Readers of placed obituaries in the Southampton Press this week might have puzzled over the one for Francesco Galesi, who died last month in Palm Beach, Fla. at age 95. There was no mention of any connection to “The Hamptons”–perhaps he was just one of many grandees on the winter-summer circuit between the two pockets of wealth? For some years, Galesi was that–but the “pioneering visionary” who developed commercial and industries properties near and far was a more notable South Fork figure. In that same Press newspaper circa the 1980s, Galesi appeared frequently–and sometimes notoriously–amid the residential building craze taking hold of local farmland and waterfront. He acquired a few big parcels that could have yielded scores of homes, only to sell them on when financing or zoning proved too difficult; this was the case in North Haven (where big houses were eventually built) and at what instead became the Atlantic Golf Club in Bridgehampton. For a few years, his family occupied a mansion on the Meadow Lane beach strip in Southampton that had been a civic architectural controversy. But it was a different, intended dwelling that most got him ink. In the mid-1980s, he sought to erect a homestead on Clam Island off Noyack Bay, near the Elizabeth Morton National Wildlife Preserve. For an access drive, he proposed installing a long wooden causeway. The whole idea seemed too much to just about everybody but Galesi and his planners, and after two years of town-hall consideration was abandoned. Suffolk County later acquired the stretch as parkland. In a Hamptons where over-the-top only became more common in the years since, this ambitious man’s legacy instead would be confined to an enigmatic obit. –Sept. 10, 2026
Francesco Galesi, 95, Dies August 14 | Obituaries | 27east.com
Tim W. Ferguson 