Continued legal strife between the Long Island, N.Y. town of Southampton and the Shinnecock tribal nation this week brought a key piece of South Fork land-use history into the picture. No–not the original “treaties” by which white settlers laid claim to their now-rich foothold on the Atlantic Ocean, but a more recent land seizure. This Newsday article explains the Shinnecock’s contention that New York State put the high-speed Sunrise Highway through a portion of tribal land beginning in 1959 without compensation. That land, in the hamlet of Hampton Bays, is called Westwoods and is the site of Shinnecock developments that the town and state are trying to regulate. It is a Peconic Bay-front property separated from the main “reservation” on Shinnecock Bay facing the ocean. The eastward extension of the Sunrise expressway, completed with other key road projects in the 1960s, is what made weekend trips from New York City feasible–and opened up the Hamptons to the wealth tide that followed in succeeding decades. The latest Shinnecock lawsuit alleges that the state illegally obtained an easement for the road, serving notice only to a tribal trustee “up island” in Babylon with no receipt signature or payment. This, in turn, may bring a review of what consisted of the Shinnecocks (who only later became a federally recognized nation) in Southampton at the time–aerial photos from 1960 show their Shinnecock Bay holding to be barely populated. Like much of the Hamptons story of the last 65 years, this is a tale of what might have unfolded so differently.
https://www.newsday.com/long-island/politics/shinnecock-sunrise-highway-lawsuit-mgewzjjv
Tim W. Ferguson 