Progress toward a major distribution center for retailer Trader Joe’s may increase the chances of one or more of the budget-gourmet stores finally reaching the East End of Long Island, NY. To date, most parts of the “Hamptons” are 40 or more miles from the nearest outlet. Other economical shopping choices are also in short supply, aggravating affordability issues on both the south and north forks of the island, where service workers find it challenging to live. This, in turn, contributes to traffic nightmares as commuters use likewise limited highways to access East End work. So today’s update from Newsday on approvals and construction of nearly a million square feet of facilities on 66 acres in the Suffolk County village of Islandia will raise hopes that more stores can be profitably accommodated. The site of the project is also a throwback to the late 1900s on Long Island, when it housed headquarters of Computer Associates, a tech giant of the day and major regional employer. The company’s CEO, Charles Wang, was in the early 2000s the majority owner of the Islanders franchise in the National Hockey League.
Growth controls on luxury housing may be coming to the town of Southampton, N.Y., after earlier moves in East Hampton township and Southold town on the North Fork of Long Island. Southampton councilman Michael Iasilli, a young Democrat with a progressive bent, is taking a slightly different tack in legislation he’s adapting for formal introduction. Whereas the neighboring towns have focused on building size–a direct reaction to the mansionizing of the modern Hamptons and surrounding areas–Iasilli’s plans target “land disturbance.” This gets at the same aim, because most mechanized clearings stem from either a new big residence on raw land or a smaller home on a sizable lot being displaced by one sized for today’s luxury tastes. Iasilli knows that the uprooting of mature trees or the bulldozing of wooded areas, often carried out with little or no warning to neighbors, is a particular trigger of public anger among those (frequently voting residents) who think their peace and beauty is being surrendered to cater to a super-wealthy seasonal crowd. So the councilman’s draft would require permits–subject to review–before 500 square feet is “disturbed” on lots bigger than half an acre. (He says he’s “amenable” to giving ground to an 800-sf threshold.) Some commercial projects would also be covered. If passed by the majority-Democrat council after a public hearing process Iasilli hopes to start next month, this stands to affect much if not most new development in the town. Not for nothing is the fact that traffic–another triggering issue in Southampton–is greatly increased by the “trades” vehicles involved in construction and then in the tending of the landscaped estates that result from it. Iasilli last year spearheaded an official committee to weigh steps toward containing that problem. –Jan 29, 2026
Before the smart phone disrupted American classrooms (a disruption that is now being contained) the earlier great change in recent decades was what is broadly called “special ed.” Programs designed to address a range of learning disabilities have shifted resources across U.S. schools, for better or otherwise. The subject is an extremely sensitive one for parents of affected children, for naturally, everybody wants their kid to have the best shot. And, these efforts have surely spared any number of youngsters from academic isolation and failure. But the chips haven’t always fallen where a good policymaker might wish. I was reminded of this by a paragraph buried in a recent New Yorker article about freeing early-graders from the trap of dyslexia that might otherwise doom them to miserable lives. (For the usual reasons, a disproportionate number are from poor households.) The passage is reproduced below. Consider the unintended consequences of legislation followed by a sweeping court order. –1/24/26
As the village of Sag Harbor, N.Y., sought fitfully in the 1970s to renew itself, two young men from west of the Shinnecock Canal–a symbolic divide in the Hamptons real-estate game, which is mostly to the east–came to play notable roles. One was Ted Conklin, who purchased the American Hotel on Main Street—a hostelry and meeting place that, like the village itself, had seen livelier days. The other was Patrick Malloy, a sailing enthusiast who was to transform marinas and dockside real estate.
Both aging men today are said to be not up for much travel to New York, preferring instead their Florida locales. (Conklin was honored with a streamed caroling tribute on a chilly Dec. 15 from the front of his landmark establishment.) But the Sag Harbor of today, a sought-after if self-consciously class-free community of a few thousand fulltime residents, would not have attained liftoff in more recent decades if not for what they got going a half century ago.
Sag Harbor has been a place in love with its history, including whaling and manufacturing periods, that distinguishes it from the rest of the Hamptons. Architectural touches continue to be celebrated, including its landmark film theater, and literati and the arts have been attracted for decades to a place that John Steinbeck made his later home and where a black summer set sustained its own neighborhood.
The iconic movie house, restored after a fire.Ted Conklin’s place, dressed up.
The factory heyday had come and gone by the 1950s. The Long Island Rail Road tracks to the west had been ripped out by then, the greatly immigrant workforce, for whose children Mrs. Russell Sage had helped build a library, were finding other livelihoods. But a tight community lived on.
Despite frequently expressed nostalgia for grittier and more insular days of the 1960s into the mid-‘70s, however, reports from that period show discontent with a bar-laden, sluggish village that needed rebirth. One result was a decision—soon widely regretted—to locate a sewage plant near the main waterfront in 1975, replacing old gas tanks, in the hopes it could enable new industry. Also that year the village restarted its Whalers Festival, discontinued a few years earlier as “honky-tonk” but today part of what is a big effort to lure visitors. Some businesspeople planted a sign on Route 27—the coastal road through the beach spots that were by then taking off again as seasonal retreats—flagging the Sag Harbor turn to those unaware.
This corner of the Hamptons didn’t have the legacy of a wealthy summer crowd that had populated the oceanfront villages. “There wasn’t much old money,” recalls Bethany Deyermond, a lifelong Sag Harbor resident whose husband, Ed, was mayor in the early 2000s and a longtime village trustee. Instead “the Harbor” had traditional heartland cogs—the American Legion, a core Catholic church, the fire department. A dairy farm operated into the 1970s, while some of the old factory families remained.
It was about that time that Conklin, from a New York City brass-making family that had summered in Westhampton, was taking ownership of the hotel and Malloy, a Wall Streeter cum developer with a place in Hampton Bays, was sailing into a decrepit boatyard a few blocks away looking for repairs. Both would spend decades building complementary pillars of a new Sag Harbor, anchored to a resort economy that in turn attracted high-end residences. Conklin’s upgraded hospitality mirrored the marinas that Malloy built for big pleasure craft, including at Long Wharf where Main Street ends. There, he notably restored a small Grumman aerospace plant into a multi-use site that came to house the local cultural hub, the Bay Street Theater. The wharf itself had sunk into disuse–by the late 1980s the village partnered with Suffolk County to restore it, ultimately regaining full control in 2012.
An aerospace plant and adjacent site became core to Patrick Malloy’s plans.Malloy’s redevelopment would house a cultural mainstay.The watch-case factory would become condos…after decades of wrangling.
The changes, particularly the appeal to a more cosmopolitan crowd, were welcomed by some Harborites.“Smart people found this place cute, cozy and not pretentious,” recalls Nada Barry, who in her 90s still owns a village gift shop with her daughter. Barry with her late husband were pioneers of post-war Sag Harbor, preceding Conklin and Malloy. Their onetime chef at the former Baron’s Cove, a gathering spot from the old days, was Jack Tagliasacchi, who created the Il Capuccino restaurant, a mainstay for locals. (He also repairs to Florida for much of the year.)
Not all went down well for the new guys. Some old-timers were put off when the moneyed set ultimately came to favor the American’s dining in high season. Yachtsman Malloy, meanwhile, met with increasing resistance to later projects and litigated against the village government. He was involved for 22 years in an effort to rehab a watch-case factory in the village core, last operated by Bulova, into pricey condominiums. The project was completed by 2015 after he had sold his interest. (Malloy’s developments on the South Fork weren’t limited to Sag Harbor. In one of his last, he and a partner were allowed to turn pine barrens in rustic East Quogue into a subdivision that was marketed as Hamptons affordable at the century’s end. A golf course at the site was quashed.)
To be sure, Conklin and Malloy were not alone in seeing Sag Harbor through a transformative period. Tagliasacchi’s place, run by his daughter, endures. John Ward, for 24 years a village trustee and ultimately mayor, also bridged the period from industry to tourism, with infrastructure projects to underlay development. A blue-collar sort, “Johnny” anticipated the change he witnessed up to his death at 90 in 2012. In the meanwhile, little things meant a lot, such as the opening of the Provisions market-cafe for a Baby Boomer cohort taking up root.
Such undertakings by themselves did not solve Sag Harbor’s economic puzzle. It continued to lag its storied neighbors in buzz through the Millennial boom. But that lack of status would seed its future. A quality housing stock going back decades had not kept up with Hamptons property prices. When a series of outside shocks—the 9/11 attacks on New York City, the financial crisis of 2008 and the Covid pandemic of 2020—jarred a new generation of homebuyers to come looking for East End quarters, many were attracted to what Sag Harbor had been and was becoming.
A new era was dawning when a natural-foods store opened in 1987.But ‘unHamptons’ sentiments endure, just like Otter Pond at the village gateway.
Today the village is socioeconomically indistinct from the rest of the Hamptons. It has a bit more year-around character but plenty of precious boutiques. The Church (restored, Methodist from 1835) is a notable art center. A gourmet cheese shop will outfit your picnic for a cool hundred bucks, easily. Parking for Main St. in the summers will cost you a little, too. And once-pastoral North Haven, across a bridge to the north, has plenty of lavish estates of the sort that Pat Malloy took up there in his prime.
As 2026 dawns, Sag Harbor’s story is both old and new. Fractious village politics have quieted a bit but late this year another election cycle will begin. Proposed redevelopment near the wharf area—in a commercial area that hasn’t yet reflected the boom—continues to be contentious. Preservationists are also focused on the loss of old trees as builders march through the residential neighborhoods. Each venerable business (or newer one) that closes on or near Main Street is mourned by locals as a victim of high rents, and a sign that higher tabs are coming for the wealthy set that keeps moving in.
But then the Sag Harbor Historical Museum has just raised funds to construct an archives wing that will safeguard the effects of its early artist patron whose daughter was another civic leader in the period discussed here. And if there’s a parade or music fest or notable school function, the salts of the earth appear, trying still to be unHampton-like. Or at least the post-1970s version of it. –Jan. 16, 2026
Addendum: Ted Conklin died at age 77 on Feb. 1, 2026.
Land prices have ballooned on the North Fork of Long Island, particularly since the Covid pandemic, adding to fears of “Hamptonization.” And these are felt in Greenport Village, long established as a fishing and boating burgh and in recent years as a foodie haven amid the fork’s surrounding farm and vineyard culture. (It’s also the ferry landing for trips to Shelter Island and on to the ritzy South Fork.) Greenport’s politics increasingly have revolved around anti-development stances to maintain the small-town feel. At the same time, however, Greenport is pleading poverty of a sort in seeking to gain a share of the funds Suffolk township (in which it sits) gets from the Community Preservation Fund–the massive kitty derived from a tax on residential transactions on Long Island’s East End. The CPF is mostly used to preserve open spaces but also has a water-quality mandate, and Greenport wants a chunk of the Southold share in order to rehabilitate septic and other facilities in old shore neighborhoods (while it draws on a separate fund for housing itself). An interesting twist is that, in making this demand, Greenport can cite its qualification as a New York State “Disadvantaged Community” as defined by the Climate Justice Working Group in 2023. Being (relatively) poor amid the splendor of eastern Long Island gets you a 10% meal ticket at the preservation buffet. Any morsel in a storm! –Jan. 3, 2026
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.
This weekend’s New York Times real-estate section has a nicely turned encapsulation of changes in the village of Sag Harbor, N.Y., over the last four decades. It’s told through the ownership of one of the formerly modest homes from the “UnHamptons” village’s industrial past–houses that now sell or rent for a fortune in Sag Harbor’s precious present. Except for the extraordinary attention paid to historic preservation there, the village is no longer as distinct from the rest of the Hamptons. But the story of its transformation actually goes back further than the 1987 start of the NY Times’ tale. From at least the 1970s, Sag Harbor was trying to reawaken what had once been a bustling core economy. It never wanted to be like the Hamptons hamlets that took off around it, but in the end it couldn’t escape that. More on this saga in a future post!
Amid the national “blue wave” at the polls Tuesday, engaged Southampton Town Democrats scored another triumph, most notably in sweeping five trustee seats, traditionally a Republican redoubt in much of New York’s Long Island.
Town trustees manage the various (and many) waterfronts, including both salt and fresh-water ponds (aka lakes). They are distinct from the town councils that handle inland affairs. As wealth-bred development continues to press up against these shorelines, the political quiet that has long surrounded trustee positions may grow louder. A hint of this comes from a recent Newsday article on controversy over private docks extending into precarious public waters in Southold town on the island’s North Fork. (Democrats also won all the trustee spots there on Nov.4 and the Southold town board subsequently okayed new restrictions as described in this East End Beacon article.)
Typically, campaigners for trustee posts mouth platitudes about protecting both the waters and public access to them. (By this latter pledge they sometimes mean the latitude to drive trucks onto sandy beaches, a cherished right among some locals.) Media outlets, to the degree they cover trustee races, simply summarize the candidates’ backgrounds and expressed sentiments. What’s more, they rarely cover the regular trustee meetings.
At the same time, environmental groups that might have special interest in trustee affairs have also taken an official pass. The Group for the East End, the most notable such outfit in that stretch of Long Island, does not question or score the trustee hopefuls. Even the New York League of Conservation Voters, which doesn’t shy away from endorsements for even local offices (virtually always Democrats), is silent about trustees at its site–and didn’t respond to an email query.
In this information vacuum, a party organization can play an outsized role, and Southampton Democrats did so with mass road signage and other voter outreach. They succeeded in ousting three Republicans who are community fixtures, and re-electing two of their own incumbents, giving them complete board control.
This was thus a watershed election (so to speak), much like the one in East Hampton Town in 2015, when Democrats finally won a majority on the trustees board. They have never given it up, and in a town they increasingly dominate, the party again on Tuesday won all the trustee posts.
As Southampton Town gradually loses its own competitive Republican base, the trustees may take on a more activist bent. Whereas in the past they were content to issue permits for the fishing, boating and hunting activity of the town freeholders, while maintaining the shorelines, the Southold situation may herald wider concerns over pools, extended structures and wetlands vegetation. These could intersect with the ambitions of expensive waterfront property owners.
Additionally, the new trustee board might be more aggressive in securing public (non-truck) access to those waters. For example, the Southampton trustees for two decades have husbanded about $200,000 intended for use on 54 acres along Peconic Bay-adjacent Cold Spring Pond. The land and funds were obtained when the Sebonack golf club was developed nearby, but no trail or other formal opening-up of the picturesque site has followed.
Perhaps, as in Southold, more attention on the trustees will proceed from the political upheaval that has reached the shores of Southampton.
The “college” football season is in high gear, with ever bigger dollars flowing through what is actually a business. As a result–and also to raise their profile in attracting more students and fans–ever more schools are joining the bigtime (expensive) competition. Paradoxically, this is occurring even as participation rates in high-school football have declined noticeably over the past two decades.
First, the explosive growth: Boosters at the National Football Foundation point to a roughly 40% growth in the number of schools playing NCAA-level football since 1978. Although attendance at games has been flat over the last 20 years, the revenue from cable, broadcast and other video has risen enormously. It’s common to find 20 or more national game “feeds” on a Saturday, and an increasing selection on other nights. Recently, the number of “power” conferences has consolidated to four, but most remaining leagues enjoy greater exposure as well. Adding to the alumni loyalty factor as a draw for even non-marquee games is the mass legalization of sports betting, which engenders interest of a sort in any contest.
The result is an escalating spectacle aspect to the performances, culminating in the College Football Playoff among the top programs. Meantime, many players are now paid handsomely through the Name-Image-Likeness provisions to which the schools agreed under legal duress. And the coaches and other staff come at an increasing cost as well–into the tens of millions of dollars, even as they are (more often) fired for insufficient wins.
It’s as if America is a football-mad society, forgetting even the professional wing of the sport. That may be true from a spectating standpoint, but in fact fewer young males want to play the game. According to the National Federation of State High School Associations, the total of boys in 11-player football (meaning full-contact tackle) dropped by 106,000 between 2008 and 2018–nearly 10%. It has then risen by 23,500 by 2024, the last datum available. Overall school enrollment has been basically steady over the period.
We can’t know why the falloff, but during this time the risks of CTE brain injuries from concussions received wide publicity (and increasing liability litigation). Equipment advances have been made to counter this and other types of injuries, along with rule changes, but at the same time player techniques and physiques have heightened the potential for harm. More boys and their parents have opted to take a pass.
Which boys? Here the numbers get fuzzier, but most reporting on the topic points to more affluent white families and to the Pacific Coast and Northeast regions of the country. These dropoffs have been mitigated by greater Hispanic participation, although that may simply reflect population gains in that sector. (At the major-college level, there’s a perceptible rise in international imports on some rosters, nearly tripling between 2012 and 2023 for NCAA Division 1, although in all they’re accounting for only 1%.)
So, you’d be excused if you saw a parallel here to the “two Americas” when it comes to waging military might: the cheerleaders for saber rattling and the young who actually do the fighting. Sure, in this case the battling has a potential payoff–commercialization of college sports has made football lucrative all the way down the line. But there’s apparently a limit to who will volunteer to wear the uniform.
Today’s Newsday catches up with East Hampton township’s reductions in just how large houses there can be built. This issue has gathered on the East End of Long Island, N.Y., in recent years as “mansionization” is blamed for changing the characters of neighborhoods–both visually and demographically–and for quickening the rise in land and thus home prices. East Hampton–which includes hamlets such as Montauk, Amagansett and Springs–has long been tougher on developers than other nearby towns. So, its adoption of a modified tightening ordinance was not out of character, though builders and some property owners are complaining that the new strictures will limit not just big “spec” construction for high-end seasonal use (the primary target) but the enlargement of smaller homes with growing families. This debate should soon spread to neighboring Southampton town, which has been seen as more lax in its development controls. The prospect of a revised general plan there–tied to traffic that stems from trade vehicles serving expensive properties–is vaguely at issue in a town board election on Nov. 4.
Tim W. Ferguson 