk Point forms the break between New England and the Mid-Atlantic. It’s the southernmost rocky beach on the East Coast. With its headland, lighthouse, bluffs, buffeting breezes, surging tides, and crashing

A diving gannet finds breakfast. Previous pages, Carl Safina at Lazy Point

A willet at full throttle

waves; and drawing great numbers of seabirds, fishes, and other ocean life; Montauk’s waters are a great cauldron of vitality. It’s a real place, of real power. This morning when we get to the Point the sea is still calm — no whitecaps, no swells. A light, ruffling breeze is up, and an ebbing tide is streaming a broad current of water toward the open ocean. The sun, low, sets the water shimmering. A gull floats overhead like an idea perfected. In the circle of a natural year around here you may see everything from arctic seals, whose summer home is Canadian pack ice, to tropical reef fishes that have ridden up from the Caribbean in flickering tongues of warm water. Some birds, like the terns that often lead me to dinner at the end of my line, breed here. Others, like harlequin-costumed ruddy turnstones, migrate right through. Sometimes when I’m thousands of miles from home, I run into migrants I’d last seen here. They all remind me that the world is much bigger than we know, yet much smaller than we think. “I have traveled a great deal in Concord,” reported Henry David Thoreau. And how much greater might he have thought his travels if he’d lived here instead. The coast’s moods, changing light, and shifting migrants, year upon year, make this a much bigger place than any map of it could ever suggest. A coast is an edge, an edgy place. Life here presents stark realities and a sometimes-terrible beauty. Continent consis-

tently confronts ocean. Weather intensifies tides into tantrums. Shore can never conclude its eternal negotiations with an ocean that gives much, but demands more. Every year the raw rim of this coast gets hammered and reshaped like molten bronze. Roiling with power and a wild, bare allure, the coast remains youthful, daring, never certain about tomorrow. The guessing, the risk. In a way, we’re all thrill-seekers here. One summer, the air one night was so still that you could see distant lightning reflected in the water; it was mirror-calm. But soon arrived that black downpour full of thunderbolts upon ten thousand winged stallions that beat the water frothy. My neighbor’s anemometer registered winds leaping past 50 knots before one staggering 80-knot gust blew it to pieces that lodged under his roof shingles. I worried about my neighbors J.P. and Marilyn Badkin, in their 80s, taking it fullforce in their tiny beach-shack right on the dune. But I knew they’d weathered many tempests. When I inquired the next morning, Marilyn said approvingly, “That was a fantastic storm.” In a word, this place is fluid. Jackson Pollock, who worked nearby, famously said that his art was about the rhythms in nature. Mountains, plains, valleys dotted pleasantly with cows — to me, they seem uncomfortably . . . what is the word . . . stuck. The coast is no still-life. I sometimes tell friends it’s possible to see the whole world in the view from Lazy Point. • JULY 2016

DELL CULLUM

Fighting Fake Farms

Peter Dankowski, a farmer in Wainscott, sold the development rights to his farmland, but developers still hunger for it. â€˘ JULY 2016

Under progressive local laws, much of our remaining farmland was supposed to be preserved for, well, farming. But, due to a loophole, the ultrarich are buying up former potato fields to create “farms” and polo stables that will never feed a soul. Is this agriculture’s last stand — or is there a better way? Michael Shnayerson reports.

E HAS ONE OF THE LAST great

farms in the Hamptons, 33 acres in Wainscott north of old Main Street, and he is, in fact, East Hampton’s last bona fide potato farmer. Strong and healthy at 58, Peter Dankowski plans to work those acres — and 400 more that he leases between Mecox and Amagansett — another decade or so. But at some point, he’ll have to sell, and when he does, he fears farming here will cease. No subdivision will rise from this loamy land: Peter’s father and uncle sold development rights for it some 40 years ago. The threat isn’t that condos or McMansions will sprout where potatoes and corn once grew — but that a polo pony stable, vineyard, or, simply, giant-sized lawn will. On a fine spring Sunday in his junkfilled barn, Peter finds a stool for his visitor and perches on a box to explain his dilemma. He’s a stocky figure in faded overalls, genial and blunt but inclined to look off: a man who spends his days alone. It was in 1933 that his Polish grandfather came out from Queens to buy these 30 acres and live his American dream. By the early 1970s, nearly 90 percent of the East End’s 100,000 acres of farmland were gone, and a new generation of preservationists had set about saving the rest. John Halsey, 64, from a twelfth-generation East End family of farmers and eventually doctors, was one of those who took up the fight. Raised in Southampton Village, he came home in his 20s from California to see a large neighboring farm sold off for estate taxes. Shocked, he founded the

Peconic Land Trust with a circle of friends and started working to save farms by helping arrange the purchase of their development rights (P.D.R., as it came to be called). The farmers got a substantial payment for tendering those rights. They then benefited from low taxes on agricultural land, and low estate taxes. They knew they were giving up future value on land that was sure to rise in price. After all, acreage in these parts is more expensive than nearly any place else in the country. But the land would stay in production, and their children could keep the farm. Only things didn’t work out as planned. “Back then, the covenants were written so loosely,” Peter Dankowski explains. “That’s why you got people like Matt Lauer doing what they’re doing on agricultural land.” A few miles northwest of Peter’s ramshackle barn lies a different sort of farm with very different buildings. Bright Side Farm is a new equestrian center built by the television anchor Matt Lauer and his wife, Annette, on 40 acres of protected land. It has an indoor riding ring with a girdered roof like that of an airline terminal, under which, on another spring Sunday morning, young women on horseback are practicing their English-saddle form. It has a beautiful barn with fine wood stalls for 36 Thoroughbreds. Bright Side is open to one and all for lessons and boarding (if they can afford it), and to its neighbors it offers panoramic views that have boosted their property values. But • JULY 2016

ed grass seed instead, creating 40-acre lawns, and sent the farmers on their way. The towns had no power to stop them. THE EUREKA MOMENT

At some point, some unsung lawyer for a wealthy client must have had a eureka moment. Farmers weren’t the only ones who could buy P.D.R. land for agricultural use. Anyone could! Not for growing potatoes and corn: for horses. A whole farm field might be turned into pasture with a horse or two at one end. Or, as at Bright Side, an equestrian center might arise, with dozens of horses and nearly 50,000 square feet of en-

How can Peter Dankowski afford not to sell his land at some point for $100,000 to $200,000 an acre?

DURELL GODFREY

closed structures, two and a half times the this land remains in farm use?’ Everyone 20,000-square-foot limit on residential dejust assumed it would.” velopment. The structures, after all, weren’t Until a decade ago, it did. residential. They were agricultural! All the Shorn of development rights, the price new owners had to do to abide by the code of a farmland acre dropped from about was not live on the set-aside land. That was $100,000 to $10,000. As Halsey had preeasy: They just bought a mansion down the dicted, the only buyers were fellow farmers. road or, even better, a property next door. Meanwhile, preservationists used an In short order, Madonna bought a other tool to protect open land, one that Bridgehampton field on Mitchell Lane, soon acquired the force of law throughout just off the Scuttlehole Road traffic circle. the county. When unprotected fields were sold for development, houses were clustered; some 70 percent of each field was kept green as agricultural reserve. Once, Halsey imagined that farmers would work those agreserve fields while weekenders waved from their patios. But the weekenders, who owned the reserves, found Success story: Jim and Jennifer Pike, left and right, farming a nuiwith Peconic Land Trust’s John Halsey, center sance. They plant44

• JULY 2016

DOUG KUNTZ

this isn’t what Halsey and the preservationists had in mind for P.D.R. land. The problem lies in how New York State agricultural law defined what the owner of a P.D.R. field could still do with his land. Along with planting potatoes or corn, he could grow and market fruits and flowers, or operate a nursery or vineyard. He could keep livestock, too, “including cattle, sheep, goats, horses, and poultry.” What exactly the state meant by “horses,” in a farming context, was left unclear. “No one anticipated that anyone other than a farmer would want to buy the field that way,” Halsey says with a sigh. “So there was no thought of, ‘How do we insure that

“Who knew Madonna would have horses and a tree nursery?” muses Scott Wilson, head of East Hampton’s Community Preservation Fund, which handles the purchase of open land and development rights with the revenue from that 2-percent propertytransfer tax that Hamptons homebuyers know so well. “Is it agricultural? By New York ag-market law it is. I don’t know that I would personally call it agriculture, because she’s not doing it for business, she’s doing it for fun.” For the new owners of P.D.R. land, fun was the point. Farther up Scuttlehole, at the corner of Lumber Lane, the fashion photographer Steven Klein bought a field to use as an outdoor horse ring. Off Head of Pond Road, Joe DiMenna, a hedge funder, installed a string of polo ponies in his sprawling stables, alongside a regulation polo field. Melanie Cirillo of the Peconic Land Trust estimates that there are 24 equestrian centers

It’s called a farm: Matt and Annette Lauer’s Bright Side Farm equestrian center, north of Bridgehampton. in Southampton Town on about 720 acres on land protected as ag reserve or through the P.D.R. process. (Figures for East Hampton Town were not available.) These are picturesque, well-tended stretches of green, part of the open viewscape in accordance with state ag-market law. They have, of course, displaced food farming on their properties. Over time, they’ve also pushed the price of P.D.R. land throughout the East End far beyond what farmers can afford: to as high as $200,000 an acre. That’s a market that cuts both ways. How can Peter Dankowski afford not to sell his land at some point for $100,000 to $200,000 an acre? His savings of $250,000 are gone for estate taxes, now that his uncle has died and Peter has inherited the farm outright. His two daughters are currently in college at full tuition. Neither wants to take over the farm; why should he sell his land for $10,000 an acre and shortchange

his family, when he has a choice? A rich equestrian could solve his money problems tomorrow. So could a nursery or vineyard. That’s Peter Dankowski’s dilemma. His solution may lie in how the Peconic Land Trust saved Sagaponack’s favorite farmstand family, the Pikes. FARMLAND BACK TO $22K AN ACRE

“It was tortuous,” John Halsey recalls, “a campaign that lasted for years.” Jim and Jennifer Pike, first-generation farmers, had managed to buy six acres just off Sagg Main, but leased nearly 60 more to sustain their business. Then an owner died, and some of that land, adjacent to the Pikes’ acreage, was put up for sale at full value: initially $8.3 million for 7.6 acres, and then, after the recession hit, $6 million. The good news was that Southampton Town and Suffolk County agreed to pitch in $4.3 million to buy the develop-

ment rights. The Peconic Land Trust had to raise the balance of $1.7 million, which it did, to purchase the land’s secondary development rights (for equestrian centers, vineyards, nurseries, and the like). But the Pikes could no more afford to pay $1.7 million for it than $6 million. The Pikes were lovely people, all agreed. If he could have, Halsey would have just sold those 7.6 acres to them for the $20,000 an acre they could afford, and allowed the trust to take a loss on the rest. But he couldn’t do that. As a function of its nonprofit status, the trust had to offer the land to all interested buyers. What it could do was slap one restriction after another on the land to discourage those buyers. First came the ban on equestrian use. That brought the price per acre way down, but not far enough. “We then eliminated nurseries,” Halsey says. Then vineyards. (continued on page 75) • JULY 2016

ARTSEEN

Scott Bluedorn, Maritime The young surfer, traveler, activist, and artist takes the art, and brewing, world by storm By Biddle Duke

A customer is staring into the cooler in the Amagansett

I.G.A. “Of the whale,” she clarifies. We’re staring at a wall of beer, and one of the brands features an intricate whale drawing. I pull out a six pack to offer a closer look. It’s a right whale, its entire body shingled like the side of a house, which is improbably carrying a barn on its back. Birds flutter around the magical scene. The whale, its curved mouth open, looks oddly content. It’s an entirely arresting image — on a bottle of beer. Many burgeoning craft brewers are fea-

Scott Bluedorn at his studio-barn off Springy Banks Road, with Gardiner’s Island, left, and North Brother Island, ballpoints on paper.

• JULY 2016

turing original graphics on their packaging, but Scott Bluedorn’s pen and inks on Greenport Harbor’s beer are a sharp contrast to the rest of the graphics on grocery store shelves — beer and otherwise. Detailed and carefully crafted, with bizarre, nautical narratives, the images jump out at you from the cooler: a walrus peering out just above the water line, a tropical garden growing from his head; a black duck with a bill shaped into a bootlegging fishing boat, barrels slipping from its hull; a striped bass with an intricately armored body. It’s all almost too beautiful to be on a bottle of beer. Which, for Bluedorn and his patrons at Greenport Brewing, is ex-

actly the point. The young East Hampton native — a surfer, traveler, activist and artist — decided a few years ago to settle in his hometown. Drawings, paintings, even furniture inspired from his growing up here spilled from his imagination. Industrious and business-minded, he showed his work, it appeared in a few local publications, and he pushed it out on social media. The wife of one of the owners of Greenport Brewing saw his whale on the cover of Dan’s Papers a year ago. Co-owner John Liegey, something of an artist himself, had been mulling over his own images and ideas when Bluedorn’s whale drawing appeared

TARA ISRAEL

HAT DO YOU THINK?”

Cosmologist

It Came From Plum Gut 2015, ink on paper

â€¢ JULY 2016

in front of him. “It said ‘old whaling and fishing village,’ which is what Greenport is. It had that shingled, ocean vibe. It was a little mysterious,” he said. “It was just right.” “I put all my ideas and Scott’s on a table for people to decide, and everyone picked Scott’s.” With that, Bluedorn’s fine art aspirations took a turn for the commercial. Having your art on beer packaging isn’t a conventional route to fine-art success. But thousands upon thousands of people now see Bluedorn’s work. What’s more, he now has his drawings at the MOMA — well, in the café; but it’s a start. There’s a long tradition of artists as tradesmen, and art as a service. Warhol

started his career with advertising illustrations. And none other than Michelangelo, whose biggest collectors and patrons were the Pope and the Catholic Church, offered dozens of paid services — including painting, architecture, and goldsmithing. He probably would have illustrated beer bottles if the money were right. Not that Bluedorn’s drawings on beer labels are his Sistine chapel, but the gig with Greenport — there are now seven separate drawings for seven separate beers — marks the ascendancy of his career. He’s taking all the newfound attention in stride. “Everything seems to be converging 48

• JULY 2016

this June for me,” he said in an interview. Catching Bluedorn this summer will be easy, if you’re out and about. He is curating an exhibit opening in June at the Montauk Oceans Institute and Surf Museum. The theme is “marine plastics.” He was also awarded a residency by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts to spend a week — again, in June — making art at the Warhol property on the cliffs in Montauk. And in perhaps his most important fine-art credit yet, Bluedorn was chosen as one of three local artists included in the Parrish Art Museum’s ambi-

elogue; like a sojourner naturalist in this project that relates to maritime history.” visit to the groovy little barnstudio Bluedorn rents off Springy Banks Road finds him working on half a dozen things at once, each inspired by the sea. It’s a remarkably organized, tidy space, which jibes with his careful, not-aline-out-of-place drawings. Projects around the room include a driftwood coffee table, assemblages of objects found in or at the edge of the

tious early summer show, entitled Radical Seafaring, a multi-dimensional exhibit featuring 25 artists from around the world. The show is about experiences around, on and in the sea. “He had this idea to go to forbidden islands that really resonated with me,” said Andrea Grover, the curator of special projects at the Parrish who conceived and produced Radical Seafaring. “He would work sort of like a 19th century naturalist, to go out to these places and come back with drawings. His work would be his trav-

ocean — a tableau of shoe soles, a collage of washed up plastics and another of bits of surfboard fiberglass, chairs made from an old surfboard and another from lobster buoys, a collection of totems inspired by island cultures. Bluedorn, who’s traveled to five continents in search of waves and ocean experiences, has a fascination with sea culture and facts, which is all wrapped up in his love for the South Fork. He speaks from experience on an impressive range of subjects, from the bizarre cargo cults of the South Pacific — islanders who revere the goods and happiness that spill

magically from cargo ships and European and American visitors, a subject Bluedorn explores in his art — to surfing huge Chicama waves in Peru, to the shell maps of the South Pacific, to the ocean wind farm proposed off the South Fork, one of his several personal political crusades. Bluedorn also takes some time to make a heart-warming and heart-breaking observation: “This is one of the best places to be an artist” because of the profusion of

collectors, galleries, and encouraging arts groups, he says. But high housing costs make it impossible for young people. “Staying here and solidifying my connection here has been a good idea. But I’m one of the few people my age who’s trying to stay here and do it. We are in an epidemic right now of young people moving out, and they’re not coming back.” Bluedorn, who is 29, grew up a block from Main Beach. His family lived in a house on one of the large properties off Ocean Av-

enue where his mom and dad were estate managers. He could bike to the beach as a kid. Summers were spent surfing. “The house was a big shingled structure and it was filled with antiques and interesting furniture and art, a lot of visual stimulus.” The Bluedorns would often visit his grandparents in Connecticut, traveling by ferries through Sag Harbor, Greenport and New London. “That plays in to how many nautical references there are in my work, the maritime industry, like boats and submarines, and the weird military industrial shadow over everything.” His mother,

Anne, who grew up in Paris, was a gifted professional chef with an interest in art, and his dad, Bruce, was good with his hands and with wood, fixing and building things. Both were inspirations to pursue a career as an artist.

fter high school Bluedorn attended the Savannah College of Arts and Design and then transferred to the School of Visual Arts in New York City, graduating with a degree in fine art.

Mulford’s Whale, 2015, ink on paper; and, next page, Hermit’s Rock, 2014, ink on paper, and Bluedorn’s pen and inks on Greenport Harbor Brewing Company’s seven varieties of beer. Also appearing on this page are details from a larger work, entitled Twelve Shanties, a watercolor painted in 2014.

After a few years living in the city he moved back to East Hampton, in part to be close to his father, who’d lost Anne to cancer while Bluedorn was in college. In 2012, Bluedorn ambitiously opened a gallery in Amagansett called Neoteric, and organized a series of shows and programming that thrust him into the middle of the art conversation here. He joined East Hampton Town’s Arts Council. Separately, concerned about climate change and “the catastrophic things we are doing to our planet,” he formed the East End Climate Action Network, a grassroots group to push for sustainable energy on the South Fork. That led to his recent appointment to the town’s Energy and Sustainability Committee, which is driving to meet a town-wide goal of 100 percent renewable electric power by 2020. Bluedorn’s love of the Earth is obvious in the narratives of his work. One of the pieces for the “Forbidden Islands” series for the Parrish stems from an adventure to North Brother Island, a small, abandoned clump of brush, trees and old buildings in the East River. North B r o t h e r, which is within

sight of Riker’s Island and the South Bronx, was once home to what used to be known as an insane asylum. The massive prison-like hospital buildings and the old docks are all abandoned now, crumbling, foreboding, mysterious, and empty, except for the occasional curious visitor. Bluedorn decided this was a maritime setting not be missed. He drove to the South Bronx in November to get a closer look, pulling up at a little park across from Riker’s and just up the bank from a sprawling fenced oil-and-gas-stor• JULY 2016

age-tank campus. Overhead, screaming planes took off and landed at LaGuardia. He set out across the East River on his paddleboard, shooting videos and photographs as he went. “It was late in the day,” he said. “Gloomy, weird afternoon. At one point I heard a loud horn blast and there was this huge barge coming right up on me.” He dodged the barge, circled the island once, got a little spooked, and vowed to return. Gardiner’s and Plum are his other two “forbidden” islands, just off the East End. Rumors and mystery swirl around Plum, a former fort and now a federal pathogen research facility that is off limits to the public. Gardiner’s, one of the largest private islands in America, is owned by people who make driving away uninvited visitors a centerpiece of their stewardship. Bluedorn has seen both only from the water. What emerged from the artist are three large pen-andinks that subtly capture the intersection of humanity and nature: seals basking on crumbling concrete pediments on Plum; ospreys nesting with Gardiner’s iconic windmill in the background; jets soaring above a fish-eye’s view of eerie Little Brother.

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Bluedorn likes to call his work “maritime cosmology,” which is mysterious enough to be just right: one artist’s inquisitive journey into the endless sea. Then there is the other work, the art on products. And there, Bluedorn is also in demand: Montauk Rumrunners, Jack’s coffee shop in Amagansett, and the Montauk Brewing Company are using Bluedorn illustrations. Little wonder. “It’s cool,” the girl at the Amagansett I.G.A says after examining the House of the Whale on Greenport Harbor’s IPA, as she takes the six pack to the checkout.

Last of the Fisher-farmers, Charlie Niggles works his pound nets with his son, Tommy, in May off Sammy’s Beach.

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Salt

of the

Earth

The inspiring (and stirring) story of how the Round Swamp Lester-Snyder family founded a Bonac food dynasty

By Amanda M. Fairbanks Photographs by Michael Halsband IFTY SUMMERS AGO, Carolyn Lester Snyder decided to put

her family’s little farm on Three Mile Harbor Road on the map, quietly vowing one summer to make it a household name. The year was 1966, and Snyder, then 21, used her grandmother’s old kitchen table to sell strawberries beneath one of the five chestnut trees that surround the nearly 300-year-old Lester homestead. She called her stand The Girls.

Mother of invention: founder, matriarch, Carolyn Snyder

The next year, her father built her a little red stand on wheels, and her business began to grow, ever so slightly. By 1968, Snyder had expanded the inventory to include squash, tomatoes, cucumbers, brown burlap bags, and little ceramic turtles and frogs. “We would sit there all day long under the tree just waiting for a • JULY 2016

customer. If a car actually stopped, it was a big deal,” said Lisa Niggles, Snyder’s eldest daughter. “They probably felt sorry for us.” One of Lisa’s earliest memories followed the triumphant end of an unusually busy week: She raced back to the house, opened up the metal cashbox, and counted out $300 in crumpled bills and coins. In 1974, with summers becoming increasingly busy on the South Fork, the family took a gamble and pooled its resources to build a storefront. It would sit on a plot of land that had been in her family since the 1700s. Alongside whatever grew on the 20 acres of farmland out back — leafy greens, tomatoes, plums, peaches, cherries, and corn — Snyder starting selling homemade cookies, breads, pickles, and relishes. Thus began an East End institution. “We’re strong women. We’re hardworking women. And we love what we do,” said Snyder, now 71, holding court recently in her kitchen. Round Swamp Farm has become a mecca, from May to December, for anyone who embraces locally sourced food and loves home cooking (home cooking, that is, with a sophisticated twist). And

• JULY 2016

The Round Swamp clan Below left, Round Swamp greenhouse bounty

the successful business has preserved a fishing and farming way of life for a family whose roots have grown here on land and sea for three centuries. Each day, during the height of the busy summer season, Round Swamp sells hundreds of crumb-topped pies, tins of cinnamon rolls, and hefty containers of sevenlayer Mexican dip. Last season, they used a staggering 36,612 pints of local blueberries and 31,889 pounds of local peaches. In addition to Round Swamp’s array of farm-fresh produce and seafood (much of it caught by members of the family), its breadth of prepared foods (anywhere between 60 to 75 dishes, depending on the week) has transformed the little farm stand into a thriving, multimillion-dollar business that three generations of Lesters work hard to maintain. Carolyn Snyder is the enterprise’s formidable matriarch. From May to September, she routinely puts in 90 to 100 hours each week, often rising at 3 a.m. and not returning to her bed until after midnight. She might stop to eat a yogurt, but little else. A stickler for order, with endless reserves of energy, she meticulously arranges her

kitchen countertops in much the same way that she organizes the shelves at Round Swamp: packed to the inch, with items from the filling shelf used to instantly replace anything taken from the selling shelf.

Standing in her kitchen in late spring, Carolyn Snyder said she could see her legacy unfolding before her eyes. Now with two locations — the original one in East Hampton and a more recent storefront in Bridgehampton, run by her grandson, 25-year-old Brian Niggles — Snyder has started to gently ease up on the reins, although you’d never know. Her grandchildren, the ninth generation of East Hampton Lesters, will inherit not only the responsibility for Round Swamp’s continued success, but, under their watch, its likely expansion in the years to come. “We’ve had to grow without growing and change without changing if we were to

LESTER AND SNYDER FAMILY PHOTOS

It all began with strawberries in 1966: Carolyn Snyder and daughter Shelly picking berries behind the family homestead. Below left, Carolyn at work in the early days. Below right, Lester sister, Claire Olszewski, is the family’s Betty Crocker.

survive,” Snyder said. “We couldn’t just sell baskets of strawberries. The season was too short and too many people were depending on us to make it their livelihood.” ever once in our whole life did we go out to dinner,” said Snyder, who grew up in East Hampton. The main industries during her childhood were fishing and farming; certainly, the town had its share of summer people and seasonally occupied “cottages,” even then, but these had yet to become its economic engine. Snyder was born in 1944 to Albert Cullum Lester and Barbara Jean Grace. Her mother, who gave birth to five children, one of whom was stillborn, was a homemaker. Her father worked as a carpenter at the Smith Meal Company at Promised Land, which produced fishmeal and fish oils. Once the fish factory closed, he worked for the Town of East Hampton. On his family’s farmland, he raised horses, chickens, pigs, and cows. The Lesters (originally spelled “Leicester,” but pronounced Lester) came from the north of England. They first settled in New England and arrived on Long Island in the early 1700s, according to Jeannette Edwards Rattray’s East Hampton History and Genealogies. The Lester family likely arrived in East Hampton by way of New London,

Conn., two or three generations after the first wave of settlers. John Lester, the first generation of all present-day East Hampton Lesters, died here in 1764. The oldest Lester house is the three-bedroom, two-bathroom house that Snyder occupies, where “everything is old and crooked and nothing matches.” Six houses away is the Round Swamp Cemetery. There, eight generations of Lesters are buried, some in unmarked graves, according to Dianna Catozzi, 65, Snyder’s sister. Catozzi serves as the family historian and also works full-time behind one of Round Swamp’s three cash registers. She ensures that its line, which snakes through the store and often out the front door, moves as swiftly as possible. And she makes sure that, despite the continual crush, the atmosphere is always friendly and convivial (no small feat when wrangling a crowd of hungry, deep-pocketed New Yorkers). Besides the Round Swamp Lesters, the family has various local factions — including the Pantigo Lesters, the Devon-Springs Lesters, and the Lesters of “Poseyville” in Amagansett. But despite the robust success of Round Swamp, the once-common Lester surname is dying out. Snyder and her two sisters all took their husbands’ last names. Their brother, Albert Lester, a semire-

tired carpenter and fisherman, still lives a few doors down. His two sons, Scott and Jonathan Lester, are the last to carry on the Round Swamp Lester name. Growing up, Snyder and her three siblings attended services at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in East Hampton Village every Sunday. Following a hearty lunch, when the weather was nice enough, they’d take a drive, all piling in her father’s Chevrolet. “He always bought them secondhand,” Snyder recalled. “He never had a new car.”

More often than not, the family would end up at what is now the Springs General Store. For a nickel, their father would buy his four children a taffy bar and one or two small cones of ice cream to share. • JULY 2016

Steven Niggles, an East Hampton Village police officer, out on the water helping at one of the farm’s pound nets, shows the most interest in taking over the family farming operation.

arolyn met Harold Snyder, who later became her husband, at East Hampton High School. She graduated in 1962. “He was one of the best-looking guys in school,” she said. The couple married when she was 17 and he was 19. With no money for college, Snyder went to work, determined to provide for her growing family. The couple’s first daughter, Lisa, was born in 1963. A second daughter, Shelly, arrived 11 years later. A fisherman at heart, Harold Snyder assumed responsibility for the farm after his father-in-law died in 1968, learning as he went. “My father was a fisherman who grew to love farming,” explained Lisa Niggles, noting that it paid more to farm than it did to fish. Discussing Harold Snyder’s unexpected death in 2005 still brings his family to tears. Black-and-white photographs from the last crops he planted hang in Carolyn Snyder’s kitchen. A corncob from his last season of corn, now petrified, still sits in her refrigerator, carefully wrapped in paper towels and fastened with rubber bands. Just before his death, Harold Snyder and his wife had purchased a small house overlooking Hog Creek in Springs, with plans to someday retire. “He said he never thought there were still places left in East Hampton that were so peaceful and quiet,” Carolyn Snyder said. It was July 31st, a Sunday afternoon. Round Swamp had just closed. Harold Snyder was driving his green Ford pickup truck along Round Swamp’s perimeter when he had a heart attack and drove over an embankment. His eldest grandson, Steven Niggles, an officer for the East Hampton Village police, was among the first to respond. Meanwhile, his wife was at their Springs house on Isle of Wight Road, readying it for the summer. Her daughter, Shelly, drove up and let out a blood-curdling scream, saying simply: “Mommy, Daddy’s dead.” Following his unexpected death at 62, the family struggled to regain its footing, unsure of who could fill not only the tremendous void he left behind, but his roles on land and sea. At Harold’s funeral, Stuart Vorpahl delivered a powerful eulogy for his lifelong friend. Vorpahl, a passionate advocate for local fisherman and working people, died in January at 76. Vorpahl said these words, Carolyn Snyder recalled: “I’ve had a silent admiration for Harold Snyder that goes back a long time, a really long time, to 1648. The reason it goes back that far is that Harold Snyder was about the last person who 56

• JULY 2016

truly represented what this place was all about. At the beginning, everyone out here was either a fisherman or a farmer. Harold was both — and he was the last one.” Charlie Niggles, now 56, took over his father-in-law’s responsibilities, becoming an allbut-extinct fisher-farmer. “I think he only married me to get to my father,” Lisa Niggles said. “Harold and I had a lot in common,” said the soft-spoken Charlie Niggles. Charlie Niggles grew up working on a Wainscott potato farm. Before marrying into the Lester family, he worked as a butcher at the East Hampton I.G.A. Since the 1970s, he’s overseen Round Swamp’s fish market, providing much of the catch himself from pound traps off Sammy’s Beach and Gardiner’s Island and other inshore fishing. As a farmer, Charlie Niggles is a perfectionist, much like his wife and mother-in-law. He plans 60 to 90 days out, already thinking in April about the tomatoes, lettuce, corn, zucchini, cucumber, kale, arugula, beets, carrots, potatoes, and radishes that won’t come up until July and August. Once he harvests one thing, he immediately plants another. “When it rains, I can fish,” he said. “And when it’s windy, I can work on the farm.” A lot of people, some dozen family members and another two-dozen workers in the summer,

Carrying on the Round Swamp “Lester” name, bayman and carpenter, Albert Lester

pass it off as their own. “People got away with it for a make their living from Round Swamp. Come mid-September, the curtain while,” explained Lisa Niggles. But when the same guests comes down. After Labor Day, Round Swamp’s business drops by some 75 showed up wanting Round Swamp’s ribs in the winterpercent, Charlie Niggles said. time, the ruse was up.  While Round Swamp’s prices helly is my Julia Child. She cooks “ are not as easy to swallow as their like her and makes a mess like her lobster salad, Lisa Niggles brisand drinks red wine like her. Lisa is tles when customers complain. my Martha Stewart and a total perfectionHigh prices, she said, are simply ist. Claire, my sister, is my Betty Crocker,” the result of charging a decent Carolyn Snyder said. “I’m just the color coordinator.” price for healthy food, much of Perfectionism is easily the Lesters’ it locally sourced and produced best and worst quality. “We don’t like workby fair and decent employers. ing with men, because they’re sloppy. We’re “When we use eggs, we use orcontrol freaks and we’re neat freaks,” Snyganic eggs. Organic buttermilk, Fish harvested from Charlie Niggles’s traps der said of the largely woman-dominated organic quinoa. We take a lot of business. By and large, the male relatives seem to prefer staying outdoors. time in whatever we prepare — and labor isn’t cheap.” When Lisa Niggles was 11 or 12, she started making chocolate-chip This summer in East Hampton, Round Swamp is excookies with a hand mixer that could be heard throughout the house. pecting to double its baked-goods and prepared-food outHer parents would come downstairs in the morning to find cookies linput with a new 14,000 square-foot kitchen located in the ing their countertops. exact spot where Harold Snyder died nearly 11 years ago. Slowly, the farm stand started expanding to include homemade good Over the years, Round Swamp’s loyal customers have ies, both sweet and savory. “You start with one thing,” said Lisa Niggles, 53, a self-taught chef whose most popular items include blueberry muffins and chocolate chip cookies, not to mention her guacamole, chicken salad, “We had to work. When and cinnamon rolls. “You try it once and see if it sells.” it was summer and my Lisa Niggles’s aunt, Claire Olszewski, now 59, started out by makfriends were at the beach, ing all variations of banana bread — with and without nuts, with and that was our season and without chocolate chips. Olszewski is Carolyn Snyder’s youngest sister. that’s what we did.” The two are extremely close. Now also widowed, Olszewski’s late hus— Brian Niggles band, Joseph, worked as a commercial fisherman, supplying fresh fish to Round Swamp’s market. A talker and a people person, Olszewski circles the market over and over, organizing its walk-in cooler of fruits and vegetables, chit-chatting with customers, and whipping up endless batches of cakes. Lemon pound cake is Olszewski’s most popular item. One batch yields 13 large and 21 small loaves. In a given day, she makes between three to four batches from a memorized recipe that includes 44 eggs, 27 cups of flour, 16.5 cups of sugar — and a secret ingredient (a type of juice) that she refused to disclose. Grosgrain ribbon encircles each loaf. Banana bread gets a bright yellow bow. Carolyn Snyder’s youngest daughter, Shelly Schaffer, 41, is famous for her lemonade and Key lime pie. Once her two children, Alexa, 6, and Nicholas, 11, are grown, she hopes to launch a Round Swamp delivery business. Her husband, Al Schaffer, supplies Round Swamp with lobster, fishing off Montauk and Fishers Island. Shelly Schaffer is a chef. Her most popular dishes are those customers can take home and reheat: picnic chicken, macaroni and cheese, and chicken buffalo balls, to name but a few. “Anyone can find a recipe. The reason we’re successful is because of the quality. That’s what makes us special.” Especially in Round Swamp’s early years, when premade food was a novelty, some customers would reheat the food at home, plate it, and

• JULY 2016

become like family, with Carolyn Snyder’s nod of recognition a sign of having arrived. “It’s a connection,” explained Lisa Niggles. “You don’t get that at Citarella. There’s love in the food we make.” One familiar face is Kenneth Lipper, an investment banker, who has shopped at Round Swamp Farm since buying a weekend house here in 1973. Most summer weekends he pulls into the parking lot at 8 a.m., eager to beat the morning rush. “No matter how isolated you feel otherwise, you feel part of something bigger when you walk in there,” Lipper said. “The customers are family for them, and they are family for their customers.” ur customers come to us to feel sustenance and feel part of a family,” said Brian Niggles, the second of four Niggles brothers. Brian grew up on the farm, in the house where he still lives. He spent his childhood outside. Starting at the age of 5, his grandmother put him to work, carrying empty baskets to the front of the store and using a dustpan to sweep crumbs off the floor. Since 14, he’s worked at Round Swamp on weekends and during breaks from school. “Every baby I had was planned in the winter. When I finished work, I had another baby,” said his mother, Lisa Niggles. Family members rarely acknowledge summer birthdays, briefly gathering after closing to celebrate with peach or strawberry cake and whipped cream. Brian Niggles’s parents led by example, instilling in each of their sons the value of hard work. “We had to work. When it was summer and my friends were at the beach, that was our season and that’s what we did,” Niggles said, during a conversation this spring at Jack’s Stir Brew Coffee in Amagansett. But unlike his grandmother’s upbringing, when he was coming up, Round Swamp was already a success, growing by leaps and bounds.

“I’ll never have that history of bootstrapping,” he said. “There was never a time when it didn’t work out. My family has always made our living this way. We’ve never had to find another job.” Everything sold at Round Swamp gets passed through a family member’s hands before hitting the shelf. “We’re the quality control,” said Niggles, a graduate of East Hampton High School who holds a degree in economics from New York University.

“It’s not okay if I don’t come back with something. In August, I have to have tomatoes because in January the bank won’t care.”

• JULY 2016

He knew early on that he wanted to stay in East Hampton, but he craved a space of his own and wanted to try his hand at being his own boss. Running the East Hampton store wasn’t an option. Ready to strike out on his own, Niggles slowly planted the seed that a second location could be profitable. It was a snowy day in January of

Lester sister, Dianna Catozzi, the family historian

2014, and he and his mother were driving around Bridgehampton. A for-rent sign caught their eye in the parking lot behind the Candy Kitchen. The store was ideal, with big, beautiful windows, wooden floors, and a nearby parking lot. They quickly signed a one-year lease. Despite being scared to death, he never doubted they could supply two stores. “My family has never had a problem making enough food. We always cook for 20,” said Niggles. Each day, a truck makes delivery rounds, using the back roads to transport freshly prepared foods from the kitchen in East Hampton to the store in Bridgehampton. For the first year, his goal was that the Bridgehampton store might do half as much business as East Hampton. It quickly exceeded that expectation. And last year, its second, Bridgehampton’s profits were “just under” those of the East Hampton flagship. “We are catching up with them and meeting new people who had never heard of us before,” said Niggles, whose customers typically drive from Sag Harbor, Shelter Island, and Southampton. Niggles describes himself as the “final man in a long line of strong women.” He was 14 when his grandfather died, and it never occurred to him that his grandfather, the family’s anchor, wouldn’t still be here. As his grandmother’s heir apparent, Niggles hopes the Bridgehampton store will add another layer of stability — financial and otherwise. “I’m hoping it will give my family a good life and not have this burden of killing themselves in order to operate it day in and day out,” Niggles said. With Niggles running the show in Bridgehampton, where he is part-owner, the farm will most likely be taken over by one of his brothers. So far, Steven Niggles, 29, a police officer, has shown the most interest. Tommy Niggles, 23, enlisted in the U.S. (continued on page 74)

M ISSION STATEMENT To preserve the Georgica Pond ecosystem for future generations through science-based, watershed-wide policy and restoration.

www.friendsofgeorgicapond.org

Join us for The Annual Classic Boat Fair Saturday, July 9th 10 am - 4 pm Hartjen-Richardson Community Boat Shop 301 Bluff Road, Amagansett

www.eecbs.org

Donâ€™t miss our Classic Boat Meet Louse Point, Accabonac Harbor Sunday, August 7th 10 am - 4 pm

HABITAT

SUNNY GUO

The Montauk Shores mobile homes above Ditch Plain beach

Trailer Park Luxe

In the formerly humble neighborhood above Ditch Plain beach, Fred Stelle, Bridgehampton architect, has set the standard for surf-side cool. By Levi Shaw-Faber Photographs by Philippe Cheng

Originally covered in vinyl siding, the renovated trailer is now clad in cedar.

NTIL RECENTLY, the Montauk Shores mobile

home community was pretty much what the name suggests: a trailer park with rows of mostly matching vinyl-sided houses in the dunes above Ditch Plain beach. But, like so much of Montauk, the community is changing. Trailers are undergoing complete and remarkable makeovers, being converted into carefully conceived, stylish family homes and surf retreats. Set on one of the most picturesque stretches of coast in the country, Montauk Shores overlooks a favorite surf spot and is a stone’s throw from the Montauk bluffs, the discrete, wild setting for dozens of stunning houses owned by a cavalcade of media stars, artists, and financiers (Paul Simon, Dick Cavett, Julian Schnabel, among others). Montauk Shores isn’t quite Point Dume and Paradise Cove in Malibu, where trailers owned by Pamela Anderson and Matthew McConaughey trade for many millions — but it’s getting there. A recent Montauk Shores listing featured a 650-square-foot trailer for $1.25 million. The perfect family surf house was the objective for Fred Stelle and the Bridgehampton architecture firm of Stelle Lomant Rouhani Architects when they tackled a complete remodel of lot number 800. The project, completed 15 years ago and tweaked ever since, was something of a forerunner for Trailer Park, as locals usually call the place. Like every house on the site, the $30,000 trailer (in • JULY 2016

The deck looks out on both the Montauk bluffs and Ditch Plain beach.

• JULY 2016

2001 prices) came in on wheels. After being strapped to its foundation, it was entirely stripped inside and out. Stelle and his team had free reign. They started by removing the vinyl siding, the “crappy appliances, and the fake wood finishings,” Stelle said. The design team then replaced the vinyl with horizontal cedar siding and installed a barn-style corrugated metal roof. The wood frame, the metal chassis attached to the foundation, and the drywall are among the few remaining elements of the original building. While the windows and doors are in their initial locations and the layout of the house is similar to a classic trailer, the fixtures, the flooring, the windows, and the doors were all upgraded. And, you can watch surfers taking off at Hoffman’s while relaxing on the large mahogany deck or rinsing off in the outdoor shower. The minimalist interior features bamboo flooring and a miniature kitchen with a marble countertop. In a masterful touch, the dining table folds away into a custom-designed shelving system with a mounted television. The small bathroom and bedroom highlight Stelle and company’s no-clutter, perfectly functional, and cozy designs. As you stand inside the tiny trailer and look out onto the Atlantic Ocean, the space feels like the cabin of a boat, where every detail is carefully considered to maximize space, efficiency, and comfort. As Mies van der Rohe would say, “Less is more.” Stelle’s modernist upgrades have become a new vogue at Montauk Shores. “The younger and more affluent demographic tends to favor a more updated version of the trailer,” he said. Although a number of trailers have pushed the idea of what is possible with a mobile home and its small accompanying outdoor spaces, several aspects of Stelle’s design language have become de rigueur in the community, including cedar siding, metal roofs, and, notably, the metal house numbers in a font by Richard Neutra that have popped up on many of the homes. One of the most striking features of the trailer at lot number 800 is not actually part of the architecture at all. The blue Bertoia–inspired chairs are the centerpiece of the interior, and not by accident. “I always design with furniture in mind,” Stelle said. “It’s a part of the process.”

Clockwise, from top: A Ray and Charles Eames-designed “Hang-It-All” and George Nelson-designed bench is featured in the minimalist interior. A folding dining table separates the kitchen from the living room. Bertoia-inspired chairs bring color to the interior. The trailer’s bedroom has ocean views. • JULY 2016

OUTSIDE

THAT WILY MISTRESS NOT LONG AGO AT DITCH PLAIN A GROUP

of surfers out in small, crumbling rollers watched as a father coached his son, perhaps 9 or 10. The kid stroked and stroked again, but the waves slipped beneath him. Then, quite suddenly, his timing was right. A little swell grabbed him and his board. He swept past the crowd, rising to his feet for a 50-yard glide. The crowd observed all this. The father smiled. One of the older guys nearby turned to the dad: “He’ll never be president, now.” Once it takes hold, surfing pulls you in, forever, like some mystical pagan cult. “That wily mistress, surfing,” wrote William Finnegan of The New Yorker, in his memoir,

• JULY 2016

Barbarian Days, A Surfing Life, a touchstone for many surfers. “Surfing is a secret garden, not easily entered,” writes Finnegan. And, once inside, there is only one thing: the next wave. ANDREW BLAUSCHILD knows well that garden. A photographer and a surfer, he caught his first waves and started taking pictures three decades ago in Southampton and, predictably, never stopped. He’s moved east since those early days, most often training his lens on the ocean, his work straddling the realms of art and surf photography. Here are six photos from his portfolio with his descriptions of each moment.

“

This was one of those classic days at Ditch. I took a bunch of shots but this one just captures everything, the boogie boarders in the foreground all the way to the people walking under the cliffs in the distance.”

• JULY 2016

“This is White Sands, just a really good morning, last year. And that’s a friend Scott Rudin. That’s his spot. The girl with the pink hair makes it.”

“They’re debating who this is (on the wave), Grant Monahan or Tyler Maguire. It’s Montauk on that good swell in April earlier this year. I’m sure it’s Grant.”

• JULY 2016

“Long Beach, two years ago, Montauk surfers Mikey DeTemple and Lee Meirowitz in a blizzard of puffy snow.” “This is a Rusty moment [Rusty Drumm died earlier this year]. He was sitting there with all the Ditch elders. I just thought this was one of the last days they’d all be surfing together. It was a year ago. I’m not exactly sure, but there’s Lee Bieler, Roger Feit, Randy Rosenthall, Tony and Charlotte Caramanico, and John Angiulo. Rusty is in the middle there.”

• JULY 2016

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“This was one of those great early fall days in Montauk, a hurricane swell three years ago. Rusty [Drumm, a Montauk surfer and fixture, and an East Hampton Star writer, succumbed to cancer in January] figures in this photograph. We were always okay. You know, the usual surferto-surfer thing. . . . We weren’t homies. He was already not feeling great by then, he wasn’t catching that many waves. So I announced that the next wave was Rusty’s, and he took off. We were friends for the rest of his life after that.”

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Photo by Nate Best

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FICTION

Dating Tips for the Unemployed

By Iris Smyles OU ARE UNEMPLOYED, at best very unsuccessful. Yet you go to parties.

Parties where you meet people who ask, “So what do you do?” You live with your parents. You share a one-bedroom with three roommates. You consider ramen a food group. You update your Facebook profile daily. Your job has no title. You work within a department. You’re an unpaid intern. You’re assistant to the intern. You stop people on the street and ask them if they like comedy, then push ticket packages to the “best comedy club in New York!” You stop them and say, “Excuse me, may I ask you a question about your hair?” You hand out free soap samples; nobody wants your soap samples. You don’t read the newspaper; it’s expensive and the news is never good. Instead, you pick up the free alternative weekly. You skip straight to the comics and read without laughing. You could do better, you think. That is, if you drew. You blame your parents for not recognizing and encouraging your artistic potential early on. You remember when you were ten, you’d sketched some pretty realistic-looking horses. You skip to your horoscope: “Inside you is an untapped power source, Pisces. Tomorrow, Libra, a great opportunity will present itself. Be prepared, Gemini, the rest of your life is about to begin. Leo, stop living in the past, the future is right in front of you!” You throw the paper away before you get home and forgive your parents for not buying you pastels — they did their best. You call your mom, and she asks you about the weather. You lie and say it’s colder than it is. You want to say something interesting. “We’ve a wintry mix today, Mom.” When she says, “You sound depressed,” you say you got a flu shot yesterday, just as she instructed, that it might have infected you. You feel so tired all the time lately. “Wear a hat,” she says. “I’m wearing one right now, Mom!” “Hold on, I’m going to put your father on.” “Drink plenty of liquids,” he says. “And cheer up!” he commands, before hanging up. You take a job answering phones in a husky voice. It was funny at first, and all your girlfriends had a good laugh. You told them, “I’m going to learn what men want and then share it ALL with you!” After your first day, you met them for cocktails and they asked you what you found out. “Men want sex,” you said, too demoralized to go into detail. The reality wasn’t nearly as funny as the idea. “They never call in to talk about art or politics,” you joked. But no one laughed, something about your tone. You lie and tell your parents you’re a cold caller for the Ballet at Lincoln Center. You tell them all your friends are jealous because they let you work from home; you say, “A commission is even better than a salary, Mom!” 70

• JULY 2016

You log on to Facebook and update “favorite movies.” You take out Rocky. Put it back in. Then take it out. Then you add Rocky I, II, V, IV, VI, and III in that order. “Rocky IV gets priority and could switch places with V, though V is actually a superior film, as IV has a sociohistorical significance and represents in many ways the apotheosis of the Cold War experience in America,” you’ve been known to say on first dates. “You will lose,” you once said in an Ivan Drago accent, to a guy just before he kissed you, before he didn’t call you back. You log on to Facebook and scroll down your ex’s wall. Your college internship comes up at Thanksgiving dinner. Your mother says, “Why don’t you apply there, honey?” You can’t tell her that you’ve dated everyone in the office, that you can’t possibly go back now, what with Jed, Field, Gibb, and Markus all over the place. You’re too pretty or too easy, have low self-esteem or a superiority complex — you’re not sure what’s wrong with you, why you did what you did. You dated Jed because he said you were beautiful. And then Markus had kissed you after you drank too much at the holiday party. Gibb you went out with because Jed dumped you, and then Field after Gibb because you could do whatever you wanted, because you were above caring anymore. You say, “I’d like to try something different, Mom. Maybe teaching.” You tell her about the ads in the subway about making a difference. You attend a birthday party. The host brings out Milton Bradley’s Operation, and everyone cheers when she extracts the spleen. You fail to extract anything. Later you overhear someone ask her in the kitchen, “What do you do?” You watch out of the corner of your eye as she replies unselfconsciously, “I wait tables.” Perhaps you, too, could wait tables, you think the next morning, as you stand still for thirty minutes, naked before an N.Y.U. drawing class, a class you took yourself a few years ago, before you graduated early. What was the rush? You found your own T-shirt company. You are president and sole employee, and your apartment is filled with the unsold stock from the street fair where you ran into an ex and a former professor all in one day. They fingered your goods and neither of them bought anything. “I was in your class! I make them myself!” you said too quickly. Your ex said he liked the one that said “Second Base” and was trying to gauge whether or

door in the rear. An older waiter who always gets the best tables, an actor who’s worked there for twenty years, takes you under his wing, shows you tricks with the ice machine, and tells you not to worry, that you’ll get used to it. You thank him with a mixture of gratitude and horror. You don’t want to get used to it. You type forty words per minute, you lie. You believe you can learn PowerPoint. On days between job interviews, you smoke pot and watch Jerry Springer, Judge Judy, Judge Joe Brown, Dr. Phil, Oprah, Tyra, because “it’s so bad, it’s good,” you tell someone at a party. You call your parents to ask for more money. Your life, you think staring at Dr. Phil, is so good, it’s bad. You avoid your friends. The successful ones make you feel ashamed, and the unsuccessful ones avoid you, too, for fear that all together you give off too strong an odor of failure. You prefer the company of strangers, those middle-aged drunks at the bar around the corner from your apartment, about whom you’ve decided to write a novel. You have the title and the last line already. Nowhere Is a Place. “Because you can’t leave nowhere unless nowhere is a place.” It’s about desolation and redemption at a bar around the corner from your narrator’s apartment. You check your email: nothing. But then, a message from your parents: “We just got email! How’s the weather?” You think of responding with a link to a weather website, but then worry it might throw off the delicate balance of your relationship with your parents. What would you talk about? “Mild with a chance of rain,” you Superman, by Eric Fischl, Sag Harbor, oil on glassine, 1978 write back. You want to write something hopeful, some bit of good news, something they can feel proud of. You want to tell them that things are looking up, that they shouldn’t worry. You type, “I got one of those new not it would fit his new girlfriend. He got her on the phone to Sonicare toothbrushes you told me about. It’s revolutionized the ask her size, but then she didn’t want one after all, he explained, way I clean my teeth.” You sign it “love” and press Send, unable to before winking at you and saying he had to go. shake the feeling that your mom thinks you’re a loser. And no, it You get a job at a trendy restaurant you once went to on shouldn’t matter. But it does. It starts to. a date. You thought it would be fun to work at a place so chic. “Getting a date,” a woman says on morning television, “is But your uniform is not chic and the waitstaff, they correct just like applying for a job.” This makes sense; no one will go out you on your first day, must enter and exit through a special • JULY 2016

with you and no one wants to hire you. You’ve heard a rumor that there is someone for everyone but are starting to worry that the one for you is ugly and stupid. What if you don’t like the one for you? You’ve begun to take seriously magazine articles offering dating tips, when you come across an article entitled “Dating Tips for the Unemployed and Unsuccessful.” You read: “Singles are comprised of two distinct groups: the Miserable and the Non-Miserable. Recognizing to which category the object of your affection belongs is the first step toward a healthy romantic life.” Rule #1: Never date someone more or less miserable than you.

Your ideal partner is just as miserable as you are, though early on this may be difficult to discern. For in the beginning, you’ll both put on a good show, disguising your misery with a sprightly off-the-cuff wit (this has been rehearsed). And charmed by one another’s astonishing élan and the unusual receptiveness you’ve found with no one else, you’ll both begin to fall. Now, having successfully tricked one another into believing you’re both happy, laughing persons, one of you will suggest that you share that happiness exclusively. You eagerly agree and are thrilled to find yourself the object of a love you suspect you do not deserve. She/he is just so great! you think, until you discover that your partner, whom you’d thought was way out of your league, whom you’d thought you’d stolen from the high shelf, was only faking it, just as you were. He or she, it turns out, is just as miserable as you. At first you are angry, but then anger gives way to relief. At last, you can share everything, including your misery. That is until one of you (you pray it’s not the other) achieves some modicum of success and leaves you even more miserable than before. But don’t despair — there are plenty of other miserable fish in the sea! Rule #2: You will never fool anyone with your self-conscious quips about what you do.

Your wit will be your giveaway, as the most miserable in work offer the most creative responses. Individuals who are happy with their professional lives have no need for whimsical replies. They answer plainly, “I’m a bonds trader.” “I’m a teacher.” “I’m a doctor.” “A journalist.” If someone answers, “I’m a blowfish,” rest assured this person is narrowly holding on. Furthermore, it will never work between the bonds trader and the blowfish. For just as you are suited to misery, the non-miserable are suited to one another. Even if you do manage a few dates with the bonds trader or any other non-miserable bachelor or bachelorette, your misery and the air of failure you’ve attempted to mask will eventually become apparent through the desperation of your wit and near-compulsive charm. 72

• JULY 2016

“Why must everything be a joke with you all the time? I asked you a simple question. What did you study in college?” the non-miserable boyfriend may ask during your final argument. “I told you. Theory and Engineering of Sweet Meats!” you answer devilishly, not wanting to tell him the truth: Medieval Poetry. “Why can’t you ever be serious?” he growls. “Are you suggesting my major wasn’t serious?” you purr.

nce you have disabused yourself of any notion of dating a non-miserable, the next step is learning to navigate among your miserable peers. The key to a lasting union lies in finding that unhappy single whose misery best matches your own. Online dating sites are a treasure trove of the sad. Match, OKCupid, and Facebook are all great places to begin your search for a kindred loser. Once you’ve located a few nice pictures, scroll down their profile to where it says “Occupation.” Learn to decode these often figurative descriptions, and you’ll be well on your way to finding your perfect match. Let’s practice: See Christine! Blond hair with a pretty smile. She has written under Occupation: “Being Christine.” This is to imply that Christine is down-to-earth, that she understands in a deep way that being herself is enough. Christine is lying. The truth is Christine hates being Christine, but feels she must get used to it; “everyone else is taken,” she once read in a fortune cookie. At the corners of Christine’s smile lie curls of defeat, but isn’t that what you found so charming in her photo? John is smiling beside a sock puppet in suit and tie. Scroll down to Occupation, which reads: “I make toast in space.” John is deeply unhappy, so much so that he has mistaken it for happiness. He blinks a lot and is frequently confused, sometimes crying inexplicably at the conclusion of knock-knock jokes — he’ll claim he is crying because he is so happy to find “Orange” at the door. If you go to a diner with him, he will make the beaker of milk talk until you laugh out of an awkward politeness, which he’ll take for encouragement before continuing with the sugar packets. Watch out for those who write “Secret Agent.” These charmless charmers are quick with ready-made phrases borrowed from the sitcoms and movies they favor, as a way of imbuing their steady stream of nervous chatter with the personality they fear they lack. “How you doin’?” the Secret Agent will ask you repeatedly in his best Joey Tribbiani voice, no matter how many times you answer that you are “fine.” Longing for intimacy and eager to drop his disguise, the Secret Agent can morph into “the Real Me” in a matter of minutes. You’ll recognize the change when he begins talking of your “getting to know the real me,” as the primary characteristic of the Real Me is endlessly alluding to “the real me.” Other catchphrases of the Real Me: “I thought we were beyond that” and “I don’t play games.” What the Real Me really means is “I am bad at playing games. My saying I don’t play games is actually my best game. My Secret Agent secret weapon! ‘Yeah baby!’ Please be gentle. I’m very vulnerable right now. I can’t find a job and have had to move in with my parents.”

Need more help? Here’s a chart:

But back to you! “What do you do?” That is, what are you going to say when the question comes up at that party tonight? Feeling like you can’t face it? Like you might just stay in after all? Maybe stay in every night until you finish your novel? Until you’ve diagnosed the ills of your generation and found their cure in prose, so that when you do go out again, you’ll know who you are, and it won’t matter anymore how you answer, but it won’t feel too bad either when you say: “Novelist!” Yes, you think, looking in the mirror as you throw on a comfortable sweatshirt. Stay in, it is! But to the deli first to buy a six-pack! And then, yes, of course, to your destiny in front of the computer, to your blank Word document entitled “The Novel.” You crack open a beer and type a few paragraphs before deleting them. You don’t know what you’re doing, what should happen next, what’s important, if any of it is. You consider making the novel about desolation at a bar around the corner from your narrator’s apartment. You finish your last beer and consider going to the bar around the corner from your apartment for some research. But then you don’t; you’re already in your underwear and, besides, that lonely five-dollar bill in your wallet needs to last the week. You stare at the blank document, a broad open boulevard inviting you to pass through, a door to your new life. The light from the screen reflects back on you like a spotlight. You decide to go online awhile, just a little while, and log on to Facebook, where perhaps you and I might meet. Look me up! I’m Iris. I have long brown hair, an uncertain smile, and become nervous when questioned directly about what I do. Scroll down. Under Occupation my job is listed as “You!” Which really means: “I like writing and talking about myself in the second person. If you go out with me, I’ll tell you all about yourself.” Excerpted from Iris Smyles’ forthcoming novel, Dating Tips for the Unemployed, out from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on June 28. Smyles (Iris Has Free Time) was Guild Hall’s first-ever writer-in-residence this spring. She is renting in East Hampton for the summer and wrote portions of the book in Southampton. She lives in New York and Greece. • JULY 2016

Peter Beard, continued from page 23 The Rolling Stones came out to visit, and recorded Exile on Main Street in the mill and cottages. “Unfortunately there was a radar tower that emitted this horrible series of noises every 45 seconds,” Beard recalls. “They would hear it on their earphones — it was extremely annoying.” Halston stayed at the mill, too, designing canvas furniture coverings to pay for his stay. Tragically, in 1977, the mill burned down, taking with it all of Beard’s early journals — he’d started at the age of 8 — and artworks, though fortunately not including any of the portraits of him by another new friend, the artist Francis Bacon. Beard was a ladies’ man of the first order who’d sailed through Studio 54 with a succession of beauties, including Cheryl Tiegs, the supermodel he married in l982. But by the end of l986, he was ready for monogamy. He married Nejma Khanum, 20 years his junior, and the two had a daughter, Zara, who, at 27, is now his full-time studio assistant. The main house where Beard works is itself a creation crammed with paintings, knives and spears from Kenya, rugs and baskets, first-edition books on Africa, and more. Beard’s health is not quite what it was: Where once he spoke in a torrent of words, riffing for hours on the natural world’s demise, he speaks more slowly now. Still, ask him how Montauk has changed, and he starts to rail at the architecture, the crowds, the loss of a windswept, frontier culture where fellow pioneers like the songwriter Paul Simon, the photographer Richard Avedon, and the TV talk show host Dick Cavett might come for dinner. Beard isn’t quite the lonely bluff dweller he sometimes seems to be. He and Nejma have a rambling apartment in one of the great buildings on the West Side of Manhattan, filled, like the Montauk house, with marvelous treasures. Window ledges are lined with African artifacts, walls covered with large framed paintings. Low against one wall is a framed letter from Livington to Stanley; high

on another wall is a large oil portrait of Nejma by Julian Schnabel. A Bacon sketch of Beard would be here, too, if it were not on loan to the Tate. It’s all testament to Beard’s searing curiosity, his passion, and ultimately his despair at the state of the world. “When I first met Peter he would be ranting about everything,” Nejma says. “I would say, ‘Please stop, it’s so depressing!’ People thought he was bonkers.” Over the years, she’s come to share his views — after all, his predictions have come true. “I do care very much what he’s been doing,” she says now, “and I share those ideas.” The journals, all those decades’ worth, aren’t a personal narrative. “But there is a narrative,” Nejma explains, “if you understand about what man has done to this world.” Nejma is, like Beard, wary of Montauk’s build-up. But there’s land enough to keep the world at bay. “Where we are it still feels like ancient land,” she says. “You feel like the ancient people are still there, and that there is something so sacred there, such solitude and peace. We do see the houses next to us getting bigger, but as long as we have our property, we feel safe.” By the time this story appears, the Guild Hall show will have opened (It lasts from June 18 until July 31). Its title: Last Word From Paradise. Fifty years after The End of the Game, Beard is still seeing through a glass darkly. But seeing the walls filled with his art may cheer him up yet. “I think he’ll be very happy when he sees the show up,” Nejma says. “We want to make it a celebration of P.B. He’s had a wild life, and we’re lucky he’s around.” Last Word From Paradise is a museum show with no works for sale; to make inquiries about saleable work, Peter Beard’s studio can be contacted at info@peterbeard.com.

Salt of the Earth, continued from page 58 Navy last month. That leaves Jim Niggles, 18, a senior at East Hampton High School. He plans to enroll at Suffolk County Community College in the fall. Jim is the only employee that Carolyn Snyder has fired twice. (She joked, with a laugh, that he “didn’t cut the mustard”). My ideas are the oldest and the rightest,” said Snyder, who is nothing if not determined. When asked to recall the precise moment when she knew that Round Swamp had made it, her response was unequivocal: “I always knew it was going to be successful. I’m a determined person. I don’t give up.” Standing in her kitchen in late spring, she said she could see her legacy unfolding before her eyes: When Tommy stops in for a banana or a ham and cheese sandwich before heading back to work, or when Steven talks about a recent course in organic farming and the gallons of honey he hopes to harvest

• JULY 2016

from his four beehives later this summer. “At 72, your life starts to change,” Snyder said, with tears in her eyes. She’s already started putting her affairs in order, including a handwritten copy of her eulogy, written on yellow legal paper, tucked into her Bible for safekeeping. “Do you think you might live here someday?” she asked her grandsons, without waiting for an answer. “It would make my heart happy.” Mostly, she wants the next generation to be proud of their heritage — what it means to make a true and honest living from the water and what it means to be a steward of the land. “I hope Round Swamp will be here in 50 years, for the next generation and the generation after that. I just hope Round Swamp will be here forever and ever.”

Fighting Fake Farms, continued from page 45 “But even that didn’t result in the reduction we needed.” The trust was still fending off developers who wanted to buy the land as ag reserve and make it a nice lawn for adjacent houses. “We had to knock that out,” Halsey says. “We had to require that the farmland be farmed. If it was out of production for two years, that would trigger the trust’s power to lease it to a farmer.” With all those restrictions, the land at last sank to $22,000 an acre. The Pikes now became the perfect buyers: farmers who knew the land, wanted nothing more than to farm it, and could afford to buy it at that price. Which was, of course, how the trust had hoped the story would turn out all along. START OF THE REVOLUTION

What’s happened since is nothing less than a revolution in East End land preservation, inspired by the Pike deal. Five more agreements have been struck, restricting some 86 acres in and around Water Mill, Bridgehampton, and Sagaponack to active farming by the purchase not just of development rights but all those secondary rights. In these new deals, Southampton Town has played a huge part. It’s gone so far as to race to a closing, on a weekend’s notice, with a check for $11.1 million to rescue 33 acres from a Water Mill estate with developers circling. That deal, done in July 2014, marked the first time that any town in New York State purchased both development and secondary rights. That was what the $11.1 million bought. The trust then paid $1 million for the land stripped of all rights but active farming — and sold it, at $26,000 an acre, in two chunks: 19 acres to the Southampton farmer Hank Kraszwewski, and the balance of 13.5 acres to the Pikes, a deal just now closing. That gives the Pikes 27 acres in all, enough to keep their farmstand going without leased land if need be. Since then, five more Southampton farmers have come forward to sell their secondary rights and assure their acres stay actively farmed: another 50 acres in all.

Alex Balsam, an East Hampton farmer and lawyer, as well as head of the town’s ag advisory committee, is optimistic. “The town has plenty of money for this type of use,” he says. “The money would come from the Community Preservation Fund, which is doing pretty well.” It would never be a law, he adds, “simply a tool the town could use.” This isn’t a role Peter sought, but he hasn’t a choice. “I want to keep this farm,” he says. “My dream is to keep it in rote crop production forever. So this is why I’m trying to get the town to buy the extended rights. I could pay off a mortgage I have, and make plans, and have a few bucks, and then if something happens to me, my kids would be protected. And they would still have the land.” As would we all.

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Peter Dankowski’s farm, as it happens, lies just east of Town Line Road, the ancient border between Southampton and East Hampton. East Hampton has far less remaining farmland than Southampton: 1,470 acres versus 6,800, though each town has protected about two-thirds of its acreage, and is working hard to save more. So far, East Hampton has balked at paying secondary rights to farmers who’ve already been paid for development rights. Which is to say, to Peter Dankowski. There is, Halsey admits, a perception that this amounts to paying farmers again. “Some say, ‘We already bought the development rights, why give them two bites of the apple? ” But Scott Wilson of East Hampton’s Community Preservation Fund is not one of those. “They’re not coming because they want to get paid again,” he says of the farmers. “They want to assure the business is viable.” The East Hampton Town Board is expected to decide early this summer whether secondary rights, and the buying up of them with Community Preservation Fund money, is officially a new tool it can use to save land. “Peter is the test case,” Wilson says.

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HALCYON DAYS

LOOK BACK An Edwards Brothers bunker steamer crew, above, coming in to the Smith Meal fish factory at Promised Land with a record-making catch in the early 1900s. Oil from bunker — a.k.a. menhaden — was a key ingredient in lipsticks, paints, margarines, fertilizers, and even drugs. Crews were both black and white, with many hands coming up from the Carolinas. Until the fish factory shut down in 1968, the pungent odor of fish being pressed and processed could be smelled as far away as East Hampton Village when the wind was right. (Is it a coincidence that real-estate values skyrocketed only after the fish-meal plants closed?) Bottom left, William de Kooning, in his studio. Bottom right, Prize Catch, East Hampton, 1936. These and more available as fine prints from The Star photo files: www.easthamptonstar.zenfolio.com • JULY 2016

HALCYON DAYS

The Land Baron of Brigadoon The Squire, they called him: a brilliant, mischievous real estate speculator who dined with Churchills, pool-partied with movie stars — and saved East Hampton Village from overdevelopment. By Irene Silverman

E BLEW INTO TOWN SOON

after the start of World War II as president of a design and construction firm commissioned by the Defense Department to build early-warning coastal radar towers from Southampton to Montauk, and saw almost immediately, on a supercharged internal screen, what others had not: the Big Picture — breathtaking beaches, superb farmland, unspoiled meadows and woodlands, thousands of vacant, undeveloped acres — East Hampton as the Garden of Eden it then was, and all of it going begging at $50 to $200 an acre. By the mid-1960s, Evan M. Frankel, born Meshulam Frankel (the middle initial was for his long-discarded Yiddish name) had become not only the largest landowner in East Hampton but one of the most detested, admired, reviled, respected, controversial characters ever to live there. The Squire of East Hampton, people called him, though as often in deference as in derision. He’d arrived in America as a 2-year-old in 1905, a speck in a tidal wave of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, and grown up in a series of Lower East Side tenements where children slept six to a room and a small fire escape was the only place to be alone. As an adult he had a passion for open space and a reluctance, once he had hold of it, to let it go. He was to become one of East Hampton’s first great land preservationists and most ardent opponents of development. “My background has given me a special, neurotic need to own land,” Mr. Frankel told a writer for The New Yorker in 1968, by which time, with over 1,000 acres, he was the largest property owner in town. “Most of it, when I got here, was in the hands of people who didn’t care about it, but who regarded it as an investment, and 78

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wanted to resell it at a profit to a developer as soon as possible, or to cut it up and develop it themselves. Along I came, a man who fell passionately in love with the land and was determined to keep it unchanged as long as I could.” An old girlfriend of his — reportedly, they were legion — recalled that “way back then, he was already calling it ‘a living picture.’ ” She would tease him about it, she said, as they turned a corner in his car: “Oh, Evan! Here comes another living picture!” Soon after the war ended, the Squire bought the house he was to live in until his death, a 12-room, half-timbered, Tudorstyle former carriage house set on 15 acres off Hither Lane in East Hampton Village, not far from the Maidstone Club (which either turned him down flat when he applied, or he never applied at all, depending upon whom you ask). He named the estate Brigadoon, for the Broadway musical about an idyllic village. An old friend of blameless Episco-

palian lineage accompanied him when he signed the $25,000 contract, and both their names went up on the fence outside for a time. “To dissolve any unfriendliness,” as the friend explained. The Squire never made any secret of his religion or lost the deep faith drummed into him as a child, but, like many Jews who watched as England stood alone against Hitler, he was an Anglophile down to his Wellingtons. Striding across his land in his favorite houndstooth cape and Sherlock Holmes hat, a collie at his heel, he looked as if he could out-WASP the Archbishop of Canterbury. Look as he might, though — and he was once described by an awed New York Times reporter as “a cross between General Rommel and Lawrence Olivier” (though he himself thought he resembled Churchill) — it was never any secret that Frankel’s neighbors did not roll out the welcome mat for him, never mind the impeccable credentials of such houseguests as Margaret Truman and Sarah Churchill, What else would a 20th century squire use to get around his 15-acre estate? Evan Frankel in full Sherlockian fig.

The Squire in Rome, though not in his full Roman armor daughter of Winston, who took him as her beautiful women, though never at the altar. escort to the coronation of Queen ElizaOne young lady reportedly suggested that beth. the village change the name of his street to He’d had a shooting-star rise from Come Hither Lane. poverty to riches as a young man, building Whatever he did, whether enthroned offices and stores for such clients as Douat the head of one of his Lucullan dinbleday Books, Joseph E. Seagram & Sons, ner parties or enumerating the virtues of and the Bulova Watch Company. During preservation in pontifical tones (hovering, the Depression, when others were jumpsome thought, just this side of condescening out of windows, he bought, at bargain sion), the Squire was the subject of specuprices, a few of the buildings they were lation — did he like boys, too? Would he jumping from, including one on the site of ever sell a piece of land? — and the object what’s now the New York Hilton, as well of envy. The one feeling he did not inspire as a 12-cylinder Packard convertible that in those who met him was indifference. convinced his numerous brothers and sis He never bought an acre here, an acre ters he must be a millionaire. (They were there, or even 10 — always 50 or 100 at a right.) time. He was said to sell only to those who In East Hampton, he loved to be surwould agree to low-density development, rounded by visiting friends for a weekend traditional architecture, and indigenous or a week, and to display his books, sculpplantings. In some cases, he sold only in exture, and artwork to them, in particular a change for a promise to donate open space very large painting called Yellow Poles. “By to the Nature Conservancy. Jackson Pollock,” he’d say wickedly. In fact, As the advancing years brought specuhe’d commissioned it from an assistant to lators, swimming pool contractors, Wall the artist Alfonso Ossorio, but the rest Street bonus boys, groupers, and others of his collection was real, including one with an eye on the main chance to the of Henry Miller’s massive female nudes, Hamptons, Frankel, accustomed to getting which pointed the way through woods, his own way and self-assured to a degree gardens, lawns, and promenades to one of particular to the self-made, grew more and the most photographed swimming pools more short-tempered. In 1971, as a memin America, a darling of ber of the East Hampton shelter magazines. Village Planning Board, [He] become not only Throughout the he beat back a popular the largest landowner proposal that would have ’50s and ’60s, celebrities — regional, national, inin East Hampton but allowed the building of ternational — caroused up to 220 motel units on also one of the most there together, often any parcel of 10 acres or detested, admired, without the nuisance of more, anywhere in the bathing suits. Built on village (which then had reviled, respected, the charred remains of controversial charac- such parcels all over the the original house’s founplace). He helped draft ters ever to live there. a village law keeping the dation, with its stone fireplace as the focal height of buildings to point, the Venetian pool incorporated tiles two stories, and made sure that no fastfrom the fireplace, a grotto, and a waterfood chain would ever set a footprint withfall, with two life-sized Roman gladiators, in village limits. carved in stone, guarding the entrance. The Pro-development members of the planSquire is said to have enjoyed startling the ning board chafed. The Squire had become a swimmers by appearing between the gladiround peg among his very square colleagues ators clad in full Roman armor, complete (whom he publicly called “ignorant” and with a centurion’s plumed helmet. “stupid”), and he was not reappointed to All his life, Frankel was seen with the board the following year. (Southampton

Hospital, Guild Hall, and the Jewish Center of the Hamptons were happy to have him on their boards, though.) Much of his final quarter-century was devoted to the well-being of the Jewish Center. His money and that of the philanthropist Jacob Kaplan bought the center’s original Woods Lane building in 1959; in the late ’80s, as its longtime president, he was the moving force behind the construction of its spacious sanctuary, designed by Norman Jaffe, an addition that received numerous architectural awards. Over those last two decades, little by little, Evan Frankel sold off all but 30 acres of his land holdings. Four years after his death in 1991, all that remained were two parcels, one of seven acres on Cross Highway in East Hampton and the other, which had been especially dear to his heart, 12 acres of rich farmland on the east side of Two Mile Hollow Road, with views of the ocean from Further Lane. Both parcels, home today to sprawling estates with tennis and basketball courts, pools, pool houses, and more, are now hidden behind 40-foottall trees. Brigadoon and its 15 acres went for $4.76 million in 1995, and the house was immediately torn down. • JULY 2016

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Serial ’s Sarah Koenig reveals what’s on her bedside table right now (but, no, she can’t tell us what the third season will be about). A familiar voice from This American Life, too, as well as from her long-ago days as a reporter for The East Hampton Star, Sarah grew up in a highly literary extended family in Sagaponack, and these days spends summers with her kids and husband in Sag Harbor. “Right now, I’m reading Mr. Sammler’s Planet by Saul Bellow. This was my dad’s, a first edition. It was in New York, at the Delmonico, when we cleaned out his apartment last year. Every time I read Saul Bellow — which isn’t hugely often! — I feel like I’m not smart enough to read it. And if I could write like that, well . . . that’s what I aspire to. He’s so good. But I’m not smart enough. That’s the truth.” Note: Sarah’s father was the late, great ad man Julian Koenig of Volkswagen, Timex, and Earth Day fame. “The other book of my father’s is Fabre’s Book of Insects by Jean-Henri Fabre. It was one of my dad’s favorite books. I never paid attention to it until after he died, because that’s the way it goes. His copy was from 1921. It’s basically this French guy who lives in Provence, and was an amateur entomologist — is that the word? — who has a bunch of land and is an amateur scientist. He is just completely captivated by the insects on his property. Each chapter is just a different insect, and he writes these little fables about them. They’re quasi-scientific, but anthropomorphized. It’s so pleasing, and so funny, and so sweet.” “The Gettysburg Address: A Graphic Adaptation by Jonathan Hennessey. I just bought it, and it’s really good. I really like graphic novels. This is a comic that deconstructs Lincoln’s speech. Embarrassingly, I’ve learned a lot about American history from it.” 80

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“I also have In Paradise by Peter Matthiessen, which I have not read. (Sarah’s stepfather was Peter Matthiessen, the late, great novelist and naturalist, of Sagaponack.) I haven’t even started it yet. I’m going to start it! Just yesterday, my mom emailed around this link to a memorial reel that Charlie Rose put together to, I guess, announce Peter’s death. It aired a couple days after he died. One of the things that Peter said in one of the clips was in answer to a question from Charlie Rose, something — I’m paraphrasing — like, ‘What key ingredient must a writer have? What’s the common denominator in a great book?’ And Peter, surprisingly to me, said something I’d never heard him say, which was — again, this isn’t the exact wording — basically, like, ‘It has to have some element of tackling the mysterious, so the reader is kept a little off balance. You’re delving into a world where something is not quite as it seems, something is going on that is intangible, and you can’t quite get your hands around it. All great books have some element of that in their world.’ So I’m anticipating maybe this will be like that. But those words are definitely true in regard to Saul Bellow: That is totally Saul Bellow to me. The whole time, you’re like, ‘Huh?’ You’re almost there, you’re almost there. . . .” “And here are a couple of parenting books, Siblings Without Rivalry by Adele Faber and How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish. They’ve pretty much been unread on my bedside table for about eight years now. I’m sure there’s some connection between the fact that they’ve been sitting here so long and the fact that they’re still needed: This is why.”

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