Dan's Papers - April 18, 2008

There's a millionaire developer named Bob Gianos who is determined to build a brand new "village" on a former 50-acre farm in Southampton, which will look exactly like it has been there for three hundred years. He's already begun to build this project, and if you stay up late at night, you will see flatbed trucks pass with trees lashed on the back that, when stood up at the site, will be nearly six stories high. All together, during the next year, 440 of these huge trees will be brought to Southampton from a nursery in New Jersey that grew them. They will be planted in careful rows along the sort of narrow streets of this 50 acre project that research told Gianos were the width the early settlers made their streets. Some of the trees are already in the ground. I am not making this up. This is happening on the former farmland at the corner of Wickapogue and Olde Town Road across from Southampton Hospital.

Just seven families will be living on these 50 acres. Each will be allowed to build a house in a classic Victorian manner by a Gianos approved architect on a site of just four acres. The remaining 22 acres will be communally owned either as woods, meadows, pasture, or by agreement with the Village, as parkland.

The project is not oceanfront. But Gianos will be listing these lots for between $18 and $22 million each. If you want to live as if you were in the first settlement of Southampton, this is it. A reproduction. And it will be all for you - an exclusive, private community. He calls it Olde Towne. Doesn't even need the word Hampton in the title.

Gianos was inspired to do this because the farm he bought from Anna Fiore that had occupied this site for 250 years is sitting right on the spot where not long before that, the first white men built the dirt dugouts with the branches tied together at the top to keep the rain out. The Indians showed them how to build them to get through the winter and, subsequently, they built the wooden houses and meeting houses they already knew how to build from their former colonies in Connecticut. Thus, they created the community of Southampton in 1640.

Although the center of the community soon shifted to a site about a mile away to where it is now, this early village is considered the oldest village in the State of New York. It is also to be, when finished, the newest.

You really have to hand it to Gianos, a developer whose prior work has been in New York City and Riverhead. What he is building here may be a reproduction, but then almost all the McMansions you see being built today are reproductions of what the Hamptons used to be like. So why not? And you can't deny that you'd go down Olde Town Road to visit Olde Towne. Also there is the historic sign down there that says this is the site of the first village. So there it is.

Finally, though he persisted in overcoming all the objections when he bought this farm - it is the last farm in Southampton Village - to make this subdivision, it's turned out to be a remarkable and very imaginative surprise. And if you're not freaked out by 50-foot trees traveling past your door in the middle of the night for the next few months, all the better.

Indeed, Gianos is taking an enormous financial gamble. He paid $35 million for the land. He's hoping to convert it into $140 million in gross in what appears might be a huge recession. Yet he has these huge expenses to bear. It's quite a risky undertaking. You have to admire him.

His bringing in these over five-story-tall trees to the property puts me in mind of a lawsuit that has just concluded in Sunnyvale, California - aptly named as you will soon see - and also of another controversy involving trees that Gianos himself created just ten months ago.

Ten years ago, Richard Treanor and his wife Carolyn, who live in Sunnyvale, had eight beautiful redwood trees 20 feet tall brought to their property and planted in the yard that they were expected to soon grow to be as high as 80 feet. The couple expected that these trees would be a wonderful statement of their commitment to the environment. The trees would absorb carbon dioxide and be wonderful homes for a wide variety of birds and climbing animals. They bought a Prius. They were totally committed to supporting nature. They waited.

However, what they forgot to consider, unfortunately, was that their immediate neighbor, Mark Vargas, had installed the staggering number of 128 solar panels on the side of his house facing south ten years before. Vargas runs everything with this solar power - lights, heat, air conditioning, even his electric car. He is totally self-sufficient.

Well, wouldn't you know it, late last year the redwoods began blocking the sun that shines on the solar panels. Vargas's power began failing. His solar car died. Citing an obscure California law that says people are not allowed to put up anything that would obstruct solar panels of their neighbors' homes by more than 10 percent, Vargas sued. And in Santa Clara court, after presenting photographic evidence of tree number one and tree number two and so forth, he won. The case is currently in appeal, but if it stands, the couple will, gasp, have to either cut down or move the redwoods. So there you are.

As for the second controversy involving trees, ten months ago when the general public was loudly protesting the purchase of the 50-acre farm by Mr. Gianos, not only because this would mean the end of farming in Southampton Village but because it would also mean the end of the beautiful view across this open farmland that everybody so much enjoys when they go by the corner of Wickabogue Road and Olde Town Road, Mr. Gianos countered by planting six-foot tall hedgerows on the property, all along Wickabogue and all the way along Olde Towne, completely blocking that view. And under present law, he is within his rights to do so.

There has often been talk of whether the magnificent views in the Hamptons should be protected so that we can all enjoy them, but so far, nobody has done anything about it. Thus far, there are no new laws.

These hedgerows were up for nearly a year. And it was only after he got his approvals to build Olde Towne that he took them down.

So what we will have here is an approximate reproduction of the first village of the State of New York, on the site of the first village of the State of New York, with 440 fully grown trees brought in from New Jersey at night by a man who owns a nursery there and says this is the largest contract for trees he's ever filled, larger even than the one he did for Disney, accessible by a former dirt road called Olde Town Road, which was named in 1680 because it was how you got to the site where the old town used to be before they moved it, built as a private community for millionaires or billionaires, probably gated, not oceanfront, across from the hospital, and just for seven families, and nobody else, unless invited by them.