Dan's Papers - September 5, 2008

The summer of 2008 is almost at an end, and so, one might ask, how was this summer different from all other summers?

Well, in lots of ways.

For one thing, bigger crowds of people than ever before came out here every weekend, all summer. But they seemed to have less money with them. Whether they were the wealthy Wall Street people or just summer daytrippers I do not know, but the truth is that they came into town with high hopes and less money in their pockets to spend in the stores.

They'd walk into Tiffany's in East Hampton, for example, and they'd say, "What have you got for a dime and three pennies?" And the answer would be, "Not much."

The lack of wild spending resulted in several high-end stores, particularly in East Hampton, putting together certain promotions to get people into their stores and into a spending mood. These included free ice cream cones, a little band, and some wine and cheese, and that resulted in the local police conducting a raid throughout the town in early July. One day, they went into every store looking for champagne or wine being served, and, finding four or five, had them put away their liquor or suffer getting a ticket for not having a $35 one-day liquor license required by the village in order to serve alcohol.

Also, quite famously, there was the case of one East Hampton art gallery owner, Ruth Vered, not getting the message about the liquor license requirement - because it hadn't been enforced in 30 years. After asking the police to go away because she was having her art opening party and could be free to discuss it later, Vered herself was hauled off in handcuffs.

There were huge numbers of fundraisers in the early part of the summer - one Saturday night I counted seven of them - but by the end of the summer, with the fundraisers getting far less support than in prior years, there were several weekends where there were only one or two.

The Big Recession settling in over most of America has not reached the upper echelons of those who come to the Hamptons yet. But real estate sales were off about a third this summer because of the recession and the sub-prime mortgage crisis. Yet everybody still wanted to come out to the Hamptons. And so rentals were way, way up, and so everybody got here anyway.

It was the year of the Europeans. With the dollar in the dumps, the Europeans were over, stocking up on all manner of goodies, filling their suitcases with whatever jewelry and furs they could fit, since to them, spending $30,000 on a fur was like spending 55 cents. The Europeans included mostly French and Germans, with a smattering of Russians (from the European part of Russia), and one elderly Sicilian organ-grinder I met from Palermo who was here to buy a Lamborghini with what he made last weekend with his pet monkey at a circus in Naples.

The Artists beat the Writers, 4 to 2, at their annual softball game in East Hampton. Chevy Chase, Alec Baldwin, Lori Singer and a host of others attended. It raised a record sum for charity.

I got married on August 2 to my best friend and love, Chris Wasserstein. I also wrote a bestselling memoir, called In the Hamptons: My 50 Years with Farmers, Fishermen, Artists, Billionaires and Celebrities, which got rave reviews, including one in The New York Times. It is available wherever books are sold.

The Children's Museum of the East End on the Sag Harbor Turnpike went through a hard time financially, but appears to have recovered. The kids say, "yay!"

The Sag Harbor Cinema was put up for sale this summer. Bay Street Theatre is coming to the end of its lease without any resolution of what might happen there, and it seemed the village board got religion. Now the board is all hot to make the village the most beautiful in America, looking to put John Steinbeck's house and the Cinema onto the historic register. They also finally made the move to save the abandoned Bulova building from another 10 years of eyesore heaven. They approved a project for developers to make condominiums out of it after negotiations that had gone on for years and years, and as a result of the developers saying they'd been jerked around long enough and were outta there.

Snowflake, the only fast-food joint in East Hampton, is no more now. In its place is Cherrystone's, which features lobster roll, fish and chips, etc. And it's pretty good.

Meanwhile, the Old Stove Pub reopened. And big crowds attended.

The weekend-long ArtHamptons art fair in July was held on the grounds of the Bridgehampton Historical Society. Lots of galleries came from around the world to show their wares, and it reportedly grossed $20 million.

In Westhampton Beach, the Orthodox Jewish community proposed putting up an eruv - a little string on the telephone poles - around the town, resulting in all sorts of anti-Semitic behavior and the determination of a former mayor of that town to start packing up to leave. Nice town, that one.

George Motz, the mayor of Quogue Village and a millionaire New York City money manager, was indicted during the last week of August out here. The accusation was that on any given day, he'd arrange for the bad trades he made to be posted to his clients and the good trades he made posted to himself. He did this by allegedly holding off posting the trades until the end of the day, allowing him to see the good from the bad. Anyway, he's the mayor of Quogue. His wife's the judge. And the police chief has a policy of strict enforcement of every ordinance. Much of the village is terrified of its own government.

In the village of West Hampton Dunes, the founder of the village, Gary Vegliante, who has been mayor since the first election, had a challenger for his re-election bid, but he won anyway. Most people like him.

This summer it was learned that the town supervisor in East Hampton had been dipping into the Community Preservation Fund big-time for the last few years, "borrowing" $8 million, which he did without letting his fellow councilmen know. Apparently, he was doing it because it was an election year and he wanted to get reelected without it appearing that he was spending the town toward bankruptcy. (He did get reelected.) He's had to give all the money back. It's resulted in his town having a huge deficit and being demoted by Wall Street four notches, which will mean higher interest rates for whatever the town borrows. The final outcome? Higher taxes, of course.

We had lightning storms galore during the last half of the summer. Some houses and cars and trees were struck. There was damage. We may or may not have had a tornado in Hampton Bays. But we never had a hurricane. I don't even recall the last time we had a hurricane.

The early part of the summer was hot as hell. We had a record number of 90-degree days. Then, very strangely, at the beginning of August, summer ended and fall came in. It was much cooler than expected during the last part of the summer.

New celebrity arrivals in town this summer included Michael J. Fox, Madonna and the cast of "Gossip Girl."

Montauk seemed to have shifted into a new gear this summer, getting discovered by many well-to-do residents of the Hamptons to the west. Toward the end of summer, the chic new nightspot in Montauk, called The Surf Lodge, which attracted all the young, big-money spenders, had $19,000 worth of liquor stolen during one night. In normal terms, at $10 a bottle, that would be 1,900 bottles, or 150 cases. That's a lot of cases of booze. But maybe this was just 19 bottles of $1,000 wine. In any case, that much hasn't been made off with in these parts since the rum-running days of the 1930s.

A new semi-pro baseball team called the Hampton Whalers had its first season this summer in the Atlantic Collegiate Baseball League and enjoyed a solid run. The team was organized by Montauk cowboy, Rusty Leaver. And Jerry Seinfeld, who lives on Further Lane in East Hampton and has an actual ball field on his property, threw out the first pitch to start the season.

For the first time in 40 years, the Amagansett Farmers Market didn't open, having gotten caught up in the financial problems that engulfed the town of East Hampton. When the owners retired last fall, the town bought the place, intending to open it this summer, although they figured it would lose money since they don't know how to run a market. So when it appeared that with their financial problems this could be something they could cut, they did. In the end, however, the town sold the property to the Peconic Land Trust, and the Peconic Land Trust leased it to Eli Zabar, the famed upscale bread-and-food market owner in New York City who, by August 1, had it back open for business, presumably at a profit.

The Hampton Subway had its best year this summer as more and more people began to use it for local travel around the Hamptons in these high gas-price times. The Hampton Jitney, of course, is still by far the best way to get to New York. There are those who hope to hook the Jitney up with the Subway for some combined promotions. We shall see.

Dennis Lynch, the New York City filmmaker, has wrapped up his six-month-long shoot of the full-length documentary he's calling King of the Hamptons after interviewing lots of locals, bonackers, celebrities and surfers out here. It's gonna be a big hit next year.

Toward the end of summer, the two presidental candidates were finally chosen. The primaries went on and on for nearly seven years, it seemed to me, and finally we had Barack Obama for the Democrats, with his vice presidential partner, Joe Biden, and for the Republicans, John McCain and his vice presidential partner, Sarah Palin, of Alaska. The platforms are "More of the Same" and "More of the Very Different."

The Yankees are looking as if they aren't going to make the playoffs, while Joe Torre is working to get the LA Dodgers back on track.

Howard Stern of Southampton got married. Billy Joel of Sag Harbor held two gigantic concerts that closed Shea Stadium. The Shinnecocks had their big Pow Wow in Southampton, with 50,000 people in attendance, while in Bridgehampton, the season ended with the Hampton Classic Horse Show, with 30,000 people watching.