I was in Montauk yesterday, and, as always, was impressed by what a unique and lovely place it is. I wanted to write about that today — y’know, something upbeat and charming. Unfortunately, after reading yet another ill-informed opinion piece about the John Jermain Memorial Library’s expansion plans in last Thursday’s Sag Harbor Express, I just can’t do charming. It’s not that Lorraine Dusky’s viewpoint was unreasonable — in fact, I agree with her main point, about it being our responsibility to protect the character of our community — it’s just that when talking about the library, she reiterates a few old arguments that I thought were long ago laid to rest.
Posts in ‘2007’
What Sag Harbor Can Learn From Brooklyn’s Atlantic Yards
Ordinarily, you wouldn’t expect to find a lot of similarities between Sag Harbor and Brooklyn. But while reading an Op-Ed piece in Saturday’s New York Times by Jennifer Egan (author of the novel The Keep
In Praise of Listening
I once worked for a company that wasted a lot of time in meetings. It wasn’t that the meetings themselves were a bad idea, it was just that the meetings never seemed to achieve the intended results. Ultimately, the company hired a consultant, who, after observing one of our meetings for about fifteen minutes, told us why our meetings failed. …
Local Boy Makes Good (With Your Help)
Usually when I ask my readers (all three of you) to do something, it’s for the benefit of the Sag Hampton community in one way or another, whether it’s a reminder to attend a meeting, or an entreaty to write to our public officials about the issue du jour. But this post…this is shamless family [...]
That Didn’t Take Long
No sooner had I posted the story about the proposed ski-resort in Riverhead, than the whole thing started to unravel. Anthony of the Ozone blog drew my attention to this Newsday article, (thanks Anthony) in which the paper quotes Riverhead Town Supervisor Phil Cardinale as saying, “I would expect him to be chairman, because that’s how he signs his letters,” …
Unbelievable
File this under “Development/Crazy.” My jaw is on the floor. Could this be for real? The blog Ozone quotes from the Long Island Traveler-Watchman (part of the Independent chain of newspapers) that a 500 ft. tall ski resort is planned for Riverhead, and that Riverhead’s supervisor Phil Cardinale is already salivating over the prospect. The Traveler-Watchman quotes Cardinale as saying, …
The Ghost in the House
Our house sits on a half-acre lot, in a neighborhood of half-acre lots located just south of the Village line. It’s a modest neighborhood by Sag Hampton standards. It’s not in the historic district, in fact the neighborhood is so not historic that it didn’t even exist before 1987, give or take a year. Before then it was just woods. …
What We (May) Have Here Is a Failure to Communicate
A few days ago, a Sag Hampton resident I’ve known for years said to me, “The Long Island Railroad should be running shuttle trains in the Hamptons. There should be a train at least every half hour.” I started to tell him about Five Towns Rural Transit (5TRT) and the East End Transportation Council (EETC), and the $400,000 grant from the State that those organizations got to study that very situation, but he interrupted me. “Study? What a waste of money. Why doesn’t the railroad do it? It’d be a great thing, and they’d get a lot more people using the trains out here that way.” …
98.6 miles
Google Maps says it’s 98.6 miles from the library in the middle of Sag Harbor to the Empire State Building, which I think of as being the metaphorical middle of New York City. Interesting…take the temperature of any healthy person in Sag Harbor, and you come up with the distance we live from Manhattan. I’m sure there’s a correlation there. Maybe the key word is “healthy,” in that our health is somehow tied to living almost 100 miles from one of, if not the, greatest city in the world.
