Dan's Papers - October 3, 2008

Two local institutions, the Lobster Inn and the Amagansett Farmers Market, are in danger of closing in the next year or two as a result of issues that are entirely out of their control. One of them, the Lobster Inn, may have to close because of changing traffic patterns. The Farmer's Market may have to close because of just plain stupidity.

The Farmers Market has, for the nearly 50 years it has been in existence, constantly been challenged by neighbors who just would rather not have all that activity going on there. The market is on Main Street, but it is at the far end. Until the market opened, down at that end there were, for the most part, a bunch of private homes interspersed with farmland, the railroad station and the firehouse.

The market today is arguably the most well known landmark in Amagansett. The Struk family opened it. They owned farmland and had a farmhouse on the highway. They built a small farmstand in front of the farm field alongside their house. And it has just sort of grown from there.

In the early days, there were no zoning laws to regulate farmstands. The idea was you could put them out and then take them in at the end of the day, or if you wanted to leave them out, the end of the season.

The farmstand grew and grew. It was very popular. After awhile there were awnings overhead you could stand under. And after that, they put bricks in the ground so you wouldn't get your feet all muddy. At one point, they attached the market to an outbuilding, which had plumbing in it, and so they were able to have a bathroom for the staff there. After that, they built washing facilities and put in some cooking equipment. There was zoning in the Town by then, but this was all considered outside of the zoning. It was just a very large farmstand. And they were fine any way you did them.

When laws governing farmstands finally did come in, they seemed ridiculous. The farmstand had to be portable enough to be moved if the town said they didn't want it there anymore. The stuff sold at a farmstand had to be from a farm directly behind it, or stuff related to the stuff being grown in the fields directly behind it in a proportion of 80% grown in the back and 20% accessories to the stuff being grown in the back. Because they didn't want somebody just planting corn around a tree and saying it was a field, they made laws establishing a minimum size for the farm field, which was, I believe, six acres. The Amagansett Farmers Market easily passed that measure.

Today, the farmstand measures 60 feet across the front, and is about 20 feet from front to back. They still close it up in the autumn, when the weather gets too cold, not only because the crops are no longer being harvested, but because the place is not heated. Indeed, to close it at the end of the season, they have to board parts of it up. Those parts are just open to the world when the place is in business.

I recall a wonderful battle the Struks had about 10 years ago involving café tables with umbrellas in front of the market. The town said no, you can't have them. Now you're a restaurant. And so the Struks took them away, but then soon discovered that a one acre pasture by a brook in front of a cornfield along the side would be just as nice a place to sit in. And so they set up plastic chairs and tables and such during the day and then just brought them in every night. No law against that. They still do that.

Everybody loves the Farmers Market. And now in a complicated transaction, the Struks sold it to a local resident named Margaret De Cuevas, who sold it to the Town, which sold it to the Nature Conservancy, which, this summer, signed a three-year lease with Eli Zabar, the New York City high-end country market tycoon (Zabars, Eli's) to run it. He has reopened it to run it just about the same way that the Struks always did.

But now neighbors have created a new group that intends to file a lawsuit claiming that the Farmers Market is now a building. As a building, it would have lots and lots of discrepancies and violations from what current law would allow. For example, you can't put brickwork down inside a farmstand without a permit. You used to be able to do this. Now, no. Or to make a pun, it may be true that it is neither fish nor fowl, but it needs to be something more than a red herring. The stupid part of all of this is that when the Town of East Hampton went to look to find the file about the Amagansett Farmers Market, they couldn't find it. There's nothing. There's no C.O. for this building (building?). Maybe it's because it isn't a building.

Anyway, trouble lies ahead for the Amagansett Farmers Market.

As far as the Lobster Inn is concerned, the trouble is traffic. Too much of it. And because of some rejiggering of the highways, too little of it that wants to get to the Lobster Inn.

The Lobster Inn has been run by the Tollifson family since around 1960. It sits on the north side of the very eastern end of Sunrise Highway, at the very entrance to the Hamptons, down North Road to a small lane that goes a hundred yards to a waterfront upon which it sits. It's a fine wooden restaurant, right on an inlet of Peconic Bay. It has docks where boats can come in, an ice house, a lobster house, a dining room and kitchen. You can't get much fresher lobster than this, and you can see why as soon as you walk in. There they are, live.

Two years ago, however, the State came in and barricaded the eastbound terminus of North Road, making it impossible for those leaving the restaurant to go east back out onto the highway. If you come to eat at this restaurant from the east, and people do, you can still get there, using the open westbound lane, but when it comes time to go back, you have to travel about a half mile west to find a way to get over the highway to get back on it to head back home.

Enthusiasts for this wonderful restaurant know it's a bother and do that anyway, but others, after learning of the closure, decide that it isn't worth the effort. They eat elsewhere.

As it is turning out, the State is planning more changes for that particular location, but none of the changes will help improve the situation for the restaurant.

Business, according to the Tollifsons, was off 20% last year, and it is off further this year. Now the restaurant has decided to just be open weekends through the winter until next spring. This is the first time in its history it has done that. And the Tollifsons have put the property up for sale.