Dan's Papers - May 15, 2009

The day after the last cedar shingle was hammered onto the side of the Town-owned Lester-Labrozzi House on North Main Street in East Hampton last week, there appeared to be something of a party or ceremony taking place on the front lawn. I couldn't be sure because I was just driving by. But if it were a party, I would fully understand. What had happened at that house was the most impressive case of slow shingling I have ever encountered.

It all began four years ago when the Town bought this property. It included the house, the barn, a shed and an outhouse on three acres. It sat on the corner of North Main and Cedar Street on a busy commercial corner. There's a traffic light. The firehouse is across the street.

Before they bought it, it had been a small dirt farm, owned by the Labrozzi family, which had handed it down from father to son to son to son, mostly involving people named Lester, for 300 years. You'd see chickens scurrying about, maybe a goat. And that's why, four years ago, the Town bought it. It bought the house to save it. It's a historic farm. Maybe they could make it into a small public park.

For the 10 years prior, it was apparently occupied only by a very old man living alone. People told me about him. He had survived everyone else in his family and was doing just fine, thank you very much. In his last year there, he single handedly built a picket fence along both his North Main and Cedar Street property line. And when he finished it, he went back to where he had started and commenced to slowly go down the pickets, painting them white. He was doing a second pass, but this time painting.

Once, at the beginning of the painting process, I saw him from my car window. He was skinny and a bit bent over. But he was full of energy and he was managing the brushes and paint pots just fine.

Then, half done, the work stopped, and that was that. I feared the worst. And indeed, friends told me it was true. He was Charlie Labrozzi and was 90 years old when he died. After that, the place became overgrown with foliage.

The following year, the Town stepped in and bought it. It was flush with money at the time. The Town would save it and restore it as a small colonial farm on two acres.

I was ecstatic they did that, not only because I often drove by, but also because it was quite near my house up the street. Someday, I imagined, I could be walking around at the Labrozzi property, visiting the little main house, now a museum, strolling the grounds and enjoying the flowers, sitting on a bench there. What could be better than a little park right in the middle of a commercial district?

Soon, the Town workers came. The foliage got ripped out, the lawns got mowed, the newly built fence came down, the barn and shed got secured. As for the main house, the Town ordered it re-shingled. It was really a very little place, no more than 40 feet by 30, only one floor on one side, but two on the other, saltbox fashion. A peaked roof sheltered it all.

Eighteen months ago, the shingling began. The old ones, some very rotten and moldy, were being carted away. Now some tarpaper went up.

But then, a financial crisis hit the Town. An auditor found it. The Town supervisor had been spending money like a sailor on big civic projects and that was good. He had said, before he ordered them, that he had the money, but it turned out it was way more than was in the till. The auditors could see the shortfall, but couldn't figure out why. There were 60 different checking accounts and only about half had been balanced from month to month going back years. What a disaster. At the house, the shingling project, with just a few rows at the bottom along one side completed, came to a halt.

Layoffs were being announced at Town Hall. Projects were being curtailed. A big new planned purchase was put on the back burner. I really wondered what would happen to the Lester-Labrozzi House shingling project. It was a small thing, and I hoped they'd get it done under the wire. It would not be good to leave the job in the middle, a tarpaper shack exposed to the elements. It wouldn't take any more than a couple of days to finish up the shingling.

But that is not what happened. What next happened, and I can tell you this because I drive by every morning on my way to work, was that this job became the slowest shingling project in the history of the world.

Some days, nothing got done. Going by, I'd visually mark the level of the shingles. It would still be at this level when I returned at the end of the day.

On other days, it seemed to me that just a few shingles had been put up, or just one row of shingles. Usually, when I'd go by, there'd not be a car there.

Early one morning, I went by and saw a white pickup truck parked on the lawn. There was nobody working that I could see, but then again, maybe he was around the back. I couldn't see all four sides of the house just driving by. But I'd imagine him there, working a bit, and then leaving. That would be that for the day.

I can also tell you that whatever was going on here, it was going on a little bit on one side of the house and a little bit on the other. When the project had been moving smartly along, the shingling had been started on just one side and was on its way all the way up. But now, whoever was doing this had changed his mind. He'd do a little bit on one side, then a little on the other. It was kind of a slow build, and I guessed the end of it would be he'd button it all up on one final day on all four walls at the same time.

Would it get finished? Autumn turned to winter and then to spring. In June, there was talk of the surge in Iraq. A committee said we ought to pull out, but President Bush went ahead. By that summer, the shingling was about half done.

Obama was elected president in November. As Bush's term ended, the nation had begun a long collapse into a severe depression. It was quite frightening.

My own house is cedar shingles. One day in January, I took out a tape measure and measured them. Four shingles took up two linear feet. There were six and a half inches of shingle exposed. From this information, I deduced that an average of eight shingles a day were being banged into the side of this historic house down the street during that first year. This is not a lot of shingles a day.

And so I thought what we must have here was a volunteer. He'd come in his white pickup early in the morning, bang in a few, and then go off. I imagined him in the shingling business. I felt pretty good about him, volunteering like this. He was nearly three quarters the way up in early December.

I also got to see him one early morning, just before dawn. It was five a.m. and I do not recall what I was doing driving by at that hour that day, but there was his truck, its front lights on, and the man inside with the light on reading a newspaper. It was 10 degrees out.

The other thing I deduced about the house from the shingle calculations was that he might get it done by February. I hoped he would. This historic house had gone through one hard winter. Two would be worse.

Obama was inaugurated in the first week of January. The second week, there was a bitter snowstorm. By that time, there were only three more rows on two sides, right up under the eaves, to be shingled. I found myself rooting for this guy. Come on. Do it. But he didn't. The job languished all through February and March, through an ice storm and a big snowstorm that dropped nearly 10 inches on us in just 12 hours.

Anyway, in early April, on a warm spring day with the flowers peeking out and the buds sprouting on all the trees, I drove by and saw it all done and these six people on the lawn. They were standing around, chatting and smiling. I thought one of them had a glass of something in his hand. Champagne?