Summerpeople Museum

Celebrate the 19th Century WASPS Who Founded Southampton

By Dan Rattiner

I don’t think there’s ever been a comprehensive history of the Hamptons summer people written. These people are the most dominant group out here today. They deserve a history. They probably even deserve a museum of some sort where they can celebrate their early history, which they also do not have.

Some time ago, I suggested that the current site of the Parrish Art Museum could be such a place. The Museum is going to move four miles to the west to a new building on Route 27 near Water Mill sometime soon. The old Parrish would make a perfect site for such a place.

The summer people first started coming out to the Hamptons in the 19th century. They were relative newcomers at that time, because for about 200 years prior, this community was inhabited by Native American Indians, fishermen and farmers. The last two, simple God-fearing folk, had come to America from England beginning in 1640. They knew lots about the land, about animals and crops and about the sea. There were Indians in this area, but they did not possess gunpowder. The English settlers, with gunpowder, dealt with them, not kindly, I’m afraid to say.

The defining moment that made the invasion of the summer people possible was most surely the railroad. Before that, people of any kind, sophisticated or otherwise, rarely traveled out to the City. And, indeed, the country folk rarely traveled to the Hamptons. This would be, either way, an arduous overnight stagecoach trek over dirt and mud roads and tracks. More likely, if you wanted to contact someone, you’d write them a letter, which was carried aboard the daily stage to and from the city. It would take a few days to get where it was going. Those that did make the journey often published books about it, as if they were trekking to Katmandu. Elaborate drawings of the farmers and windmills elaborately illustrated these books.

The railroad came out as far as Bridgehampton in 1871. And that did it. Suddenly, the East End was accessible aboard a comfortable railroad train in just three or four hours. And so people came out to see it for themselves.

Among the first to come out were New York City artists, who wanted to paint scenes of what they had read were these beautiful old communities. They would paint the windmills and the old saltbox homes and the simple folk who occupied them. They’d meet picturesque characters and interesting country folk. And they would stay in boarding houses for the summer and paint in the fields. One such boarding house, in East Hampton, Miss Annie Huntting’s, became nicknamed “Rowdy Hall” by the artists, because they’d get drunk there and party until the wee hours. There was a special straw hat that the farm people wore at that particular time. The artists bought them and wore them too.

If the railroad made eastern Long Island accessible for the artists, it also made it accessible for the rich. There were other places that became summer colonies for the rich because of the railroad. And they included Cape May, Tuxedo, Deal and Newport. Giant mansions were built in those places. And a few in Southampton.

In the late 1880s, the President of the Long Island Railroad believed he could create a deep-water port at Fort Pond Bay in Montauk, and bring freighters and oceanliners there. He had heard many of the complaints about ships coming from Europe to New York getting stuck at the Narrows, that passageway between Staten Island and Brooklyn. Ships had to be cautious there, and it was against the law to pass through the Narrows at any time but at high tide. So there were huge delays.

The railroad extended the tracks to Montauk. And they awaited the arrival of freighters, whose goods could unload there and be brought swiftly to New York City aboard the Long Island Railroad. The plan never succeeded, but the tracks were now there, and so the most easterly end of the Hamptons was now accessible from New York City.

In 1888, seven wealthy New Yorker families who normally went to Newport, decided to create an oceanfront colony at Montauk. They hired architect Stanford White to build giant summer “cottages” along the beach there, adjacent to a central dining room where all the owners and their families could get together every night.

Servants stayed at these cottages all summer long, and when the rich came out on the train, they were met at Montauk station by porters and even cooks, who carried thermoses filled with soups and other delicacies for the hungry travelers. The time was passed languorously on the beach, or on wicker chairs on porches. Croquet was popular, as was tennis. It couldn’t have been a more different experience than New York if you could have managed it.

The Montauk Association lasted until about 1902 when the daughter of one of the members was thrown from a carriage and died from her injuries. A doctor was more than an hour away. After that, the Association members thought it more prudent to summer in Newport. And their homes were sold off.

Today, the Association Homes are still there, and now serve as private estates for their owners. One is owned by Dick Cavett, the former ABC talk host.

In the rest of the Hamptons, people with names such as du Pont, Whitney and Vanderbilt built large summer mansions to add to the growing community down at the beach and far from the farmers and townspeople. The summer people in the Hamptons enjoyed the same routine the few at the Association in Montauk did. But they went further. They soon created exclusive clubs, such as the Maidstone in East Hampton, the Bathing Association and the Meadow Club in Southampton and the Beach Club in Quogue. Numerous yacht clubs were created. But unlike at Montauk, where the rich lived in the dunes, those in the Hamptons lived in mansions placed on former farmland now elaborately landscaped with lawns and exotic flowers, shrubs and trees, their properties bordered with hedgerows for privacy. Highlights of the season in the Hamptons included cocktail parties, cotillions and coming out parties for the 16 year old daughters.

Often the arrivals in Southampton or East Hampton were actual events. The servants with their carriages assembled to await the 4:19 cannonball on Friday at the station — the Southampton station was built with seashells embedded in the concrete along its walls — it is there today — and the families would come off the train with their luggage hauled by porters to be taken by horse drawn carriage down to the cottages. Many of the wives and children stayed out here all summer to enjoy “the air.” The husbands would come out for the weekends. As today, the air is cooler, cleaner and healthier in the country than in the big city. Nobody had air conditioning. It hadn’t been invented yet.

Other summer colonies also thrived in the Hamptons and elsewhere on the East End. Big mansions down by the ocean were built in Westhampton Beach. There were also mansions built on Shelter Island, where the preferred mode of transportation out to them from Manhattan was by paddlewheel steamboat. As those in the Hamptons assembled at the train stations on Fridays, the wives and children on that island, that same afternoon, assembled at the ferry dock for the arrival of what came to be called “Daddy Boats.” The men would arrive in suits and ties straight from work, and nearly all wore at that time virtually identical bowler hats, which were the fashion. They’d take them off and wave them merrily to their families when their ship came near the dock.

If this community of wealthy people lived in splendid but opulent isolation in the city, they deliberately chose to live in simplicity in the country. The interiors of those old homes often were decorated with little more than wicker sofas and tables, beds with iron bedsteads and the most primitive of kitchens and baths. If they were coming out here to get away from their lives, that is how they would do it.

Among those who were frequent guests in the Hamptons in those years was Thomas Edison. He experimented with talking motion pictures in Riverhead at the new Opera House. At that time Riverhead was a merchant town involved in the shipping of fresh farm produce. Also animals. One year, Edison noted at the beach one day a layer of what appeared to be black iron across the top of the sand, having been washed in by the sea. It happens once in a while to this day. He tried but failed to figure out a way to harvest this iron, going so far at one point to build a small factory on the beach at Quogue.

The Parrish Museum was built for the summer people in Southampton, who sometimes took art classes from famous artists who came out for the summer. Guild Hall was built in East Hampton, spearheaded by the famous film actor John Drew, who lived in that town. East Hampton was developing a reputation as a more artsy community than Southampton. Nevertheless, for a long time, a “Blue Book” was published and circulated among the summer people from all of the towns, letting them know quite clearly who was acceptable and who was not in the upper class social society of the day. Indeed, in that era, homes in the estate section of the town were often sold with written instructions that they not be sold to Jews, Negroes or Entertainers, unwelcome folk all.

Black Tuesday in November of 1929, wiped out many a fortune among these wealthy people. The Depression lingered for ten years, and during that time, numerous summer homes were deliberately blown up because those who owned them could not afford to pay the taxes on them. A vacant lot they could afford. There was, at the time, a black man who knew all about dynamite in this community and who, for a price, could blow up a home and have the debris fall harmlessly right at your feet a half a mile away. He was the expert.

After World War II, the world began to change. The exclusive hold on businesses in America by this wealthy clique of people began to give way, and soon, in banking, advertising, Wall Street and Real Estate, the wealthy more and more, came from a variety of walks of life.

Here in the Hamptons, the exclusivity by the old money ruling class held out for sometime. And it was during this time that those with new money began to emulate the old. Mercedes-Benz became the car of choice. Homes were built in the shingled English country style more and more, though “primitive” was out of the question. Now the fashions were subdued and elegant, presented by such designers as Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein. If you closed your eyes, you could be in the English countryside, or the Hamptons of 1920, minus women’s bustles and sun umbrellas. And so it is today.

Soon, more clubs opened, where there were no rules and regulations barring those of other backgrounds. And so you have the summer people today, from the Theatre, from Wall Street and Madison Avenue, from Seventh Avenue, from the media and most recently, from Hollywood, a development that has flourished in just the last fifteen years.

The Hamptons today is a huge network of wealthy people, tens of thousands of them, attended by gardeners, pool people and exercise trainers, who raise tens of millions of dollars for charity at various fundraisers during the fifteen weeks of the summertime. Many of them now live here year round. And they are the driving force in preserving the environment and the historic districts in this area. They get to the city and back aboard Helicopters, Jitneys, Limousines, airplanes and expensive automobiles, sometimes with private drivers.

There should be a museum describing their history here.