The End of the Hamptons: Scenes from the Class Struggle in America's Paradise

Preface

Preface My wife and daughter and I were returning from a trip to Vermont when we hit a massive traffic jam just north of our home near Boston. It’s not unusual to find yourself subsumed by an automotive quagmire in Beantown, so I am well practiced in responding to such situations with the rationalized efficiency of all good twenty-first-century professionals —I reached for my cell phone to check my voice mail. There was a message from a reporter at the New York Observer, a New York City weekly that has made a name for itself over the past decade as being somewhat brash and hard-hitting, sometimes left or libertarian-leaning but almost always irreverent and politically incorrect. Apparently, the reporter, Alexandra Wolfe, was doing a story on the Hamptons and had been given my name as someone knowledgeable about the area. I joked, saying that I hoped she hadn’t been misled. We talked for almost an hour on the phone as Boston’s “Big Dig”– inspired morass gave me as much time as I needed to chat. Wolfe explained that the paper often did an “end of the summer season” piece on the Hamptons, and this year the editors wanted to focus on the controversial proposal by the Shinnecock Indians to build a casino in Hampton Bays. She said that the article might ponder the question whether the casino would mean an “end to the Hamptons.” To this, I responded with a sigh. Again and again, the magic question of whether the Hamptons were coming to an end had surfaced in my research. In fact, people had been predicting an end to the region almost from the moment it had acquired its sobriquet—“the Hamptons.” I explained to Wolfe that talk of an “end to the Hamptons” was generally about how successive groups, having conquered the area, suddenly felt inundated by the forces of the new migrations that their own settlement had actually inspired. Whether it was the early Puritan immigrants who grabbed Shinnecock and Montaukett land, nineteenth-century Tile Club artists and the first wave of Manhattan elites who built a summer ix colony, or the current infusion of the telecommuting hyperbourgeoisie, each group had conquered the land with both great fanfare and more than a little bit of anxiety. This conquest was always followed by a triumphant narrative that proclaimed the “naturalness” of the particular group’s success. Change being inevitable, however, these transformations were quickly followed by disappointments (usually brought by newer migrants taking advantage of conditions set in motion by the conquerors themselves). This process was inevitably talked about as the harbinger of the “end” of an era and an “end” to the place. Thus, stories of conquest in the Hamptons were soon overshadowed by tales of the area’s demise. Wolfe seemed interested but believed that the casino issue was too far from being resolved to focus on, anyway. So she inquired about what else I had found in my research. I explained that the central theme in the book I was writing was the impact of large-scale economic and social forces on the cultural politics of the region. Though most people think of the Hamptons as a playground for the very rich and famous, there are many other kinds of people who live there. Native Americans and white working-class people, Latino immigrants and African American workers, middle-class environmental activists and artists, as well as new McMansion homeowners and the ultra rich and famous all breathe the same, often fresh and salty sea air. Eventually, Wolfe thanked me for my time and asked if it would be OK to call me again before the article was published in case she needed to check facts or quotes. I never heard from Wolfe or the Observer again, and when the piece came out a couple of weeks later, I was more than a little bit disappointed. My work had ended up on the editing-room floor before, but usually I could see that my thoughts had at least influenced a reporter to some degree. In this case, however, I imagine Wolfe did feel that the person who had recommended me had misled her. The article was entitled “Dune, Where’s My Hampton? It’s Seceding ” and focused on a recent effort by a handful of very wealthy Bridgehampton residents to secede and form a microtown called Dunehampton . These “über rich,” as the article referred to them...