Dan's Papers - January 11, 2008 - ...On the Dotted Line

Last week, the attorney for the new Riverhead Ski Mountain Resort, Don Secunda, came to see me at Dan's Papers. We sat in our conference room, and he set out some papers.

"Most people think this is just going to be a big ski mountain," he said.

I noted that people couldn't be blamed for that. Nearby is Splish Splash, the big water park attraction. Further out, in downtown Riverhead, there is the new Atlantis Aquarium with its big shark tank, still another attraction. People tend to think in terms of attractions.

Smith showed me a drawing of what appeared to be a lake in that rural part of Riverhead. I didn't know there was a lake there. There isn't. They're going to build a one-mile long lake next to the mountain on the old Grumman site.

"Here's the mountain everybody is talking about," he said. "And it is an attraction. But it is just one of eight different resorts, each with its own attractions, set around the lake. This is an enormous undertaking."

"It should take close to three years before a shovel can be put into the ground," he said There are planning board permits to get, environmental impact statements to be written, building contracts to be let. And it will take two years after that to open this multi-billion dollar complex.

And now the process has begun. This past week, the Riverhead Town Board voted 3 to 2 to approve this project. It's now in contract. At the closing, Riverhead Resorts will give the Town $155 million, the largest sum ever received by that town and triple the size of their annual budget, to buy the land, then between $1 and $3 million a year as various additional hurdles are cleared. In addition, Riverhead Resorts will pay between 6% and 9% for every dollar that comes in the door. This is an amazing amount of money for a town the size of Riverhead to receive.

Here's what you see when looking at the plan. The lake, artificial, lined on the bottom and eight feet deep, is longer than it is wide and extends north to south. On the north side is the Long Island Expressway and Route 25a. And it is here, at the northern tip of the lake, that the entrance to the project will be built.

The eight resorts will be arrayed around the lake, much in the way different resorts are arrayed around the lake at the Magic Kingdom at Disneyworld or the Lake of Nations at Epcot.

"We intend to build them in stages," Smith said.

The first of them, by the entrance, will be a little village with a Main Street and shops. There will be ski shops and ice- skating stores. There will also be a few condominiums.

Next to it, built at just about the same time, will be the ski mountain, 350 feet high and grassed and planted with shrubs and evergreens "as a bird and animal sanctuary," Smith said.

"The skiing goes on inside the mountain," he told me. "There will also be ice skating. And some other recreational facilities. There are many ski mountains around the world like this one," he continued. "The one in Dubai is 800 feet high. This one is less than half that high."

After the mountain is built, a water adventure resort will go up next to it, and then beyond that an upscale condominium and hotel resort.

"You have to build the attractions before you build the hotel and condominium units," he said. "We expect people to come here from around the country and around the world, for stays of four to seven days. When they get here we have to have something for them to do. So the attractions get built first."

I asked Secunda about whether there will be day-trippers coming to the project and he said of course there would be. "But the heart of it is to make this a family vacation destination. We hope to have two million visitors a year. We think about 60% of those who come here will come from afar."

The next resort to be built will be a hotel and convention center resort (the convention center is to be 100,000 square feet) and at the very southern end of the lake a spa and health resort. These five resorts comprise the relatively high activity expected on the eastern side of the project, which is adjacent to land set aside for an industrial park. On the western side, adjacent to an existing cemetery, will be lower intensity developments. Incidentally, water taxis will be shuttling people back and forth across the lake. So people can go from one to the other without driving.

On the western shore, at the southern end, there will be an equestrian resort with show jumping, stabling, riding trails and so forth, and to the north of that there will be a wilderness area with trails, and to the north of that the final facility, which will be a sports and lifestyle resort with indoor and outdoor tennis and basketball courts and soccer and baseball fields. Total acreage: about 550. And that's it.

"Where's the parking?" I asked.

"It's off-site," Smith said. "We have not yet purchased the land for it, but we will. It will probably be north of the Long Island Expressway. And we will have shuttle busses to take you to the resort."

And so it appears that Riverhead Resorts will be, in size, something that rivals the great family entertainment resorts around the world. Certainly it brings to mind the plan for Disneyworld. The project should produce 2,000 permanent, year- round jobs.

Behind this project are the financial resources of two giant European companies, who built skyscrapers in New York and other cities around the world, giant hotels and other resorts. The total assets of these companies are in the neighborhood of $80 billion. Riverhead will be a blip in their portfolio, though a big blip.

Which brings us to the question - how did it come to this?

The first time I drove out to the Hamptons from New York City was with my parents in 1956. We passed through all the suburbs of Long Island, then spent two hours in a sort of wasteland of undeveloped farmland and scrubland until we got to the Hamptons, which were very beautiful and busy old New England towns.

After we settled here, a topic of conversation was always about what would happen to all that open space. It did have some major institutions in it amidst the farms and forests. But all were there because they needed to be far, far away from the big city. There was the mental institution in Islip. There was the top secret Brookhaven Lab. There was the Grumman facility where behind barbed wire they made warplanes. There was a Nike Missile Base in Wading River. There was the Animal Disease Center on Plum Island. And there were several auto racetracks and drag strips.

The majority opinion was that suburban quarter-acre lots would keep marching ever eastward and fill up not only this seventy-mile long open space but just keep right on going until the whole Hamptons got torn up into shopping centers and housing developments sprawling all the way to the foot of the Montauk Lighthouse.

Well, that never happened. At least not quite like that.

Once I went to the East Hampton Library to try to find out why this seventy-mile long open space existed. That was easy. The Dutch had settled New Amsterdam. The English at the other end of this long, long island had settled the Hamptons by rowing across Long Island Sound from New England. And neither group of settlers ever did anything in between.

And then, around 1990, I wrote an article suggesting that we use this big open space for new "Hamptons." I noted that there were only eight different villages that qualified as Hamptons on the East End. And the eight were becoming quite crowded. So what we needed was a bunch of new Hamptons, and where better to put them than in that big open space where they could act as a buffer for the real Hamptons, and where people heading for "The Hamptons" might veer off and spend their time in these new Hamptons, thus sparing us further out east. I suggested names for these new Hamptons. There could be Celebrity Hampton, Sport Hampton, Media Hampton, Surf Hampton, Hampton Harbor, Wilderness Hampton, NASCAR Hampton, Hampton Sur le Mer, Polo Hampton and Dominy, the new Hampton for those who are so unbelievably rich that there is nobody who can afford to live there.