Dan's Papers - October 12, 2007 - Racecar Drivers Drive Slow on Route 25 to Protest Ski Resort

Within days after the Town of Riverhead signed a $155 million deal with a group of European developers planning to build an indoor ski resort and alpine village on a part of the former Grumman property that the Town now owns, more than 150 car racing enthusiasts staged a huge protest by driving their racecars at 5 miles per hour on Route 25 in Calverton, tying up the regular traffic behind them for hours. Last Sunday morning, the rumbling of the racing cars was heard for miles.

Eastern Long Island has long been a hotbed of high-speed racetracks and racecar drivers, and during the bidding for this 750-acre former Grumman site, there had been two proposals in the running. One was from the Europeans, whose plan for a 350-foot-tall replica of a ski mountain with a ski jump inside eventually won the day. The other was from a group headed up by the Petrocelli family, who own the Atlantis Marine World Aquarium in downtown Riverhead, and Charles Wang, the former Chairman and CEO of Computer Associates in Islandia. Wang had already won the bid to revitalize the Nassau Coliseum and its surroundings. This group had proposed to build a theme park that would include a racing oval with a 10,000-seat stadium, several racing circuits, condominiums, restaurants, a lake and numerous equestrian facilities. They did not win the bid.

The auto racers carried banners and signs that read "We Race, We Vote" and "Cardinale Sin," referring to the present Riverhead Town Supervisor who led the town to choose the ski mountain project over the racetrack, motorcar and horse jumping proposal from Wang and the Petrocelli family.

Locals from eastern Long Island, mostly farmers, fishermen, merchants and blue-collar workers, have long been attracted to racing cars. If you had been here thirty years ago, you would have been able to enjoy that sport at the Westhampton Drag Strip which featured one-on-one drag strip trials, the Riverhead Raceway, which hosted the first NASCAR races in America, the National Raceway in Manorville, which featured stock car races shown on television as well as figure eight racing where old wrecks had to zigzag through one another at the crossing point of the eight in what became a very popular TV show called "Demolition Derby," and the Bridgehampton Race Circuit in Bridgehampton, a facility that rivaled Watkins Glen and about a dozen other racing sites around the world where you could come to watch high speed professionals such as Dan Gurney, Bruce McLaren and Jackie Stewart battling one another in 200 mile per hour Formula One racing cars along a curvy European-style racing circuit. The CanAm Races, among the top of the line events in the world at that time, was contested here at Bridgehampton for many years before a racing crowd that sometimes numbered upwards of 50,000.

Indeed, from about 1950 to 1990, there was enough racing out here - and several race tracks still survive - so that almost any place you were in the Hamptons on any given weekend in the summertime, you could thrill to the roar of the engines somewhere nearby, while others just shrugged and figured it would be all over before sunset, hopefully.

The protest on Sunday went on for much of the morning.

"They're not going to ignore us anymore," said 63-year-old racer Alan Estergomy, who retired from school teaching, now lives in Ridge, Long Island, and spoke to reporters.

Ron Pisco, who is 37 years old and lives in Riverhead, was on the site of the Enterprise Park demonstration that day, and said that he and his friends were supporting anyone this November's election who wants to see to the building of a new racetrack in the area, either by reversing the decision made with the ski people on a technicality, or by building a racing circuit somewhere else in the area. Jimmy Stark, Republican Candidate for the Riverhead Town Supervisor's office, was one of them. Phil Cardinale, the Democratic incumbent running for Town Supervisor in November said he was not opposed to a racing venue and that he would look into having it somewhere else. Pisco was standing by the sign that read "Cardinale Sin."

In another development, just two days before, Riverhead Town voted unanimously to approve a deal with RepCal, Llc, to sell that company 300 acres of the former Grumman site for a total of $32.5 million. It is zoned to be developed for light industry, which if successful would provide thousands of new jobs for East Enders in that area. The principals of RepCal, who call themselves the Rexler Group, will appear before the Town Board on October 16 to have further discussions about their financial backing. They will be required to post a bond and then build a series of roads, sewer lines, streetlights and power lines through the area to enable the sites to be leased out to different industrial corporations.

The total size of the Grumman site is 3,600 acres. For many years between 1950 and 1990, Grumman produced Navy fighter planes on this site, including the legendary F-14 fighter still in use today. They also built, on contract from NASA, the moon rover used by the Astronauts in exploring the surface of the moon in the 1960s and 1970s. Grumman during that era employed more than 30,000 Long Islanders and was the largest employer on the island.

After Grumman left, they "sold" this 3,600-acre production and testing site - it included an airport since dismantled - for $1 to the Town of Riverhead. Much of it still remains to be parceled out. It is sure turning out to be a very good investment made by that Town.