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Contemplative Joy: 
A Winter Weekend in the Hamptons

By Stephen Henderson

A few weeks ago, after driving straight east from Manhattan onto Long Island for an hour and a half, I arrived at an isthmus bounded by the Atlantic Ocean and Peconic Bay.  A group of towns link together here along Highway 27 like a strand of costly pearls: Southampton, then Bridgehampton, Sagaponack, and Wainscott.  Sag Harbor is a detour north, but leads quickly back to East Hampton, Amagansett and Montauk. 

Flat, fertile land which was once potato fields is jeweled with ponds, lakes and salt marshes.  With so many watery facets in which the sun can shimmer and shine, the light here is famously clear and flattering.  Originally colonized in the 17th century, the Hamptons have attracted summer pilgrims ever since, especially those fortunate enough to be painters, writers, rich or famous.  The South Fork of Long Island is a place of great natural beauty, but also unnatural wealth and a fantastic, at times even grotesque, excess. 

Like whispers about Jay Gatsby, stories of Hamptons intrigue are savored far beyond these shores. In the ever-expanding gossip grab bag, tales of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Truman Capote jostle against more recent shenanigans by Martha Stewart, Jerry Seinfeld or P. Diddy.  A maze of fact and fiction grows high in the Hamptons, nearly as tall as the green privet hedges surrounding the palaces where millionaires and minotaurs live.  Not for nothing are these communities called The American Riviera.

Yes, everyone knows – or think they know – what a summer in the Hamptons is like. But what about Oz during the off-season?   Those who live here, or are part of the growing number who come for weekends year-round, count the days till summer crowds disappear after Labor Day.  September and October are the most beautiful months on the South Fork, they claim.  Die-hards even maintain that the frozen months of January, February and March have their unique charms.  

“It’s a completely different experience in the winter,” said Newell Turner, editor of Hamptons Cottages & Gardens magazine.  “There is such peace and quiet. It’s easy to go shopping, to park, and it isn’t a struggle to go out to dinner.  It’s what I imagine the Hamptons were like year-round in the 1950’s.

“As the temperature drops, the sky changes from an azure to a chrome gray, with only hints of blue,” said Markie Hancock, a documentary filmmaker who weekends in East Hampton.  “The birds fly south, boats are pulled out of the water, and the landscape becomes vacant.  It’s still joyous, but a more contemplative joy.”

I thought I knew what Ms. Hancock meant, but decided recently to see for myself by visiting three of the area’s best-known villages.  For my winter weekend at the beach, I packed a bag not with sunblock and shorts, but gloves, a scarf and goose-down slippers.  Only then, did I feel ready to chill in the Hamptons. 

Seeing the Flowers

In the summer of 2001, an addled publicist named Lizzie Grubman drove her SUV into a crowd of people outside a Southampton nightclub called Conscience Point, thereby creating the latest homegrown scandal to be clucked over.  As fate would have it, this was precisely the same spot where a group of families from Massachusetts landed in 1640, thereby being the first Pilgrims to colonize Long Island’s east end.  The native Shinnecock Indians reportedly befriended the newcomers and taught them how to survive in the wilderness.

To learn what life was like way back then, shortly after arriving in Southampton, I visited the town’s Historical Museum.  This charming and quirky spot has twelve buildings, including a printer’s shop, blacksmith and a one-room schoolhouse.  Apparently, the Hamptons has always harbored rogues, for on display are a set of stocks for men guilty of public offenses such as cursing or sleeping on guard duty.  There is a pillory for women who “spoke with a forked tongue.”

Browsing along Main Street, I looked in at Hildreth’s, what is proudly touted as “America’s oldest department store.”  For the record, it has a numbingly vast inventory, including a baffling wealth of lampshades.  Around the corner, on Job’s Lane, the Parrish Art Museum also has eclectic holdings ranging from masterpieces by Andrea della Robbia to American painters like Winslow Homer, Robert Rauschenberg and Helen Frankenthaler.  In the Parrish’s gardens, over 250 types of tree and shrub from around the world are displayed, as are two parallel rows of marble busts depicting Roman emperors, among them Hadrian, Trajan, and Tiberius.

Thinking it only polite to hail Southampton’s current Caesars, I spent the afternoon touring the village’s so-called “estate district.”  On Maiden Lane, which runs directly along the Atlantic Ocean, I discovered that the favored type of hedgerow (Latin name: Lugustrum Vulgare) sheds its foliage in winter to become a denuded lattice of twigs.  This means that trophy houses which from June through September are utterly concealed to passersby -- modernist trapezoids on stilts, Italianate palazzi, and ivy-clad Tudor mansions -- were now quite exposed.  It was like seeing my grandmother in a negligee.  I couldn’t resist staring, but felt creepy doing so.

Why, I later asked Perry Guillot, one of the South Fork’s leading landscape designers, would the wealthiest people on earth select a privet hedge which would go bare for half the year?  “Because they aren’t here when the leaves fall,” Mr. Guillot replied, sounding slightly incredulous at my naivete.  “They only need privacy during the ten weeks of summertime they live in Southampton.”

Oh.  I knew people here were rich, just not that rich.

This was hardly news, however, to my waitress later that evening at Plaza Café, a pleasant place on Hill Street.  She was a raspy-voiced woman named Barry who suggested an excellent choice: “seafood shepherd’s pie,” or a casserole of lobster, scallops and shrimp in a white wine sauce, covered with crispy mashed potatoes.  When she learned I was visiting for a few days, Barry opined, “well, there are three types of people in the Hamptons: worms, weeds and flowers.  Only in the winter time can you see the flowers.”

Barry was speaking with a forked tongue, was she not?  In an earlier age, a brisk walk to the pillory might have been in order.  Instead, I decided this was a diss to the owners of those empty summerhouses out on Maiden Lane, and a flowery compliment to me, the winter guest. 

A Blunder into Blubber

When the U.S. Department of Interior in 1993 declared the Old Whaler’s church on Union Street in Sag Harbor to be a national landmark, they also noted that this town was, bar none, the best-preserved 19th century seaport in the United States.

Members of the Algonquin tribe first made this cove on the Peconic Bay their home because of its abundance of lobsters, clams and other seafood.  When the Pilgrims arrived in the late 1600’s, professions such as shipbuilding, farming, rope-making and salt production were all assayed.  None achieved remotely the success of what would one day become Sag Harbor’s most prominent industry: whaling. 

This history was immediately evident as I drove over from Southampton (a trip of seven miles) the next morning.  A cluster of fishermen shacks on the edge of town is called Ninevah, named for where the prophet Jonah was headed before he was swallowed by a you-know-what.  All along Main Street are huge homes in the Federal and Greek Revival styles, built for 19th century shipping captains.  “Part of our town’s remarkable state of preservation is a result of good luck, some due to misfortune,” said David Cory, President of the Sag Harbor Whaling Museum.

He explained that while whaling prospered tremendously till 1850 and brought untold wealth to the community, when this industry collapsed, Sag Harbor faded from a bustling seaport to a blue-collar town of factory workers.  As no one could afford to tear them down, or build new buildings in their place, the sea captain’s mansions all became boarding houses.  Thus, these structures, as well as other architectural treasures such as the Custom House and a Masonic Temple, were saved.  

As befits a town so besotted with its past, Sag Harbor boasts an impressive number of antique stores.  When I entered one called The Yard Dog, a trio of elderly men were loudly arguing the provenance of certain paper goods.  “The post card was a German invention!” one guy shouted.  Whether or not he was correct, his buddies were cowed into silence. 

Such proud Yankee assurance of taste – some might call it eccentricity -- was also evident in a Sag Harbor gallery which was offering stained glass window-making classes, or the man I spotted leaving a lawyer’s office.  He wore a black Chesterfield coat with a gray bowler hat, a costume last considered fashionable around the time an aspiring author named Herman Melville was in town researching cetology. 

Similarly, my room at The American Hotel was a fever dream of 19th century embellishments, with an old brass bed, and a cabbage rose wallpaper so vibrantly colored it made my head spin.  Feeling the need for a drink, I headed down to the hotel’s bar, where walls chock-a-block with lithographs of long-forgotten congressional skirmishes and mezzotints of American Presidents offered no relief.  Who knew Andrew Jackson had such big hair?

Since it was dark by 5:00 p.m., I ate dinner early at the New Paradise Café, which is also a bookstore.  John Steinbeck lived in town back in the 1960’s, so it wasn’t a surprise to find his complete works for sale.  Before tucking into roasted, locally-caught sea bass, I turned to page one of “The Winter of Our Discontent,” Steinbeck’s novel set in a place remarkably like Sag Harbor.  It opens with a married couple who wake one morning, only to immediately start bickering over their heritage, specifically, which of them descended from pirates or Pilgrims.  I imagine such connubial arguments might easily happen here even today, a notion indirectly corroborated by Mr. Cory, the local historian. 

His final words to me were, “in Sag Harbor, we consider ourselves the un-Hampton.”

A Secret is Discovered

The next morning, I journeyed on to East Hampton, or what is generally agreed to be the uber-Hampton.  All along Main Street, where no building is higher than two stories, the polite, but firm hand of historic town zoning is constantly at work.  Tiffany’s and Ralph Lauren make the grade, but there isn’t a McDonald’s or Starbucks, not to mention any hot dog stands or shops selling “I’m with Stupid” T-shirts.  No indeed.  This is where the globe’s privileged few come to play, so the shopping here must meet or exceed what is back home. 

At Glenn Horowitz Booksellers, an antiquarian shop on Newtown Lane, I was thrilled to find a first edition of The Waves, signed by its author, Virginia Woolf.  Thrilled, that is, until I inquired about the price which was a cool $12,500.  Wary of the undertow such a purchase would put on my credit card, I told the manager that I’d think about it.  Then, I ran back to my hotel.

The Maidstone Arms has a comfy, clubby decor, with tartan curtains, duck decoys, stuffed Marlins, and an estimable collection of blue and white china.  My suite has a sitting room overlooking the town green with its pond and two windmills.  The wing chair in the corner looks comfortable and warm, and I consider just curling up with my John Steinbeck paperback.  Yet, this isn’t a winter of discontent for me here in the Hamptons.  Quite the opposite.  Besides, I have a date with Jackson Pollock.

Artists have discovered the Hamptons in at least three distinct epochs.  First, was the 19th-century Rat Pack which included Winslow Homer and Stanford White.  Then, came an influx of Europeans fleeing the Nazis, Marc Chagall, Piet Mondrian, Salvador Dali and Andre Breton among them.  Finally, after World War II, the abstract expressionists arrived:  Willem DeKooning, Robert Motherwell, and Clyfford Still.  Blazing the trail for this last group was Jackson Pollock and his wife, painter Lee Krasner. 

Unfortunately, when I came to call, their 200-year-old house in Springs, now a museum, was closed for the season.  The couple themselves were of stronger mettle, as for years after moving here from Greenwich Village, they were still too poor to afford either heat or indoor plumbing.  I walked to the back lawn and nosed about the perimeter of Pollock’s studio.  A salt marsh and Accabonac Bay were off in the distance.  This seems a haunted spot, quiet and still surprisingly stark given that the village with its luxurious amenities is just a few minutes away.

At the nearby Green River cemetery, I paid my respects at Pollock’s grave.  He came to a bad end despite all the sympathetic care offered by his long-suffering wife.  An alcoholic, Pollock was driving drunk when he crashed into a tree along one of these winding roads.  For a headstone, his friends dragged in a fifty-ton boulder called a glacial erratic.  There is now a similar monument for Lee Krasner.  It seems there is a custom among visitors to bring along stones from the beach, and place one on top of the artist’s tombstones.  Her grave has amassed a considerably larger pile than his.

Later, I drove out along Lily Pond Lane and West End Avenue, two of the most prestigious addresses in all of the Hamptons: Calvin Klein, Martha Stewart, and Steven Spielberg all have houses nearby.  Here, too, is a house now owned by Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn, but that was once home to “Big Edie” and “Little Edie” Beale who were relatives of Jackie O.  These two elderly ladies, mother and daughter, lived here until the 1970’s in decorous squalor, attended by feral cats and raccoons, as is poignantly attested to by a documentary film named for their house, “Grey Gardens.”

That evening, my last on Long Island, I went to a late show at the East Hampton cinema.  Upon leaving, I spot the actor Roy Scheider, who I’d heard was a year-round resident.  Mr. Schieder, of course, will always be remembered for his role as the sheriff in “Jaws,” the summer movie to end all summer movies.  Though now in the winter of his life, I was pleased to see him looking tall, trim, his face deeply and unapologetically tan.  Clearly, Scheider could still battle a shark, even if it was just an August daytripper trying to terrorize his way to a table at The Laundry or Nick & Toni’s, two exceedingly popular restaurants here.

I’d actually thought of Scheider earlier that day, as I stood on East Hampton’s Main Beach.  I was pondering the fact that Long Island, Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard (where “Jaws” is set), are all part of the same landmass, created by glacial movement tens of thousands of years ago.  Traditionally, these latter beach resorts have never enjoyed anything like the popular appeal of the Hamptons – why else would pilgrims from Massachusetts have sailed down to Long Island?

Suddenly, I thought I understood why.  Because all Long Island’s ocean shores face south, no matter what time of year, the sun traverses the beaches lengthwise, keeping everything and everyone attractively aglow till there is just a speck on the horizon.  It seems possible here, as nowhere else, to squeeze every last golden drop of warmth from the sky.  

An Ideal Day

9:00 a.m.  Have breakfast at the Sip ‘N Soda in Southampton.  Buy a copy of both the Southampton Press and The East Hampton Star and scour the classified ads.  Year-round, the Hamptons are famous for extraordinary (and affordable!) yard sales.

10:00 a.m.  Drive east along Highway 27 to Bridgehampton, stopping along the way at any garage sale or antique shop that catches your fancy.  Don’t miss A.R.F. in Water Mill.

11:00 a.m.  Head north, towards Sag Harbor.  The open farmland you’ll see enroute is rapidly disappearing, as is obvious from all those newly-built McMansions.  Don’t they look like spaceships dropped from the sky?

12:30 a.m.  Have lunch at the American House Hotel.  Or, try Provisions, which is Sag Harbor’s vegetarian restaurant and a Hamptons’ hippie hang-out.

2:00 p.m.  Walk around Sag Harbor’s piers.  See the breakwater jetty way out there?  It was made from stone excavated from Manhattan when the NYC subways system was built.

3:30 p.m.  Arrive in East Hampton.  Spend the afternoon shopping along Main Street, or looking at the mansions along Hither, Middle and Further Lanes.  As suspected, the rich are different.

5:00 p.m.  Take a nap in your room at the Maidstone Arms, or catch up on local gossip in Stephen Gaines’ deliriously dishy book, Philistines at the Hedgerow.

8:00 p.m.  Enjoy a drink in a club chair fireside at The Laundry.  For dinner, don’t miss the sea scallops served on corn succotash.  Even the old Indian Chief, Wyandanch, who once owned all this land, would approve of this recipe. 

When You Go

Getting there:  By far the easiest way to get to the Hamptons is on the train. Take Amtrak to New York City.  The Long Island Railroad goes directly from Penn Station to many stops along the East End, including Southampton and East Hampton.  Call 631-231-LIRR for schedules and fares.  Hertz has a branch in Bridgehampton.  If you want your own car, take the Long Island Expressway to Exit 70, and the follow signs to Highway 27.  Traffic isn’t bad off-season.

Lodging:

The American Hotel, Main Street, Sag Harbor.  Phone:  631-725-3535.  www.theamericanhotel.com.  19th century ambiance and then some.   Rooms start at off-season rate of $155.

Maidstone Arms, 207 Main Street, East Hampton.  Phone:  631-324-5006.  www.maidstonearms.com  Operating on this spot since 1740, overlooking the town green.  There are 19 rooms, and three cottages, which start at an off-season rate of $335.

Dining:

Plaza Café, 61 Hill Street, Southampton.  631-283-9323.  New American cuisine, with a French twist.  Entrees start at $18.

Sip ‘N Soda, 40 Hampton Road, Southampton.  631-283-9752.  Burgers, fries, and homemade ice cream.  Entrees start at $4.95.

The New Paradise Café, 126 Main Street, Sag Harbor.  631-725-6080.  Buy a book before eating South Fork seafood, or a steak.  Entrees start at $16.

Provisions, corner of Bay and Division Streets, Sag Harbor.  631-725-3636.  Vegetarian fare: salads, wraps, soups.  Entrees start at $3.00.

The Laundry, 31 Race Street, East Hampton.  631-324-3199.  Have the roasted chicken from Iacono Farms, a local poultry purveyor.  Entrees start at $15.

Nick & Toni’s, 136 North Main Street, East Hampton.  631-324-3550.   There’s a wood-burning stove, so meat dishes are crispy, but juicy.  Entrees start at $22.

Activities:

The beaches – There are dozens from Southampton to Montauk.  At some you need a resident’s pass, so check parking signs. 

The Southampton Historical Museum, 17 Meetinghouse Lane, Southampton.  631-283-2494.  This is the Hamptons before they became “the Hamptons.”  Wednesdays through Saturdays, 12 noon to 5 p.m.  Adults $3.00, children under 12, $1.00

Sag Harbor Whaling Museum, Main Street, Sag Harbor.  631-725-0770. The big fish created big business.  Technically, it’s closed until May, but call ahead and curator David Cory might open up for you.

Old Whaler’s Church, Union Street at end of Church Street, Sag Harbor.  631-725-0894.  A national landmark, and the South Fork’s most magnificent church.  Open most mornings except Mondays, but call ahead.

Pollock-Krasner House, 830 Fireplace Road, East Hampton.  631-324-4929.  What happened here changed the face of American art.  By appointment only.

Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, 67 Newtown Lane, East Hampton.  631-324.5511.  Build your dream library.  Prices are high.  They’re worth it. 

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