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

3: Peconic County Now! Whose Quality of Life Is It Anyway?

3 Peconic County Now! Whose Quality of Life Is It Anyway? Newsday, the business associations—the Long Island Association, all of these people—[are] trying to promote super-industry. . . . [Long Island ] gets saturated and they’ve got to give it another shot in the arm, and then it’s saturated again and then another shot in the arm. And I don’t think you can keep on living that way. . . . That’s why they want to build a bridge [to Connecticut] . . . more parking lots, more pavement , more of everything we don’t want. —Evans K. Griffing, founder of Peconic County independence movement In short, the East End is still a rural area with farming, fishing, tourism and second homes as an economic base, which depends on its small villages, open spaces and environmental quality for its economic health. It has little in common with the remainder of Suffolk County, which is suburban, commercial and industrial. . . . Peconic County [is] the best means of protecting the rural character and natural resources of eastern Long Island from the destruction by the suburban sprawl. —Peconic County Now! legal brief, 1997 If you’ve put a “Peconic County NOW” bumper sticker on your SUV and think it refers to the local chapter of the National Organization of Women, you’re definitely NOT a local. —Southampton Press editorial, May 25, 2000 Even if you told people their taxes would double, they’d still vote to secede. —George Guldi, Suffolk County legislator from Southampton 83 On Election Day, November 4, 1996, an overwhelming 70 percent majority of voters in the five towns of Eastern Long Island supported a referendum to secede from Suffolk County and to form Peconic County. A local state assemblyman, Fred Thiele Jr., one of the biggest supporters of the initiative, credited the victory to “literally hundreds of people who got together on cold winter nights [going door-to-door] from Montauk to Eastport to Wading River.” As chairman of Peconic County Now!, an incorporated organization set up to promote secession, Larry Cantwell argued, “It’s not just a pipe dream. It is a mandate from the people of the East End for a new county.” For Peconic County supporters , the referendum was the culmination of forty years of struggle.1 The fight to secede has accompanied some of the most prolonged periods of rapid change in the area’s history. But these changes have also inspired what the historian T. H. Breen calls an “obsession” with history itself. For newcomers, asserting the primacy of history lends a sense of legitimacy and even authenticity to their new claims. Even the discourse around environmentalism is wrapped in a historical cloak; saving “vanishing landscapes” promises to promote both ecological and cultural preservation. This kind of historical consciousness dominates McMansion landscapes as farms are protected to preserve open spaces and farmers to provide small-town values and local charm. Others, however, argue that historical recovery could fuel resistance to such landscapes; Tom and Cathy Lester, discussed in chapter 2, hope that recovering “their heritage” might stop the privatization of public lands and the devastation of traditional ways of life. Breen believed that their insecurity about protecting the area’s “quality of life” was evidence of a “full-scale social crisis.” He wrote: East Hampton is totally obsessed with change. The community has in recent years experienced a dramatic, often wrenching, transformation. For many people a familiar world seems to be coming apart. A failure to address the problem of development, they argue, threatens to leave East Hampton looking . . . much like any other American town. At stake is a distinctive historical identity.2 Still, Breen recognized that the history of the Hamptons is ultimately a contested one that offers few clear and convincing narratives 84 PECONIC COUNTY NOW! to support any group’s claim to authenticity or birthright. Thus, he opted for a more “hermeneutical history” that “explores the creation of truths” and that sorts through the “conflicting perceptions” and multiple narratives “that humans have always invented to make sense out of their lives.”3 Nowhere is the politics of Hamptons history and identity more notable than in the Peconic County Now! movement. The drive to form a more “indigenous” Peconic County is steeped in the same kinds of identity politics that Breen found in East Hampton’s obsession with its own past. Despite the wide variety of individuals and interest groups that...