Dan's Papers -January 9, 2009

At 8:30 a.m. last Thursday, people driving by the former Elaine Benson Art Gallery on Main Street in Bridgehampton saw a sight that few thought they would ever see. There were bulldozers lined up on the street and in the yard, workmen with hard hats everywhere, and there was little doubt about what was going to happen. The magnificent, 120-year-old main house of the gallery, a mansion built as solid as a rock in the late Victorian style originally by a successful local merchant, was about to be torn down.

Several people called the police. And the police alerted the Town Building Department, which, a few hours later, issued a stop work order, which was driven from Southampton to the site and nailed to a tree on the property, but by that time it was noon and it was all over.

Between 8:30 and 11 a.m., with the great cracking sounds of solid wood and shingles and with the crash of broken glass, including several pieces from decorative windows on the top floor, this icon of Bridgehampton had been turned into a pile of construction debris. The deed was done. Numerous spectators who had stood around to watch were near tears. The building inspector who had put up the sign at noon amidst the construction dust was just the icing on the cake.

There are some who say that the new owner of this building, businessman Joe Farrell, was operating outside his rights by tearing down this house, but the truth is he was not. He had a valid demolition permit, issued on June 6 for just this purpose. He had for two years prior made his intentions known, that he had bought the building to restore it if he could put his business office in it or, if he couldn't, tear it down and put up an office building to accomplish that fact. As it turned out, nobody in Town Hall or anywhere else would spend the preservation fund money to buy this gem and save it. And in the end, though the town had voted to give a preservation group another 30 days to have a final go at saving the building and had authorized a clerk to send Farrell a letter instructing him that there would be this delay, no letter was ever written. Farrell was within his rights.

But how, looking at the bigger picture, could this ever have been allowed to happen?

The former Elaine Benson Art Gallery is one of a string of 11 original private homes that line the south side of Main Street in Bridgehampton for a quarter of a mile between the Community House to the east and the Methodist Church to the west. The Town acknowledged the importance of this fact when, five years ago, it passed a law requiring that future owners of any of these old homes larger than 3,000 square feet would need to provide apartments upstairs if the downstairs were to be used for commercial or public space. No further rules to protect this historic district were ever made, however. So no such strings were attached to what was probably the most magnificent of these homes to prevent it from being torn down.

According to realtor Paul Brennan, the house had been the home of dairy farmer Sayre Baldwin, whose farm, now Two Trees Farm on Mitchell Lane, is where the polo matches take place in the summer time. Baldwin was also, for 50 years, the chairman of the Board of the Bridgehampton Bank.

In 1964, however, this property on Main Street was purchased by Emanuel and Elaine Benson, who for the next half century developed it not only as the premiere art gallery in the Hamptons, but one of the major art galleries in the country.

Emmanuel Benson was the president of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and a distinguished art scholar. Twenty years earlier, the greatest artists in the world of abstract expressionism and later Pop Art - Pollock, de Kooning, Porter, Warhol and Rivers - lived and worked on the south fork of Long Island. But until Emanuel Benson and his wife Elaine moved here, there had been no gallery of any substance here in which to display it.

From 1963 until Elaine Benson died in 1998, every Friday afternoon in the summertime was a social occasion in the Hamptons where art buyers, writers, painters and patrons gathered by the hundreds, and came to the gallery openings for wine and cheese and to look at, and perhaps purchase, some of the greatest art in the world. The Bensons lived in the mansion. The gallery was built in a series of courtyards and barns that allowed indoor/outdoor displays of sculptures and artwork in the most attractive setting possible. As many as 500 people could be accommodated in the gallery area. Concerts were held there. Parties were held there. (My daughter got married there.) Attending an event at that gallery was an experience that few could forget.

The Bensons were not only personal friends of practically everyone in the Hamptons, including me, but Elaine Benson, for nearly 40 years, wrote a column in Dan's Papers that was a sort of diary of her life for that week. I attended many dinner parties at her house, which were attended by some of the most interesting people imaginable, and can attest to the fact that this building was a grand and strong structure right up until its last day 10 years ago. Also during that time, Elaine Benson took an active role editorially in the paper as an outspoken critic, and her name soon appeared on our masthead as "Faculty Advisor," which she surely was to us all.

The building certainly did need to have repairs after the passing of the Bensons. It was no longer occupied by them, although it was still filled with art and filing cabinets filled with all sorts of treasures. Attempts were made to archive the contents of the house, and one of her children, Kimberly Goff, continued on with the gallery for five years and continues to archive the contents to this day in a warehouse elsewhere. But in truth, and in respect to her parents, I think, she never lived in the gallery mansion.

I think it is possible that after eight years of neglect, a sturdy mansion would need much in the way of repairs. But that this particular one should be worn down to the point of collapse, making it so uninhabitable and, therefore, a danger to the community, and therefore a candidate for demolition would not be imaginable. Not this one. And yet, that is what it was so declared, once it was purchased by Farrell in 2006.

I have seen, over and over again, magnificent homes declared a wreck by those with different plans for them. The Town sends in its own inspectors and confirms it. Though I did not see the interior of the Benson Gallery after about 2002, so I cannot say that this was the case here. Nevertheless, I have gone through buildings supposedly so shaky that they are "beyond habitation," only to find them perfectly fine. This is surely a very sad state of affairs. New laws need to be written about who can determine when a town treasure is in such a state.

In any case, before Farrell came along, Goff had gone to the Town Planning Board to get approval to continue the gallery, only to be told that the uninsulated outbuildings, the barns and sheds were illegal and only allowed all that time because the gallery had been a pre-existing use for this property. Indeed, now, instead of three parking spaces that exist on the property, (everyone parked on the street during events) she'd need to have 19 parking spaces. As for the home, it did not qualify for commercial use, so she'd have to build a real building for the summer gallery - something that was beyond her means. So that was that.

The Farrells, during the two years they battled the Town to find something that would be appropriate on the property, were originally hoping to use the home as an office for their vast business holdings, and build an extension onto it for the gallery. The house could be kept, they were told, but upstairs there would have to be two apartments as required by law. There would also have to be major modifications to the building to make it suitable for commercial use. And they too would need all these parking spaces. They began to wonder where in there they could have their offices.

They made proposal after proposal to tear down the buildings and construct a new building, which would contain their offices above and the gallery below. They submitted plans in wood, in stone, in brick, in shingles. It went on and on. And finally it emerged, an office building with lots of parking, no apartments upstairs and no gallery space. The Town guided the project and shaped it, then approved it. And that was that.

And so, the village loses a monument and the Town puts up a screwed up stop work order after the place is down just for good measure. And oh, by the way, the beautiful details, the finials and gingerbread on the eaves and atop the roof of the mansion are gone. It's all gone. It's all gone.