It is that time of year here in the Hamptons when movie stars, entertainers, tennis champions, finance wizards, famous authors, tech moguls, politicians, twenty-somethings converging on share houses, European jetsetters, and retirees from as far as Israel, all come to feast on the perfect ocean beaches along eastern Long Island. For those of us without a private chef, the restaurants are overcrowded, and the roadways are jammed with cars and trucks from early morning on the only single lane highway going east and west, until late in the evening. The private clubs are busier than usual. The side streets are clogged with runners and cyclists. Navigating the back roads is a dodge. Yet for all the traffic, celebrity sightings, parties every night, the sun rises early and the moon sets. Kids will be returning from camp. The school custodians will start readying the classrooms. The traffic cops will have run out of blank parking tickets by now. The lifeguards at Main Beach will have tired of shooing bathers out of the water because someone thought they saw a shark. The local store clerks will have lost their patience with the long lines at Citarella. Marcello at Candy Kitchen will have let his beard grow a bit longer. The refuse trucks that usually make weekly trips to the landfill will now be transporting bi-weekly. A water shortage will be declared. Lawn sprinklers will be shut down. The pool heaters will be turned off for the rest of the season. The traditional fundraising events—Author’s Night, Artists & Writers softball game, Guild Hall—and the annual house parties will draw to a close. Scorching New York City sidewalks will force even the anti-Hamptonites to bus their way out to a sofa at a friend’s rental. The city is left lopsided with the balance shifting over the next few weeks. The scent of freshly picked corn and green beans at the farmstand in Wainscott is a simple reminder of what draws the world here. I wake up as early as I can, at sunrise, before the helicopters carrying yet more weekenders swirl over our home. The New York Times delivered early. The morning coffee overlooking Jones Cove. It is a paradise—a brief one.
Category: East Hampton
A Winter Visit
Being in the Hamptons in late March—after a stay in Manhattan and a bit of work-related business –briefly reconnects me to the peace and quiet of our home in eastern Long Island. I wake early and take my new-old Mark II Jag out for a morning drive. Only 100 miles from New York City are vast expanses of farmland and ocean vistas, long secured by the Town from developers. The stress of work notwithstanding, the scenery helps me breathe easier–windows down, temperatures in the mid-40s, the sun reflecting off the polished burlwood. I consider how fortunate we are to have settled in East Hampton some 50 years ago. The population has steadily increased perhaps ten-fold over the years and the prices of real estate even more. Winter months have not changed significantly, still quieter than summer. The residential lanes are fully improved now- no more vacant lots– with a few classic shingle style houses, but modern architecture has crept in as new owners demolish and rebuild their houses, many in the oversized “McMansion” style. The route down Montauk Highway is free of traffic going west. I pass the eastbound “trade parade” backed up at the light in Wainscott and find a parking spot in front of Bridgehampton’s Candy Kitchen diner. Inside, the owner Marcello is at the counter bent over his morning coffee, awaiting the breakfast crowds. He sees me and says, “haven’t seen you in a long while” –the usual greeting after I’ve spent several months in Florida. I take the last booth though the restaurant is empty. This is my usual hang-out. I settle in with the New York Times and a large coffee in a paper cup. Absorbed in yesterday’s news, I savor my caffeine fix. I have my solitude here – no office, clients or fellow lawyers to query me about my time away. Afterward, I take the backroads through Sagaponack. The speedbumps intended to slow down the summer traffic are also a warning to me not to test the old Jag’s suspension. The sun glints off the windshield. I try to turn on the old radio but no luck. One more thing to add to my “fix” list. I return home and park the Jag in its garage space. The house is quiet and I start a fire in the library hearth. I ask Alexa to play WQXR and I settle into my cozy chair with the view out on the open field. The deer are not spooked by my return. They feed away, in their usual routine. They know.
The Cygnet
I had a short stay at camp with my high school friends this past week, all of us class of 1958, Benjamin Franklin High School, Rochester, New York. The camaraderie and closeness with the guys and the warmth of us all being around the fire pit, the shifting smoke notwithstanding, made for a strong sense of wellbeing. We were together from early morning coffee to late night story sessions of times past and memories relived. But the good feeling, which I hoped would last, was overshadowed by a disappointing discovery on my return to New York. My house is situated on a cove that is home to a longstanding flock of swans that have co-existed with us since the 1970s. Before I left to go to Maine, I noticed a bevy of young cygnets trailing a mother and father in the water. Now I found that the entire family had dwindled down to one lone cygnet survivor. Sadly, the female swan was found floating in the water and there was no trace of the others, aside from the last offspring swimming alone in Jones Cove, fluttering about among the phragmites, looking for its family. Coming off a trip with my oldest and dearest friends from upstate, the missing swans seemed a metaphor somehow, to those longstanding relationships we have, to illness and aging and the inevitable loss we face. The surviving cygnet represents our own children and the future.
At camp, we focused on the past and its impact on our respective lives. After a meal of comfort food and several glasses of Sancerre, the stories flowed like the wonderful wines my friends brought to camp. A predominant theme was the importance of our mothers on our lives growing up. Our fathers were the vegetable broker, the electrician, the garment worker and in my case the parking lot manager. We all survived like my lone cove swan to create our legacies for the future. As the swan matures, the brown cygnet colors dissolve into white and it will, like some of us humans, find a mate for life and reproduce. Unlike the cove swans, whose domain is our pond, my friends and I have “cygnets” of our own, who are well into maturity with established families and careers. They include entrepreneurs, a travel consultant, a teacher of autistic children, an attorney, and a museum director. My daughter Kara is a jewelry designer and my daughter Brooke an interior decorator. Our children have “spread their wings and flown” and we are proud of them. The sole cygnet will, hopefully, fly out of the cove to thrive with a new flock on the pond.
To my buddies, Harv, Arnie, Jer and Bobbie and their beautiful gals, thank you for coming together at camp this past week. Enjoy the upcoming season as if it were that last break after graduation, before we started our new lives in the fall of 1958.
A Conversation with Sam White
April 2022
A lifelong career in land use law has afforded me opportunities over the years to learn, explore and even profess some knowledge of local historical architecture. Recently I appeared before the local zoning board to see the restoration of a magnificent home designed by Albro & Undeberg circa 1914 in East Hampton Village. Advocating on behalf of the owners of beautiful, architecturally significant properties allows me the additional benefit of associating with the people who specialize in their restoration. In the course of my work on a new project, a home built in 1926 by Roger Bullard, designer of the renowned Maidstone Club, I made the acquaintance of Sam White, a great grandson of Stanford White. Stanford White was a partner in the firm of McKim, Mead & White and was arguably the most famous architect of his day, during America’s Gilded Age. His legacy survives in the many buildings he designed and built including the spectacular “Seven Sisters” shingle-style houses on the cliffs of Montauk at the easternmost tip of Long Island.
In my meeting with Sam, I asked what it meant to him, as the descendant of such a famous architect, how it had impacted him personally. His response: “It is a privilege that I did not earn” –a modest response from an unassuming man who has staked out an impressive career of his own in architecture. In addition, he has written, together with his wife, some four books on Stanford White and lectured extensively about his great grandfather and his legacy. Sam explained that he wrote the books to clarify a misunderstanding about his great grandfather. “Too much attention was directed at how he died and not his work.” The circumstances surrounding Stanford White’s death were sensationalized in the press and at the time overshadowed his professional accomplishments. The impact of what he did achieve was felt through the generations, as Sam’s grandfather, Larry White, had thirty-five grandchildren, five of whom became noted architects and one a landscape architect. Sam himself is one of eleven siblings.
My conversation with Sam was via zoom rather than a preferred sit down with him in the original Stanford White home in St. James on Long Island, New York–still owned and inhabited by descendants of White. After Harvard and Vietnam, Sam attended architectural school at Penn. He sought to carve out his own destiny in architecture and embarked on a career restoring historical homes on Long Island. Sam reflected on the state of architecture today. “No one except for perhaps Peter Marino is equal to Stanford White’s capacity with color and texture in his design.” A worthy compliment to a contemporary architect and designer.
It was a wonderful conversation about an architect of generations ago who lives on today in the many homes and commercial buildings he designed in New York, Newport, Montauk and Southampton. A pleasure to meet you, Sam.
Here Back East 