As the U.S. grows and diversifies, we can expect a wider range of diversions, including sports. Now cricket has caught on, at least in parts of the country, as this New York Times article discusses. (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/15/us/texas-cricket.html) Soccer, of course, has become established here after many decades of American absence from the “beautiful game.” And women’s leagues are now a bigger part of the picture. Not only is there spectating, in person and remotely, at these commercial events, but also endless chatter in the various sports media about them. (Plus, increasingly, legalized wagering on them.) The question becomes: Even accounting for a gradually larger potential audience, where does the time and attention span come from, to offer this support? At some point, there must be zero sum, and then some paid athletics must contract and fold. To date, there’ve been dips in attendance and a handful of failed franchises, but overall, just growth–including in the semi-pro “college” ranks. (Okay, ESPN and the regional sports networks seem to have maxed out.) If Americans have found more time for following athletes, they may be devoting less of it to family, friends, community and work. When does that account run dry?
Ken Fisher Got Another Call Right
As the bullish U.S. stock market of 2023–surprising to most of us–continues through mid-July, it’s appropriate to express kudos (so far!) to those who went against the grain and have made investors money. One is a prominent and controversial figure in financial circles, Ken Fisher. I knew Ken from his many years as a columnist at Forbes Magazine, where he was pushed out by a new guard at the end of 2016. He got further ostracized after some crude and sexist jokes in public a few years back, but has kept a following. And of course, the firm he founded and led for many years, Fisher Investments, remains a ubiquitous marketer in the money-management sector. Ken patterns his market commentaries on both economic data and political history, and has generally been bullish for the past generation. That, of course, has been the right call, as his was at the outset of 2023 in this video below (loaded at YouTube 1/20/23: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bv5wiOOtbdk). He has stayed “contrarian” since while many feared a Fed-borne recession. You can’t argue with the results to date.
An Excise Tax That Fortifies Long-Island Wine
Some milestone anniversaries on the East End of Long Island have been easy to overlook but not so its start as a wine region. Fifty years ago, as the “Hamptons” south fork of the island was consumed with some of its earliest development battles, the north fork saw the planting of its first commercial vineyard by Louisa and Alex Hargrave, at Cutchogue. The region’s now $115 million-plus winery industry is making much of its 50th celebration.
Carving what was ultimately an 84 acre estate out of what had been a potato field, the Hargraves were the forerunners of what would become the East End’s agricultural mainstay as they dug up the spuds that were fast relinquishing that role. Today wine grapes and bottlings are not only a product but also an attraction, mostly on the north fork. To be sure, that has brought tourism traffic and real-estate speculation to what had survived as a rustic retreat for years after the south fork came into the commercial crosshairs.
The south fork’s wine production is comparatively a teardrop, if a pricey one. Two main wineries, the Wolffer Estate (vineyards since 1988, a destination tasting room since 1997) and Channing Daughters (plantings from 1982, first retail vintage 2001), draw plaudits and visitors, capitalizing greatly on the booming market for rosé wines. But the area’s famous loam soil hasn’t always been right for viticulture. An early stab along the turnpike to Sag Harbor, Bridgehampton Winery, was a washout as a vineyard and was nearly transformed into a golf course before town officials instead opened a nature center. On the Montauk Highway in Water Mill, the flashy Le Reve winery flamed out by 1990, to be replaced by the Duck Walk sister brand of the north fork’s Pindar winemakers.
A few big names can still get in the Long Island vintner game though the escalation of real-estate prices narrows the window for further bootstrap stories. But there is one twist to that cork: In 1999, the year the pioneering Hargraves sold their winery, the Community Preservation Fund (CPF) was instituted in Long Island’s wine country. It employs a tax on luxury property sales to buy land or development rights to foreclose development. Agricultural use, including related facilities, can still be made of the acquired lands. There’s a legal tightrope for a vintner to navigate all the way to on-site retail operations, but the CPF—which has raised $2 billion already–lessens the chances that today’s grape rows will give way to mansions the way so many potato fields did.
The tax won’t subsidize ongoing operations; still, a onetime check can provide a cushion. As the primary sponsor of the CPF, state legislator Fred Thiele, emailed me, “Of course, once a farmer is compensated for the sale of his/her development rights, there is no limitation on the use of the proceeds in connection with their agricultural business.”
I have a hunch the East End will get to this crop’s 75th anniversary festivities.
A Dry-Witted History of Dismally Easy Money
We’re never long or far from a reminder that interest rates have a powerful effect on the human economy. Nearly $700 billion has flowed into money-market mutual funds this year because they offer a decent yield–4+%–when many bank savings accounts pay next to nothing. In this inflationary period, that’s a financial no-brainer, as well as a reminder that Merrill Lynch pioneered the “Cash Management Account” at a similar stretch in 1977. Then, too, a safe harbor was attractive amid stormy prospects for businesses and households.
In between the two inflationary eras, the Federal Reserve Board dramatically altered conditions, first by hiking interest rates to restore price stability, and then–particularly since the global financial crisis of 2007-8–by making money nearly “free,” with real interest rates close to zero. The economic distortions have benefitted some and caused pain to others, but the constant truth is that distortions they have been. Rather, a natural rate of interest that reflects the value of time preferences (both for borrowers and lenders) is what all economies need to stay on an even keel.
That is what commentator Edward Chancellor is showing in his latest book, The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest. Because Chancellor takes a contrary view to most in the contemporary intelligentsia, being sympathetic to the “Austrian school” of economics, he doesn’t get the widespread plaudits his wry history and analysis might otherwise. But the Manhattan Institute in New York is honoring him at its annual Hayek Lecture and Prize this week.
Whether in Mesopotamia or modern societies, the lessons from monetary manipulations are many. They include not just pernicious inflation, but speculation, perpetuation of failed investments, and confusion about the proper level and use of debt. Although emergency infusions of liquidity can calm panics, sustained “easing” such as the U.S. and other major economies have just tried for 15 years brings grief in return. At least we got one good book out of it.
June 5, 2023
Will Half a Billion Buy a B.A. in the Hamptons?
Word this week of a $500 million gift to Stony Brook University (a State University of New York branch on Long Island) can’t help but have East End residents wondering: Will this bring sustained academic life to town? For all its riches, the Hamptons does not have higher ed. The main Stony Brook campus is the closest thing, an hour’s drive away. There’s a tangled history to why, going back at least to the late 1950s and efforts by civic boosters to lure Adelphi College (as it was then) to open a satellite on an old estate in the Sebonac area of Southampton. That led to nothing, so by 1963, the town burghers had instead brought Long Island University, on Nassau County’s so-called Gold Coast, to grounds in Shinnecock Hills. That branch–Southampton College–opened to much fanfare, only to face repeated financial troubles over four decades. Finally it closed in 2005, the remains soon to be swallowed up by Stony Brook U, initially with high hopes (again) but ultimately with only marine studies and graduate arts offerings. Budget woes were blamed. The campus, though still operational, had frayed to the point that influential local legislator Fred Thiele (one of Southampton College’s most notable alums) in February branded Stony Brook a “slumlord.” But now, with half a billion dollars swelling its endowment, who knows where old ambitions will lead?
Summer Swells, Circa Hamptons 1957
The conceit of a series of posts here about the Hamptons is that, after a first rush of summer “colonies” that culminated in the Roaring Twenties, the East End of Long Island went through sleepy decades until a new wave of city money began to stir development again in the late 1960s. That is generally true but, of course, the wealthy set never really slept through the intervening generation, and the area’s attractions continued to draw them, at least seasonally. For a glimpse at one juncture, in 1957, please find this archival gem from the once regal Sports Illustrated. A correspondent, “Footloose” Horace Sutton, spent plenty of Henry Luce’s expense kitty touring the South Fork’s haunts, dropping names liberally in a swell social-register summary. He traipses “through the fields of rye” to reach Henry Ford II’s manse at Flying Point Beach in Southampton, which sat alone on 100 acres until the gated Fordune subdivision was developed in the 1990s. The local tennis and golf spots served, I guess, as the pretext for such a travel article appearing in a sportsman’s magazine. The photographer made it all the way to Montauk but unfortunately the art isn’t included here. Still, the writer’s quaint touches supply a good sepia tone.
Why Only a Few Fly to the Hamptons
If in 2023 we are commemorating notable anniversaries in the preservation of Long Island’s East End—the 40th of the Peconic Land Trust and the 30th of Southampton Town’s wetlands building restrictions—it may be time to look farther back, 75 years, to another pivotal sequence of events. These speak to why there is no commercial jetport accommodating the Hamptons.
First a necessary nod: There is MacArthur Airport in Ronkonkoma, 35 miles west of the Shinnecock Canal demarcation line, where various commercial carriers have tried to establish a foothold. And there is the East Hampton Airport in Wainscott, controversial enough even with only private planes and ticketed helicopter service. But there is no airliner access convenient enough to funnel material numbers to the area, just as there are no vehicle bridges to bring in multitudes from across Long Island Sound. Both could have happened, however, and life would be much different “out East” today if they had.
An airport almost did get set in motion, and that tale is still reverberating. Back in its farming and fishing heyday, Suffolk County had airfields, but the bigger early ones were given over to the third leg of the local mid-20th century economy year-around, the military. The Pentagon was supported by runways in Westhampton, at an Air Force base, and northwestward in Calverton, at the Grumman Aircraft test site.
By 1948, the peace dividend from World War II was being cashed and the Pentagon’s perceived need for the Westhampton strip had ended. It was turned over, gratis, to the Suffolk County supervisors (as the government was then structured) for the good of public aviation. Having no immediate travel market, the supes leased a big chunk of the 1,500 acres to an intermediary of the National Aircraft Maintenance Corp. Namco, as it was called, apparently serviced one major client, the new Arabian American Oil Co, aka Aramco, which was ramping up its post-war fields in Saudi Arabia. It needed engineers and roustabouts from the U.S., and brought them to Westhampton’s barracks for preparation and then put them on DC-4s for the Gulf.
Like so many Saudi deals, this one soon got rocky. By 1950 Suffolk County and Namco were at loggerheads over how the air-base property was being maintained for its larger aviation purposes. A legal battle ensued that would last through the 1950s, but by early 1951 other foreign affairs intervened. The U.S. was in battle again, in Korea, and the peace dividend was a casualty of the incipient Cold War. Under a “national emergency” declaration, the Air Force took back Westhampton as a training center and “forward interception base.”
As the Korean conflict dragged on, the military occupation grew less welcome in nearby villages. As early as May 1952, Southampton school officials were complaining about low-flying aircraft. But this was still otherwise a sleepy period in the Hamptons—so much so that a missile-launch area was quietly maintained two miles west of the base–and the Air Force stuck around through the 1960s even as Vietnam made its presence seem still less benign. By December 1969, moreover, local land had gotten more precious and was prime for the subdividing. In their last major action as Suffolk County’s governing body, the supervisors (soon to be replaced by a legislature) moved to reacquire the Air Force base as part of a planned countywide airport network.
Let’s zoom out here to appreciate the aerial “approach.” Various state and regional officials in the 1960s had big plans for the East End, and transport was part of them. Part of the action was the aerospace industry that developed mid-island but extended east, most notably to a huge spread reaching to the Peconic River in Calverton/Wading River. The Navy (Top Gun division) had acquired the land in the Korean War period and then turned over operations to major Long Island contractor Grumman. This would last for decades, until the post-Vietnam contraction began to shrink the defense industry’s Long Island footprint. (Also, the water-facing fifth of the property became, after the 1970s, the Calverton National Cemetery.)
But Calverton-Grumman was much in the sights of growth-minded planners for the Hamptons and the North Fork. In 1965, Gov. Nelson Rockefeller proposed the site for a fourth major New York metro area airport. This, along with other ideas Rocky had for the East End, aroused opposition and was tabled–but not before Suffolk County officials had also begun talking up some kind of jetport serving Long Island’s twin forks.
That was the context for the 1969 Suffolk move back into Westhampton. By this point, County Executive H. Lee Dennison, who had earlier surfaced the jetport ambitions, was distancing himself from anything but general aviation (private planes) there or at Calverton. Still, he wanted to coordinate such arrangements as part of his master-planning push for the long-untutored East End. Dennison’s general-aviation airport aims included the quiet strip–still active–near Lake Montauk.
The preservationist movement that sprang up from the 1970s on took most of the remaining fuel out of air-travel expansionism for the Hamptons, but the business imperative for long-runway access hadn’t gone away. As Grumman’s presence in Calverton neared an end in 1991, Gov. Mario Cuomo joined in a push by commercial boosters for a “limited” cargo jetport there. East End politicians by this point wanted nothing to do with that. So the Grumman property was turned over to the town of Riverhead, which includes the Calverton hamlet and has wrestled for 25 years with what to make of it. More on that below.
Meanwhile, in Westhampton, the military departure was again short lived: By the end of 1970, an Air National Guard unit was posted there and a version of it (now used for rescue operations) has remained since, with Suffolk County as co-operator for private aircraft. Named in 1991 for Francis Gabreski, a wartime fighter pilot later employed by Grumman and briefly head of the Long Island Rail Road, the facility remains a favorite landing pad for official visits, including U.S. presidents coming to Hamptons political fund-raisers. Other arrivals, though, are few. Surrounding woods came to be protected by a campaign to save the area’s Pine Barrens even as equally long efforts commenced to develop a nearby business park including a (flightless) Amazon distribution center.
As that buildout project finally is reaching fruition, Calverton remains a conundrum. The old test-flight base became a cleanup project for the state and the Navy while Riverhead officials have stumbled through years of false starts on jobs-producing redevelopment. At one point a 35-story artificial ski mountain was envisioned, and various casino and auto-racing ideas have been floated. But the latest iteration of the 2,900-acre Enterprise Park known as EPCAL is technology-oriented. Seems neighbors don’t like the congestion they associate with the plans, however, and are especially leery of—you guessed it–prospective use as a cargo jetport for the tenants.
The result of these 75 years of grounded ambitions is that only the most wealthy and well-connected can fly “private” to within minutes of the East End experience, and that goods to satisfy the resident affluence must come as well by a sliver of roads and rail. Enough people and freight still make the often-slow journey, but not nearly in the turnover volumes that would have happened had the Hamptons aviation story tuned out differently.
A Korean-American Crossing
Nostalgia is a powerful draw in photography–witness the many Facebook and other social-media groups centered on vintage pictures of this or that place. So it is with a compact new exhibit at the Korea Society on Madison Avenue in New York. “Koreatown LA/NY,” running through Aug. 17, features work by Emanuel Hahn (from midtown Los Angeles) and Janice Chung (from Queens) on the industrious beginnings of those two notable Korean immigrant communities.
In this case, however, the shots are taken more recently, but with an eye toward those pre-Millennial days when the newcomers were gaining a footing–often operating businesses–in their adopted land. The photographers find remnants in neighborhoods where the initial Korean rush largely has moved on, after having signal effect in reviving tired districts. This phenomenon is framed here as one of “gentrification” (in the case of Flushing, N.Y., greatly at the hands of ethnic Chinese investment).
There’s another way of looking at these warmly captured artifacts: As another chapter in one of the astounding stories of America’s last half century, the achievements of its “Asian” minorities. For New Yorkers of 40 years ago, the “Korean delis” or greengrocers that extended far from the early enclaves in the city were the introduction to a new family enterprise. Language and licensing barriers had ruled out many other means of livelihood from the old country. But beneath the surface, the merchants’ children were in school, learning their way to different futures in the metropolis. Several attended the May 4 opening. That they have moved on from what we see in this exhibit–metaphorically and literally–is a sweet sadness.
The Korea Society Gallery hours are M-F 10 a.m-4:30 p.m., by appointment only.
Population Hotspots of Texas
In the 20th anniversary issue of the Real Deal magazine this spring, the remarkable surge of Texas exurbs is described in an article (https://therealdeal.com/magazine/national-april-2023/sultans-of-sprawl/) focusing on local developers as well as major national builders such as Lennar. It’s headlined, “Sultans of Sprawl,” but don’t expect snark even in this entertaining real-estate publication. An even-handed account of what is drawing the many relocations to Texas from around the country is readable enough. The focus here is on the new communities surrounding the state capital, Austin, and lining I-35 to Dallas and San Antonio. Three of them are among the five fastest-growing places in the U.S. Austin itself has flowered as a tech center, but its politics skew left, and many of those moving to its periphery prefer orderly environments along with their lower land costs. These “pocket communities,” as developer Ari Rastegar notes, are self-contained economies that bring a “futuristic suburbanism” that typical city enthusiasts don’t embrace (try a main street called Ronald Reagan Blvd.) but homebuyers evidently do. “You’re going to watch us take this blueprint all across the United States,” he promises. Surely, this new life isn’t for everyone, and the story notes the obvious externality of highway traffic congestion from growth, but anyone blind to what’s selling in the Sunbelt is not understanding a part of our changing America.
The Lineup Ritual for Growth-Belters
David Brooks’ latest column in the New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/13/opinion/sun-belt-migration.html) reflects on the internal migrations of Americans that I recently addressed at this forum. He, too, sees political connotations but also quality-of-life considerations. On the latter, it’s worth noting that the plusses and minuses don’t fall cleanly on one side or the other. Let me note one phenomenon I’ve observed in high-growth Sun Belt areas: Drivers lining up for dropoffs or pickups of school children, in queues that could snake a few blocks during the morning or afternoon rushes. I’m told it’s not unusual for the combined daily waits to exceed an hour. I guess this is smartphone-time for all in the vehicle, or podcast periods, so perhaps it’s not so dreadful for them as I imagine this waste to be. Like other forms of road congestion, it’s a function of how most suburbs develop, with distances that are covered by autos rather than tight street grids that invite walking. Also, the roads often invite speeds (when traffic moves) that make it dangerous for kids to cycle along them. This comes on top of a (necessary?) trend toward chaperoning into the early teen years, whereas I recall childhood being free-range back then. From this anecdotal evidence, I conclude that young parents following the nation’s population wave have, wittingly or otherwise, bought into a lifestyle that will add another extended chauffeur duty to their daily existence of play dates, sports and hobby practices, extracurricular classes, medical appointments and whatnot. (Of course, if they have license-age nannies, it becomes a different story.) This is a long way from “it takes a village” notions of upbringing, so maybe there is a political flavor to the embrace of the school-lot lineups, after all.
Tim W. Ferguson 