The East End By Way Of England

By Lona Rubenstein

Property listed by Corcoran Real Estate. Images courtesy of Google Images

Southampton - Some other things that brokers do? Worthy things? Well, Beau Hulse of Beau Hulse Realty Group is performing a Benefit concert with his band Beau Hulse & L.A. Woman (Tribute Band Jim Morrison and The Doors) for LI Music Hall Of Fame & Scholarship Fund for Children. Opening act is Milago (Santana Tribute Band), Special Host Joe Rock from WBAB with his band Joe Rock All Star Band on Saturday, July 18 at 8 p.m., at Casey's on Montauk Highway in Westhampton. Give Beau a call if you want to help this cause at 631-287-7707 or 516-429-9675, or Pat at 516-429-7783.

Next week, by the way, we hope to have a market look from East End real estate attorneys' point of view. Many question what brokers may or may not be saying, but attorneys? Well they have the closings, the deals in contract, so to my mind, what they say has some weight.

Also, some of you are sending stuff, interesting stuff, to me by post without indicating from whom it comes. It is our practice to protect identity in cases when asked to do so (always ask before giving the information) but it is not our practice no matter how interesting to write stuff that comes anonymously.

So, now that you're here and we do hope you will stay and enjoy your summer respite, you may be interested in knowing some more about where you are, other than hard to get here, and often equally hard to get around. Of course it wasn't always that way.

Local folks, the first settlers, never built on the oceanfront. Prudent people from England, they knew it was dangerous. That is why when visitors came a few hundred years and wanted to buy and build on the glorious piece of real estate called the South Fork of Long Island, there was so much oceanfront property available. But now instead of dangerous it was called prime.

Property listed by Prudential Real Estate

(On the North Fork the same was true for building on the rocky Sound front. On both forks they built their homes close to the road, understanding the difficulties of snow and ice and being able to access their homes as well).

Recently in the Cape in Chatham, MA oceanfront cottages were falling into the ocean. But that phenomenon isn't new for example, for those who had second vacation homes in Westhampton Dunes on the Ocean and Inlet, nor for the lovely house in Wainscott on the Ocean that needed to be moved back for fear it was teetering on the brink.

Historically, what is interesting is that these are older cottages in Chatham are referred to as camps. Yep, camps! Now we all know the founders out east here came down from Massachusetts, after taking off on that long voyage from Kent, England to that New England point. So is it any surprise that East Hampton once had its summer "camps" like those in Chatham? Not the kind we send our kids to, before you ask.

Years ago an old friend and long-time local broker Sue Steele, whose father was once town police chief, told me and showed me the summer camps - unheated - along the Harbor - Three Mile, of course.

Property courtesy of Marla Sanders, The Corcoran Group

"Every summer," Sue said, as she showed me while wrapping her arms around herself to depict how tight the quarters were for those 10 weeks from July 4th weekend through Labor Day - (yes that was the summer season then) "families, extended and immediate, all squeezed themselves into their summer camps, while they rented their home to pay for mortgages and winter expenses."

Well those local camps sold, they did not fall into the water. I bet they were all torn down, replaced, became prime for their sunset views as the dangerous oceanfront had, and maybe the new owners sent their kids to summer camp in East Hampton.

By the way, in East Hampton through Bridgehampton, which is really a topography that makes the South Fork so unique, adjacent to that dangerous oceanfront and the protective dunes were long, fertile stretches of farm land planted in Bridgehampton loam agriculturally graded among the best planting soil in the world. Farms right next to the saltwater ocean, which did not intrude on the soil.

How did all this happen? The melting of the ice age, when glaciers traveling south picked up delicious assortments of sediment and dropped it off right here in the "Hamptons."

The moral of all this - except still a buyers' market with great values and buys out there waiting to be picked up - is that at one time, some lind of global warming did the East End of Long Isand a future favor, creating a haven for the people from Kent via New England, and, today a very strange business called East End Real Estate.

• Lona Rubenstein is an accomplished author residing in East Hampton. Her new book, "Getting Back in the Game: Finding the Fountain of Youth in Cyberspace" can be found at local booksellers and online at www.gettingbackinthegame.com. For more real estate news and views contact Lona at lonafirst@aol.com.

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