Dan's Papers - June 5, 2009

When my parents moved out to the Hamptons in the 1950s when I was a teenager, there was little regard for the history or architecture of this place. That East Hampton, Southampton and the Village of Westhampton Beach happened to be beautiful was perfectly nice, but that was because they had been villages built back in the 1600s, when the English settlers had landed in this place, and they had been on the sidelines when progress came through. Back then, if someone were to come in and knock a part of those villages down to build a shiny new shopping mall, well too bad for that. Progress was our most important product. Indeed, that was the slogan for General Electric back at that time.

(In Manhattan during those years, they tore down the magnificent and historic Penn Station on 34th Street, all iron and glass, to make way for some shiny skyscraper. Grand Central Station, a building of similar historic value, barely survived being another teardown. The soaring skyscraper called the Pan Am building got built OVER it, right smack in the middle of Park Avenue. That was progress.)

Today, we have a whole different group of sensibilities about those things. And it has come to my attention that something is going to happen in 2010 that could turn one of the less attractive villages in the Hamptons - Bridgehampton - into a rival and beauty to the aforementioned three. What will happen in 2010 will be the end of the lease that Bridgehampton Beverage has on the building that sits on one of the four corners of the very center of downtown Bridgehampton, facing the monument. When that happens, all sorts of good other things could happen, if the Town were to move into action.

That corner building is very run down today. It is one of two very run down buildings that face out onto the Bridgehampton Monument, and the other one is to undergo a spectacular renovation. That will also happen in 2010.

If instead of taking my advice, nobody pays attention to what happens at that property where Hampton Beverage is when that lease runs out, chances are that some new business will come in there and continue that building as a retail operation. What needs to happen instead is that the Town buy it, has it appraised, condemns it if necessary, and completes the restoration of downtown Bridgehampton.

In the 19th century, the Village of Bridgehampton was as beautiful as each of the other four major villages. Consider it.

On one of the four corners facing the monument was the four square shingled 18th century Bull's Head Inn. The second corner was Wick's Tavern, an old colonial wood shingled building. The third corner was the mustering grounds for the Bridgehampton militia. And the fourth corner was the Hampton House, a small four square hotel with massive Greek columns out front.

I think the mayor of any town in the Hamptons today would kill for that configuration in the very center of their downtown.

In the 1950s, when I got here, this was the sorriest sight imaginable. Wick's Tavern had been torn down to make way for a gas station (which is where Bridgehampton Beverage is today). The mustering ground was dug up so a row of commercial stores could be placed parallel to Main Street. The Hampton House was owned by a struggling family that, to raise money, had leased out its front lawn to a gas station. And the Bull's Head Inn was abandoned and falling down, after a brief attempt at making it into a restaurant. (In the 1960s, there were plans to tear down the Bull's Head Inn and replace it with still another gas station. There would have been three gas stations on the four corners facing the monument. Fortunately, spirited citizens fought that off.)

Meanwhile, public lighting came to the Hamptons, and unlike in East Hampton, Southampton and Westhampton Beach, where everything was put underground, the electric company out here decided that Bridgehampton was not worthy of anything but telephone poles with wires strung between them.

Today, Bridgehampton's center of town is on its way back. The Bull's Head Inn, after years of preservation, may become a hotel and spa. There are plans before the town to do just that. The gas station on the front lawn of the Hampton House has been bulldozed down and grassed back to lawn by the Town, which, this fall will restore the building, with its Greek columns, as a museum. And though the row of stores has remained on the third corner, there is now a Militia Park just to the back of the end store (One Ocean Road) to commemorate the mustering grounds.

Only the fourth corner remains as a mess with a decrepit building on it - Bridgehampton Beverage. And now that is going to become available.

Southampton Town should do two things. It should buy the half-acre where the Bridgehampton Beverage is, and it should develop it in some civic way for the community. Perhaps it should be a little park, or a recreation of the Revolutionary War Wick's Tavern that stood on that spot. Perhaps it could be the last piece of property necessary to make the whole center of town into a roundabout, with the monument in the center.

It is not often that an opportunity to buy a small piece of something in the very center of a town in the Hamptons occurs. The Town should state its intentions and try to buy it. If that is rebuffed, it should have the property appraised, condemn it in the public interest, and then start planning what to put there.

The second thing? Remove the telephone poles that still ruin the appearance of this old downtown. If they can put the electric lines underground along four miles of Scuttlehole Road, which was done last year, they can put the electric lines underground in Bridgehampton, which in length is less than half of that.