It’s no surprise to see in new figures from the St. Louis Federal Reserve that ethnic Asian households in America, on balance, do better academically and have higher incomes. Their achievement phenomenon is one of the great U.S. stories of the last two generations. But this summer’s study breaks down such success into at least two notable components. The first is the parental influence. Typically parent backgrounds, particularly the holding of college degrees, are a great predictor of offspring attainments. This is dramatically less so in Asian families, which means that more parents without higher-ed are nevertheless able to imbue study-and-advance ideas into their children. Socioeconomic circumstance needn’t dictate outcome. A second takeaway is that once in college, Asian-Americans rely much less on student loans (less than 17% of post-grad households carry this debt) than their countrymen. (The comparable figure in black households is nearly 62%.) However accomplished–more seed corn? more side hustles?–this avoidance in turn provides more running room for building wealth after graduation. We read much about lessened mobility in our supposedly class-stratified country. The Asian experience continues to belie this, and the data help to explain why.
Kmart Goes the Way of the Old Hamptons
Word has finally come of a planned closure of the Kmart store at the Bridgehampton (N.Y.) Commons center. When this occurs next month, Kmart’s remaining presence in the continental U.S. will be nearly gone, but the other story here is what becomes of the giant commercial space in increasingly tony Bridgehampton. Word is it will become a Target, which makes retail sense, and offers a bone to the original motivation for the half century-old shopping complex, whose history I recounted here. The key tenant was originally a W.T. Grant; following its bankruptcy, Caldor took the least and for many locals, the whole place–the only true shopping mall in the Hamptons proper–became the “Caldor center.” By the time Kmart in turn succeeded to the site in the late 1990s, the area was already in full transition. The middle-class, year-round population that was to be serviced by a low-priced retailer, a key promise of the original developers, was thinning out. Bridgehampton and surrounding hamlets are dominated by wealthier “second-home” residents. A working class primarily commutes in from the west. If a Target can manage to bridge that day traffic with an “affordable chic” appeal–while at the same time not becoming a congestion node that will trigger already-stirring protests–it will help to complete the evolution of the modern Hamptons.
Kmart in Bridgehampton closing, leaving just 1 reduced-size store in U.S. – Newsday
50 Years On, Is Caro’s Word on Robert Moses To Be the Last?
Robert Caro has gone on to greater national fame with his (still in the works) biographies of Lyndon Johnson. But in the New York area, particularly, he is renowned for his work, The Power Broker, about local planning czar Robert Moses.
It is the 50th anniversary of the publication of that Pulitzer Prize-winning book, which searingly has defined Moses in the generations since his 1981 death. Countless journalistic and urbanist iterations–and even songs and shows including a popular play starring Ralph Fiennes–have drawn on Caro’s themes. What’s been lacking in the popular or even academic culture is much revisionism on those story lines. Might this milestone year be time for more?
In the first place, it’s generally forgotten (except where the book is still sold) that the subtitle of the work was, “Robert Moses and the Fall of New York.” Granted, such wording is often the work of publishers trying to seize on a marketing moment, and 1974 was the onset of Gotham’s great financial siege, so this may not have been Caro’s choice. But the wording obviously proved untrue in any larger sense: Within a decade or so, New York City was on its way to new heights. (This was less true of New York State, where Moses also held sway, but the subtitle reference is clearly to the city. In any case, the state’s issues had little to do with Moses.)
Caro’s primary indictment of Moses is that he arrogantly used his unelected powers to rearrange metro New York’s transportation network to favor the automobile at the expense of non-motorists and the general quality of life. He did so by trying and in most cases succeeding in putting traffic around the city–or sometimes through its neighborhoods. The result was that the car either traduced those areas or sucked the life out of them by drawing the middle class in particular to the surrounding suburbs. In the process, Caro maintains, Moses often created more congestion. Many pages of the Power Broker are spent on the hours that solitary drivers were stuck in highway backups going to and from the core city (usually Manhattan).
All the while, Caro details, Moses dismissed opportunities to add to the metro area’s mass-transit capacity. A particular beef was his alleged contempt for including train lines in the middle of his signature late-stage highway, the Long Island Expressway. It’s true that Moses didn’t see much of a future for transit, although he (a resident of Babylon, on the island) could be excused for interpreting a downward trajectory for such lines, including the aging Long Island Rail Road. (Caro has also dined on the observation that Moses himself never learned to drive, having been chauffeured through his reign.)
Whether increased expenditure on transit early on, using the expansive bonding powers of Moses’ Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, would have staved off the “fall of New York” (in the 1960s and ’70s) is unknown. Of course, everyone would like signals, switches and other equipment not to have deteriorated and diminished commuter service. But as it turned out, the parkways that Moses laid out have proved more availing of the residence and work patterns of the modern economy than the hub-and-spoke configuration of most transit lines. The arterials that Moses created–heading into many parts of New York City–are vital to the big truck deliveries of today’s commerce. And, for better or worse, the Long Island Expressway brought Suffolk County at the island’s eastern end into the city’s ambit. People forget that until the 1970s, much of Suffolk looked to Connecticut for “city” connections, including broadcasts.
Highways also play a part in a second Caro indictment of Moses: that he was a racist. It is easy to believe, on the basis of recorded actions and words, that he was a white elitist of his time and place, tending to regard the plight of poorer blacks and Puerto Ricans as a function of their environments and upbringings. That partly drove his efforts at “slum clearance” in favor of higher-rise housing projects in greener surroundings (or for civic projects like Lincoln Center). His record there was decidedly mixed. It is also said, especially today, that his most controversial road project, the Cross Bronx Expressway, was the gutting of a functional if unfavored neighborhood. That is probably true, and the fumes from its traffic pervade the mostly people of color who live there today. But in the late 1950s when the Cross Bronx was undertaken, the residents were largely Jewish or ethnic Irish and Italian.
What has really limned Moses in this regard, however, is Caro’s narrative about the street overpasses on the Long Island parkways. As he told the story, Moses had them built low enough to prevent buses from using the thoroughfares and thereby reaching the beaches and other island retreats he had built for “the public.” To Caro, and all the histories that have followed his, this was a way to keep poor people (without cars) away. Moses and most lieutenants denied this, offering cost and design explanations, but the charge has stuck, long into an era when few are without the means to motor onto the parkways. Again, the Moses of his time was not especially mindful of everyday aspirations of those from the “slums.” But if his designs were overtly racist, what then–for instance–of the ornate, low-slung overpasses on the Merritt Parkway in Connecticut, built in the same era and without Moses’ involvement? Were these also venally drawn?
An extended discussion of this bridges matter appeared in one of the “fact check” analyses by Glenn Kessler in the Washington Post in 2021. It was precipitated by remarks of U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg that drew on the Caro formulation. Kessler’s verdict was muddled but he surfaced an interesting scholarly debate that rarely makes it into Moses recapitulations.
Recreation is one more dark or at least gray element in Caro’s depiction of Moses. The “good Moses” of the early decades, battling Tammany Hall and fighting for popular access to the grounds of Nassau County land barons, is in the book’s pages, if less remembered now. (In an interview for CBS Reports in 1961, Moses was asked if he approved of socialism. Yes, he said, “but not the Communist kind.”) He was always a proponent of public playgrounds, courts and fields, even on the pastoral grounds of Central Park. Caro faults him for skimping on black and brown areas. But Power Broker doesn’t mention sizable East River Park*, which Moses brought to the teeming Lower East Side in 1939. (The author had to cut about a third from his original manuscript, so perhaps it was there.)
On Long Island today, Moses is demonized as a big road builder whose damage to the natural environment was only limited by his failure to realize some big schemes. The signature memory–again, much thanks to Caro–is of a coastal highway that would have traversed Fire Island. The idea seems hare-brained, but was in keeping with Moses’ goal of enhancing public (via private-vehicle) access to beachfront. On the western end of Fire Island he rehabbed an isolated beach space into what became Moses State Park-Long Island (this rare naming for him lately being contested) with a causeway connection to usher in millions of visitors. An avowed pragmatist, he indeed may have had a developer’s eye for raw nature, but in the process grabbed choice parcels before private interests could seize the day. In the Hamptons, Moses gets scant lingering credit for achieving the area’s first major open-space preservations, at Hither Hills and Montauk Point state parks, by 1924 when he was the parks chief there, his first major post.
Caro told that part of the story, yes, but as a set up for Moses’ tragic culmination as a rapacious bigot. Understandably, as he undertook his opus, Caro was seeking to correct years of deference or even adulation accorded “Master Builder” Moses by most news media until the 1960s. (A 1959 NBC program treated him as an oracle.)** That would have served a valuable purposes had Caro’s 1,166-page take been subject to the kind of reconsiderations normally given historical figures. But for 50 years it has stuck as the last word on a man about whom yet much more could be said. –Aug. 29, 2024
* In a cruel irony, the park was named in 2001 for former Mayor John V. Lindsay, whom Moses detested.
** A notable exception to this chorus was the cultural critic Lewis Mumford. Unusually, Moses would cite him by name in his rejoinders to detractors who “never built anything.”
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Why the Hamptons Has No Bike Path Like This
Go to many affluent communities in North America and you notice some kind of safe cycling path. Not on the South Fork of Long Island.
You do see, outside of winter, some intrepid bicyclists—occasionally I am one. A few streets have designated bike lanes, where vehicles shouldn’t be blocking, but rarely do these extend for long stretches.* Except for the periodic weekend bike rallies where there’s official escort and safety in numbers, it’s a hazardous activity. Especially is this true on the east-west corridors, where traffic of all kinds is barreling along tight roads to avoid congestion on the main highway 27.
Why this dearth? There’s the older explanation, and the more recent (30-plus years) one.
The long historical context is that the South Fork (aka “Hamptons”) became a destination without having a core vacation hub or even wanting to be a resort. It was a collection of old fishing and farming districts separated by woodlands even as wealthy people adopted it as a seasonal or weekend retreat. Everybody’s desire was to keep the beautiful place the way it was “before.” Result: no new infrastructure that would accommodate a larger and active population, including bike paths (and sidewalks). Way back when, kids in the area’s towns could bike ride along sleepy roads with little care–even to school! Then, one day in the gilding of the Hamptons, nobody could anymore.
Sure, some streets near the ocean are safe enough for summer pedaling. (Ocean Road in Bridgehampton has a bike lane extending all the way to the 27 Hwy.) Even fronting the coast, however, there’ve been struggles in the modern era. In Amagansett, garden-landscape shop owner Charlie Whitmore recalls his father and mother, both longtime local fixtures, pressing for bike lanes along the popular Further Lane-Indian Wells Road-Bluff Road coastal stretch in the 1960s and early 1970s. The East Hampton town highway department ultimately improved the pavement, and a bit of sidewalk exists, but there’s still no secure path there, or anywhere else on the East End.
This, while New York State is actually a standout in this vein. The Empire State Trail, using disused rail lines and canal sidings, is off-road for most of its 750 miles. A strikingly good asphalt section runs from Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx past the New Croton Reservoir in Westchester County and then well into the Hudson Valley. (A stretch near Yorktown Heights is shown above.)
It’s not that riding routes don’t exist on Long Island. Newsday has spotlighted two dozen such paths, not including the newest and nearest to the East End, the North Shore Rail Trail from Mount Sinai to Wading River in Brookhaven town. The Trust for Public Land, pursuant to a $3.8 million federal infrastructure grant last year, is fashioning plans for a mostly-protected bike route through Suffolk County to Montauk—an attempt, along with earlier funding for Nassau County, to bring Long Island up to the New York standard. The East End’s section will come last, although a “conceptual” map for the South Fork appeared at the group’s website in April.
If that effort proceeds, it will have to surmount obstacles that met previous pushes, and here we have the recent (30-year) story.
In the early 1990s, well into the rush of Manhattan money to the South Fork, an initial bid for a cycling trail came from naturalist Mike Bottini, then affiliated with what is now the Group for the East End. Armed with potential federal highway money, Bottini laid out a route that hugged the Long Island Rail Road line for 12 miles from Southampton to Amagansett. After a slow build, it got support from both the Southampton and East Hampton town boards, and a four-mile stretch in the middle, heading east from where the SoFo nature center now sits on Bridgehampton-Sag Harbor Turnpike, went through Southampton official review in 1999. But by summer 2000, it was drawing flak from some adjoining property owners and others who thought money should go for road repair.
Nonetheless, a Southampton Press editorial in August 2000 said “the question, it seems, is not whether the path will be constructed, but when.”
Bottini persisted, stressing the route’s appeal in connecting various civic activity spots. The thinking was that the paved trail would have utility not just for committed cyclists but for a wider population wanting to transit between such sites without venturing onto hectic Montauk Highway. He met resistance in the village of East Hampton, out of expressed safety fears. Objections also came from an environmental flank: Friends of the Long Pond Greenbelt up the northern spine of Bridgehampton didn’t want pavement or cyclists crossing its preserved territory. (As it happens, the long-abandoned LIRR line to Sag Harbor runs through the Greenbelt.)
Bottini, by then representing a cycling group, was still pitching the idea in the Press in 2009. But a window had closed. Eventually that four-mile stretch amounted to a series of on-street bike lanes, not much different from what exists in other parts of the South Fork. The rest of the 12 miles were largely forgotten.
On-street lanes or “routes” (which have less demarcation) were the focus of an official Southampton town advisory committee report issued in 2007. The town board, still sympathetic to cycling alternatives, accepted the findings, which notably called for expensive widening of key routes. “Crucial,” the panel wrote, were Noyac Road along the northern tier and the primary “back road” vehicle alternative to Montauk Highway (27), which features Head of Pond and Scuttlehole Roads. These two are the inescapable east-west routes—narrow and busy with trucks and cars–for any cyclist wanting to go from town hamlet to hamlet east of the Shinnecock Canal while avoiding the 27.
Accepting a report, however, is not the same as implementing one. By 2008, a global financial crisis had put a (temporary) dent in the Hamptons ardor and political winds would shift. Although minor route enhancements with signage were made, the costly property acquisitions needed for road widening were not.
The issue came to the fore in 2011 when Tom Neely, then Southampton town’s traffic-safety chief**, led a “Complete Streets” drive to address cyclist and pedestrian concerns. The Scuttlehole Road stretch was central, but a new town highway superintendent, Alex Gregor, had been elected and he was not sympathetic. At a board meeting Gregor offered a figure approaching a million dollars for the cost of the project, and the idea sank.
Another repeated target has been the Noyac area bordering on Sag Harbor and the Long Beach bayfront. A formal cost estimate for bike lanes from Gregor’s staff in 2014 came to nearly $800,000, mostly for road widening. The plan came to naught. But the general area has stayed in “traffic calming” focus, and a decade later the town, using new state money, now intends a major sidewalks project there. Ostensibly it’s for children and other pedestrians, but cycling on sidewalks is legal in Southampton town (and most of East Hampton) so there is, well, room for maneuver.
Are the South Fork winds shifting back in favor of accommodating cyclists, either recreational or commuting? It may be notable that Suffolk County is increasingly courting tourism. Southampton town will soon end up with a short offroad stretch for biking as part of a Hampton Bays hamlet route linking Good Ground Park with Red Creek Park. East Hampton is eyeing parking fees as a way to fund bicycle lanes. For now, however, separation from vehicular traffic is one of many obstacles facing day-to-day cyclists, as a Quixotic East Hamptonite recently found.
The cost of any land acquisitions has burgeoned as homes filled many of the wood and farm lots over the decades, and each potential neighbor is a potential objector. The LIRR’s right of way is jealously guarded by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, even if safe sharing was possible. (Low-cost hacks such as “Toronto barriers” do make it possible to separate bikes from ordinary road traffic.) The LIPA power line that cuts across miles of open moraine on the South Fork is inviting, but also has easement issues, as well as terrain that would require heavy grading in stretches—adding to cost and opposition. And, recalling Mike Bottini’s case decades ago, LIPA’s line is a long way from activity nodes.
Thus the TPL Greenway planners will have big hurdles to clear once their effort moves east. So far, so good—the Southampton town board agreed this month to participate. But seed money is only a start; the choices get harder. And to add to the mix, bikes and other two-wheel transit has become an acute token of cultural controversy across the U.S.—even in San Francisco as well as New York City.
In the meantime, cyclists on the South Fork will have to pick their spots…and times. Sunday mornings seem to be best, for what it’s worth. –Aug. 23, 2024
* An exception is the Flanders Road (State Hwy 24) lanes from Hampton Bays, as seen in the photo above. But with no barriers to the 55 mph (and higher) traffic, it is not inviting to most cyclists.
**Neely retired from the post but remains active as a transportation adviser to the town (and serves on its planning board). He ran for highway superintendent in 2021 and was narrowly defeated.
Hampton Jitney’s Tale Is LIRR’s Shame
The East Hampton Star this week adds to the 50-year commemorations of seminal events on the East End of Long Island in the early 1970s, when its transition to being a weekend and warm-weather retreat for ordinary (but affluent) New Yorkers kicked in. This short article’s focus is the Hampton Jitney, the preferred connection for those Gothamites without personal transport. A longer business history could surely be written on the Jitney–a classic case of entrepreneurs discovering a need that others hadn’t identified. (In actuality, its service to Manhattan didn’t begin until 1976.) But there’s also the flip side of this success: the failure of the Long Island Rail Road to anticipate and capture this traffic. The LIRR, owned by the state of New York since the mid-1960s, has a rich history that includes connections to the South Fork (Hamptons) since the 1880s. Over the last 50-plus years, however, it has failed to offer easy, frequent and comfortable rides from convenient locations such that even a value-conscious adult passenger would choose its service over the Jitney and similar bus shuttles. Although a train ought to have speed advantages during periods of road congestion, the LIRR rarely achieves that edge. Despite a key right-of-way that it has maintained through decades of dramatic real-estate appreciation along the route, the railroad has played only a cameo role in the remarkable story of the contemporary Hamptons, leaving room for a once-lowly form of conveyance, the jitney, to assume modern appeal.
War Has a Way of Inspiring Migration
The world migrant population continues to rise–clocked at 281 million in what is still the last (2020) U.N. measure. There’s no reason to think it hasn’t grown since. The causes are well known: escape from tyranny, fear of persecution, hunger (literal, or for a better life), and physical exposure or danger. Often the last of these is brought on by wars that other people choose–or feel honor-bound–to fight. This is what a weekend article in the Wall Street Journal shows has brought tens of thousands of Russians and Ukrainians to unlikely destinations: Brazil and Argentina. (Of course, many more have fled the home-front’s killing and military drafts by seeking more proximate refuges.) Entry and work opportunities, as well as distance from reminders of what awaits any return, help to explain their trek across ocean and hemisphere. But this odd tale speaks to what has always been a lesser-told aspect of men’s battles: their casualties have included displacement. In modern times, America’s wars haven’t reached its continental shores, so the flight has been mostly from conscription. The Vietnam War produced perhaps 40,000 “dodgers” to handy Canada alone. Significant previous wars saw less-recognized refugees, going back to the Revolution (Loyalists) and the Civil War (on both sides). Patriotic fervor as in the two world wars might keep the numbers low for awhile, and favored sorts often find ways to insulate themselves in conflict, but before long mass slaughter drives people to uproot themselves. The silver lining, which may be true in Brazil and Argentina, is that those who shrink from war can grow to enrich both themselves and the lands that receive them.
When Anti-Mansionization Isn’t Just Meddling
The Wall Street Journal is catching up with the movement in the Hamptons and elsewhere to contain the maximum size of homes. This week’s article focuses on the aesthetic and probably sociological objections to the mansions (the biggest ones aren’t really “McMansions” because they are built to a scale that is not…er, scalable). In response, others quoted by the Journal speak to the property rights and general freedom of people to live as they wish. This of course is a valid claim in the USA, but what the story doesn’t get into are the externalities of these homes, which can make them other people’s business. On the East End of Long Island, the underground water table and the power infrastructure are such factors, but the most acute is traffic. The multitude of trade and other service workers that huge residences require, during and after construction, causes 14-hour backups on roads and residential bypass traffic that affects nearly everyone. “Philistines at the Hedgerow” is an old Hamptons tale, but the manifestations of enormous wealth in otherwise restrained settings is becoming a national conversation.
https://www.wsj.com/real-estate/luxury-homes/towns-rebelling-against-megamansions-7f35c9f7
Review of ‘When the Clock Broke’ by Ganz
John Ganz is a trending young writer on the left with a history bent, and his new book from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, “When the Clock Broke,” is largely a political recapitulation of 1992 in the U.S. His angle is that the populist resentments of today’s MAGA America were present in that late-recessionary year, in which the country, having emerged triumphant in the Cold War, turned in on itself. (For his own fuller explanation, you can pay for his Substack feed.)
That’s an interesting proposition, placing the origins of the current distemper earlier than most others do. (Some trace them all the way to Andrew Jackson in 1828, but that’s a different discussion.) Obviously the Ross Perot phenomenon of 1992 and the related crack-up of the Reagan Republican Party under George H.W. Bush is a major flag for Ganz’s argument, and he mines the period for other useful omens (Pat Buchanan, Rush Limbaugh, Howard Stern).
Unfortunately, the author has a subsidiary aim and that is to find strands of fascist white supremacy in the unfolding drama back then (and naturally, now). So he references David Duke scores of times. The brief Louisiana legislative career of the former Klan wizard was ending as 1992 began, but Ganz sees his enduring influence in many places. My own memory of Duke is that he was a fluky, flaky presence in American politics, a footnote now like so many others of his kind. I had to check whether he was still alive.
That’s not Ganz’s only rediscovery. Murray Rothbard was an economist and cult favorite of libertarians for most of his career, until he veered into Southern populist swamps through the Ron Paul network. He merits a solid six pages–including a raring speech that inspires the book’s title–and a few other mentions. Just as obscure by general circulation was the paleoconservative writer Sam Francis, whose Manichean and racialist views are recited dozens of times, into the book’s final paragraphs. A forerunner of Steve Bannon? I don’t want to minimize the influence of the small, intellectual press but I don’t think Donald Trump would have ever read Francis, even if he had read at all.
I’d like to see more discussion of the angry populism of the time that was bipartisan. One target of this ire was NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, which Ganz notes briefly. He is good enough to record the fact that most congressional Democrats, and not Republicans, opposed the treaty when finally passed in 1993. I recall that year witnessing a union rally against the trade deal–held at the Port of Los Angeles by my own newly elected representative, Jane Harman. She would go on to rank as a notable globalist, but was not above a bit of pandering to Perotism then.
One other objection, a frequent and self-interested one of mine when it comes to pop histories of the modern American right. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial pages are cited once by Ganz, an apparently early (1989) gibe at Rudy Giuliani as a mayoral candidate.* The Journal was, during the period at issue, the largest-subscription newspaper in the U.S., and its opinion pages (which employed me then) were a bible for millions of conservatives. Arguably, its sentiments might have helped shape those times, in that camp at least? It is likely Ganz’s view that the “Wall Street” Republicanism often ascribed to the Journal’s editorials has been surmounted and supplanted by the movement he is writing about. That’s a fair position. But to have the Washington Times, by contrast, referenced on 16 pages is a bit skewed in this retrospective. Even if that narrowly targeted broadsheet did at the time employ the estimable Sam Francis!
Those reservations notwithstanding, I am glad to see a gifted next-gen writer draw on evidence from the analog era. Historical cycles do stretch, and then of course we are doomed to repeat them. I wonder what fruit today’s time capsules will bear. –July 15, 2024
*The actual citation is not included in the notes, but Giuliani at the time was still fresh off his prosecutorial frog-marching of investment bankers and conviction of Michael Milken, none of which endeared him to Journal editorialists.
Taking Hamptons Traffic Seriously
Here’s a “letter to the editor” from me, published this week at the Southampton Press site. It concerns the worsening traffic situation on the South Fork of Long Island, not only the backups on the primary east-west arteries, but the onslaught of diverted traffic onto residential roads (including–no surprise–mine). I make reference to some renderings that a full-time local resident with an architectural background, Jay Fitzpatrick, presented last month to a Southampton Town official committee set up to address the problem. I have met a few times with Jay and Barbara Fair, an involved citizen of the North Sea hamlet. Above is one of his preliminary works, showing what could be a bypass highway atop the existing Long Island Rail Road line. Such a bypass is a decades-old idea on the South Fork, which stirred earlier controversy and died. My letter argues that this outcome was unfortunate. Further background, including my own change of heart on this subject, is to be found in this 2022 post of mine. The idea remains a longshot today, but should be viewed as representative of what a meaningful response to the traffic mess could entail. (I should note that Jay makes the additional point that a bypass route would be of critical importance in the emergency of a mass evacuation to the west.) –July 12, 2024
Arf! Arf! Is a Hamptons Sound
Among the many 50-year milestones being observed in “the Hamptons” over the last year or two–reflective of the fundamental changes that were taking place there in the early 1970s–is a four-legged one. This golden anniversary year for the Animal Rescue Fund of the Hamptons (ARF), now a celebrated (and sometimes celebrity) charity, will culminate in its annual Bow Wow Meow Ball in August. This item from one of the free publications on Long Island’s East End gets into a bit of the history, but the fundamental context is that, by 1974, the area’s shift from an agricultural-fishing community with a smattering of summer beach wealth, to a year-around retreat for New York’s professional class, was in motion. The sentimentalizing of pet animals that (mercifully, in many eyes) accompanies a switch from outdoor farm to indoor house companions is a classic reflection of such transitions. ARF is not the only adoption shelter in the pet-happy area, but it’s become a big dog: in 2022 it had gross receipts of almost $5 million as it readied its latest expansion, a large indoor training hall at its headquarters in woods near East Hampton Airport. Range Rovers frequent the parking lot, even if more modest local volunteers and staff keep the place going. When the summer gala is past, the place gets more down to earth, but for the furry set of the East End, there will be no going back to the barn.
Tim W. Ferguson 