The ‘exclusive' Hamptons is a glorified cattle mart with mansions

Irish Times

09-08-2025

Jackson Pollock was not the first artist to flee the mayhem of the city to the far end of the Hamptons and rugged Montauk – Winslow Homer and his crowd were there with easel and paint in the late 1800s. But the cottage near Amagansett provoked an antic, celebrated burst of creativity that catapulted Pollock into the celebrity glare until he crashed his car while drunk on a curve on Springs Fireplace Road and was killed in August 1956.
The modest house Pollock shared with his wife and fellow artist, Lee Krasner, now exists as an extraordinary, breathing museum, as if the couple stepped and might return any time. When they moved there the place lacked basic amenities, which was part of the point. The home John Steinbeck shared with his third wife, Elaine, who lived until 2003, is now a writer's centre in Sag Harbour. Fifty or sixty years ago the narrow strip of land jutting into the Atlantic was teeming with artists and writers. And that became part of the attraction for the new-money set who can buy anything and everything except for creative imagination and so arrive to be close to it.
The plebeian way to reach Montauk Long Island Rail Road is a $20 fare from Penn Station followed by a 2½-hour crawl through the storied, distinctive Hampton townships into which New York's old society and nouveau riche have been pouring their money for well over a century. In high season travelling by road is not much faster, and so the sight and sound of sea planes and helicopters has become more common.
John Steinbeck and his third wife, Elaine, at their Sag Harbor cottage in 1962. Photograph: Bettmann Archive
'Exclusive' is the word most commonly attributed to the Hamptons even though the briefest visit here makes it apparent that it's a glorified cattle mart with mansions and painstakingly composed wine lists in high season. There are too many humans.
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Montauk earned its nickname, The End, through its geographical extremity, right at the eastern tip of Long Island, where the land mass narrows to narrow single forks, as though giving two fingers to Ireland. And there is a familiarity about Montauk's landscape. On Wednesday the sky was overcast and salty-aired and had that about-to-rain summer melancholy of Gaeltacht summer evenings.
The arriving crowd in Montauk was mainly young and sceneish and almost, well, exclusively white. The sturdy, tasteful blue sign announcing the town itself declares that it was settled in 1686, and in racial profile it hasn't changed much since.
The villages are run by separate councils, which try to impose regulations and prohibitions to preserve the integrity of an area that is changing at pace. Census reports showed that the populations of the prestige East Hampton and Southampton locations jumped by 35 per cent and 22 per cent respectively in little over a decade. The summer population in these villages can multiply by five, from the winter lows of 30,000, when the windows are shuttered and a skeleton staff maintains the society homes through the bleak months. Those unable to afford to buy needn't fret; July rental listings in Southampton ranged from $75,000 to $125,000.
And the hordes keep coming. For years Montauk, although never lacking for wealth, preserved its surf and clam-shack carefreeness by virtue of its geography. It was just that bit too far over from Manhattan. But the fintech titans need to conquer if not new worlds then at least new dinner reservations and panoramic vistas.
Last August, Mark Vandavelde and Sujeet Indap of the Financial Times wrote a sad and wonderful piece under the headline: 'A billionaire bought a lobster shack in the Hamptons. Then the trouble began.' It contains a perfect paragraph describing the social and geographical sections of the entire preposterous summer charade.
'Only 40 miles separate the East End of Long Island from the Shinnecock Canal, where the Hamptons begin, but the drive on NY State-Route 27 can easily take two hours. Making it means passing through an elaborate social order etched on to this congested spit of sand. The road begins just after Westhampton, a suburb of million dollar houses that is also known as Wronghampton, because it is on the cheaper side of the canal. It passes through Southampton, were magnificent coastal estates built by New York's earliest English settlers have long since been carved up to cater to the Wall Street nouveau riche (Rowan paid $27 million for a beachfront 'cottage' here, on Gin Lane). Next comes Bridgehampton, with Long Island's only Kmart. Then showy East Hampton, home to Jerry Seinfeld and Steven Spielberg. After Amagansett, where Sarah Jessica Parker spends her summer, lies what is sometimes called the anti-Hampton, a hamlet of rickety wooden houses that wants no part of this gilded hierarchy. This is Montauk.'
Ostensibly, it was an account of how Marc Rowan, the billionaire private equity titan, bought the beloved Duryea's fish shack, a Montauk fixture since the 1920s which dished up seafood and coleslaw on Styrostyrofoames. It was reimagined as a destination spot: the piece reports that Jay-Z and Beyoncé sometimes moor their yacht at the refurbished dock.
It could also be read as a metaphor for how wealth, it all its guises, eyes and covets authenticity and gobbles it up. All well until the realisation comes, too late, that there is nothing left.