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

2: Houses in the Fields: New York City Moves East

2 Houses in the Fields NewYork City Moves East What has happened in the South Fork over the last five years is not really any different, in fact, from what has happened in much of Manhattan . . . . Should development be allowed to continue on the argument that the land belongs to those who can afford it, that the best future for any community, rural or urban, is the one that occurs naturally when the free market is allowed to prevail? —Paul Goldberger, New York Times, September 4, 1983 Maybe the whole thing was one of God’s warnings. Why didn’t he and Judy and Campbell get out of New York . . . and the megalomania of Wall Street? Who but an arrogant fool would want to be a Master of the Universe—and take the insane chances he had been taking? Why didn ’t they sell the apartment and move out here to Southampton year round? —Sherman McCoy in The Bonfire of the Vanities, by Tom Wolfe (1987) [The return of homeless people and squeegee men] suggest[s] to me that dealing with quality-of-life issues is like dealing with a garden lawn. Unless you constantly mow it, it’s going to grow back. —Eli Silverman, professor of criminal justice, quoted in the New York Daily News, August 13, 2000 Since 1996, our own district population has increased by approximately 20 percent. The Internet has fostered an employment mobility that has contributed and will continue to contribute to our own growth. . . . [F]amilies are moving out of New York City and up island to settle down in our area. They are attracted by the lifestyle. —Candace Porter, publisher, Landpaper, summer 2001 45 Long before the Twin Towers fell on 9/11, New York City residents had tried to escape their apocalyptic fears of urban life.1 In the late nineteenth century, concerns over congestion, filth, and crime inspired wealthier residents to create what Leo Marx called a “middle landscape ” somewhere between the chaos, garbage, and immigrant-dense metropolis and the “uncivilized,” “provincial,” and “poor countryside .”2 Members of America’s new ruling class found Long Island more appealing than their estates in Newport and their bungalows in Bar Harbor, Maine, primarily because of the Island’s proximity to the city. As Baxandall and Ewen write, “their Long Island estates were ideal for the spring and fall season and many winter weekends.”3 Despite the cultural attractions of the city and the economic need to remain tied to city life, concern over urbanism’s characteristic social problems led more and more people of means to seek refuge outside the city core. While panics about the dangers of urban life sometimes appear to be cyclical, the post–World War II, white, middle- and upper-class exodus from New York City has had only a few interruptions. Bob Moses’s parks and Bill Levitt’s mass-produced “little boxes” inspired massive surges of midcentury suburbanization. The farms and fields of Nassau and western Suffolk counties would be overrun by subdivisions and strip malls, eventually becoming one of the nation’s largest “nonurban” Standard Metropolitan Statistical Areas. Subsequently, this eastward sprawl would reach the Hamptons. But the relationship between New York City’s elite and the reshaping of the Hamptons as an upscale suburban or “exurban” landscape is complex. In part, the process represents forces fueled by a rapidly changing global economy that featured major financial market booms and an increasingly bifurcated economic growth pattern with big winners and big losers. Geographical shifts in economic production, labor markets, and worker migration also resulted in huge demographic swings such as growth in permanent residency among both wealthy whites and working-class Latinos. Add to these factors an intensified set of mediahyped urban horrors and new bourgeois fashions and lifestyles, and it becomes apparent that the Hamptons now stand at the juncture of contemporary social transformations. It is a place where people simultaneously flee from the ashes of the old economy and seek out the promises of the new economy. 46 HOUSES IN THE FIELDS Upscale urban flight and fluctuating class identities among the professional elite have resulted in a chaotic convergence of old and new. On the one hand, rural landscapes are reshaped by McMansion subdivisions clustered along the outskirts of old potato fields, while farms are more likely to raise horses for polo than crops for sale. These new landscapes represent...