Dan's Papers - June 26, 2009

Wanna live in the fabulous Hamptons on the site of a former nuclear missile base? That is what advisors are hoping will lure people to this 96-acre parcel in the scrub pines of Westhampton adjacent to Gabreski Airport, just in back of Old Country Road.

The advisors are folks hired by Suffolk County, which now owns this site. They are coming up with ways for the County to sell off a few things it owns to, ahem, raise a little money in these hard times. The missile base is one of them.

The advisors say the property would fetch somewhere between $23 and $47 million. Figure it out. With two acre zoning, you could build a subdivision for 45 homes on the property. Figure you could get $2 million for each two-acre lot with all this history, deduct the cost of permits, roads and drainage and you could still walk away with a cool $30 to $50 million in profit.

In 1960, when this base went operational, there were 56 BOMARC nuclear tipped guided missiles there fully armed and ready to launch on three minutes notice.

The guided missiles, which were 45 feet long, lay on the ground with sheet metal peak-roofed buildings covering them. When the Russians would come - this was during the toughest part of the Cold War, when Soviet airplanes were expected to cross the Atlantic to drop nuclear bombs on Manhattan - the roof of each of the buildings would open at the peak, revealing the missile lying down inside, and in each, a motorized winch would raise up the missile to a nasty looking 45 degree angle. In two minutes, the missiles would receive rocket fuel through a hose. Then, at the press of a button at a SAGE control tower, the missiles would roar up into the skies. They'd be guided by radar from SAGE, achieving speeds of 2,200 miles an hour and heights to as much as 100,000 feet, and as they would approach their targets, radar sniffers on board each of the missiles would take over and guide them for the final mid-air hit. BLAM. Another Soviet Tupelov bomber bites the dust.

Well, that never happened, which is why they call the 40 years from 1950 to 1990 the "Cold War." Lots of money was spent on weapons. A few wars were fought here and there, far away - Korea, Vietnam - but the cataclysmic one never happened. Most missiles built were never fired in anger. The BOMARC in Westhampton (the name stood for the developers of the weapon - Boeing and Michigan Aerospace Research Center) were among them.

If this secret missile base in the woods of Westhampton was a high point in the history of this property, the period from the end of the Cold War to the present was its low point.

Today, the missiles are gone. They were taken away in the 1970s to be used as dummy targets for bigger and faster Cold War missiles. But the 56 steel buildings that housed them remain.

Suffolk County, the new owner of the property, never could decide what ought to be done with them. And so, today, they and the property surrounding them there in the woods are the County's dumping grounds for old worn out computers, copiers, freezers, furniture, filing cabinets, tables, chairs, air conditioning units and other crap that the County never knew what to do with. There are more than 2,000 broken or junked cars on the property. There's tons and tons of scrap metal and building material - the advisors say they could fetch $1.3 million if the right party came along - and there is, in one open field, a Police Pistol Range and in several of the 56 metal buildings, fixed up a bit -temporary offices for deputy sheriffs.

And that's about it, other than whatever nuclear and toxic goo and other crap the military got rid of by dumping out into the grass. No environmentalists have ever gone in there to size it all up.

So. Want $2 million for a building lot in the fabulous Hamptons? The line forms at the rear. We're waiting for somebody to come to the front with about $40 million smackers to get the ball rolling though. And we hope it comes soon. The County has bills to pay.