Dan's Papers - April 4, 2008 - South O' the Highway (and the North too)

The exclusive Hampton Social five-week concert series held at the Ross School last summer that featured acts by Prince, Tom Petty, Billy Joel, James Taylor and Dave Matthews will not happen again this year. Warner Music Group, the company behind the pricey series that cost concertgoers $15,000 for a ticket to all five shows, reportedly lost $18 million on the deal because, "The rich people they were targeting had connections to get the tickets for free so no one was buying."

Ellen and Chuck Scarborough and Marcy and Michael Warren will be honored at the 2nd annual Get Wild event on July 19 to benefit the Wildlife Rescue Center of the Hamptons. Missy Hargraves, Caroline Hirsch, Beth Ostrosky and Andy Sabin will serve as event chairpersons and Linda B. Shapiro will serve as coordinator.

The East End has a new Emmy-winning resident. Michael J. Fox has purchased a 7,000-square-foot, six-bedroom home for $6.3 million in Quogue.

Further east, Blythe Danner plans to build a house on a vacant parcel next to her daughter Gwyneth Paltrow's home on Bluff Road in Amagansett.

The competition to buy Newsday from the Tribune Company is heating up. Chairman of the News Corporation and owner of The New York Post Rupert Murdoch, owner of Cablevision and Madison Square Garden James Dolan and East Hampton's billionaire real estate developer Mort Zuckerman are currently the high bidders.

Sarah Jessica Parker, whose Sex and the City movie is set to hit theaters in May, has announced that her five-year-old son James supports Barack Obama. "He's really, truly into this election," the actress said at a recent press junket.

The only unmarried "housewife" on Bravo's new hit reality series "The Real Housewives of New York City," Bethenny Frankel, landed a six-figure multiple-book deal with publisher Touchstone Fireside. The natural food chef, who is also the newest spokeswoman for Pepperidge Farm, is set to release her first book, Naturally Thin, by next year.

Southampton's Lilly Pulitzer and The Society of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center sponsored the 17th annual Bunny Hop held at FAO Schwartz, which raised over $350,000 to benefit Clown Care, a program that provides circus entertainers for children receiving treatment at hospitals. Over 1,000 families including Donald and Melania Trump and their son Baron attended the event.

Amagansett's Paul McCartney and girlfriend Nancy Shevell, whose romantic weekend in the Hamptons last November caused quite a stir, were recently seen vacationing in Antigua, perhaps celebrating McCartney's recent divorce settlement with Heather Mills.

The 8th annual Judi Shesh Memorial 5k Run/Walk to benefit breast cancer will be held at the Great South Bay YMCA in Bay Shore on May 31 at 8 a.m. Shesh was a former employee at Dan's Papers and is greatly missed. For more information, email info@judisrun.org.

Although LIPA began marking the route for new transmission lines last week, the Town of Southampton continues its effort to stall the project. The Southampton Town Chief Building Inspector issued a stop work order last Friday, but it was lifted three days later, and LIPA and the Town continue to discuss a compromise.

It was suggested that the additional $10 million it would cost to bury the entire route would come from a surcharge paid by residents over a 20-year time period, but because the Town cannot legally indemnify LIPA if residents refused to pay the surcharge in the future, LIPA denied the request.

The Town has agreed not to take legal action, but a group of residents filed a lawsuit against LIPA in New York State Supreme Court in Riverhead last week and are seeking $90 million in damages due to a decrease in property value.

After more than a year of consideration, the Sag Harbor Planning Board concluded that the Bulova Watchcase Factory project in Sag Harbor needs no further environmental review and a public hearing for the site plan application will be held on April 7.

The project headed by Sag Development Partners has already been favored by the Sag Harbor Architectural Review Board, but the Sag Harbor Zoning Board, which wants 20 percent of the 65 units to be affordable housing, has not yet approved the project. Sag Development Partners claims the affordable housing request is not feasible and have offered instead to give Sag Harbor over $2 million for local housing assistance.