Issue #37, December 8, 2006

Watchcase Rising

An Old Factory, Abandoned 40 Years, Is About to Come Alive

By Dan Rattiner

The last big abandoned building in the Hamptons, the Fahys’ Watchcase Factory, may soon be restored to its former glory as a condominium apartment building. If this happens, and if the big steeple on top of the Whaler’s Church high on the hill in downtown Sag Harbor gets rebuilt as planned, this will complete the virtually full restoration of downtown Sag Harbor.

The former Fahys’ Watchcase Factory is that grim, filthy, four-story brick building with the broken windows that looms over downtown Sag Harbor from just off Main Street on Hampton Road. It is a classic example of 19th Century factory architecture that was so prevalent throughout the Northeast and Midwest in that era, built when there were noon whistles and men in hard hats carrying lunch pails to work long hours on an assembly line here in America. Most of these factories have long since been abandoned, though some have gone through restorations for different uses. The Fahys’ Watchcase Factory is the only such building ever built in the Hamptons, although a smaller factory building was built in the woods of Water Mill for Western Union a hundred years ago. Ten years ago, that brick building, after forty years abandoned, was converted and restored into the world headquarters of artist-sculptor-designer Robert Wilson.

The Fahy factory got built as a result of the activities of a desperate Sag Harbor Chamber of Commerce effort in the 1870s. Prior to that time, the town had been a bustling home port for the thriving American whaling industry. More than a hundred whaling ships called Sag Harbor home during the early 1800s. By 1849, the biggest commercial year in Sag Harbor history, Sag Harbor had become one of the four major whaling ports in America, along with Nantucket and New Bedford in Massachusetts and Lahaina, Hawaii. As a result, Long Wharf was a bustling center of commerce for whale oil and many other products, such as foodstuffs, furniture and clothing from exotic places. Ships returning home to the wharf of Sag Harbor with great regularity brought with them coopers, captains, harpooners, sailors, cooks and first mates, and another thousand people from all over the world — Hawaiians from the Sandwich Islands, natives from Fiji and Borneo, blacks from South Africa, Arawaks from the Canaries, Arabs from Persia, Jews from the Middle East, Eskimos from the Arctic and people from many other places, all of whom had signed on to work on these ships in order to make the journey to America. Sag Harbor was surely among the most cosmopolitan towns in America from 1800 to 1850. And the main street featured a dozen bars, half a dozen restaurants, barber shops, clothing stores, warehouses, flop houses, whore houses, big mansions for the whaling boat captains, a customs house through which immigrants could pass, many churches and liquor stores and the second oldest synagogue in America.

At one end of Main Street, providing power for the town, stood a wonder of the age — a kerosene-powered generator that created steam power for the town. The use of kerosene, as opposed to whale oil, made everyone uneasy. Coupled with the fact that there were fewer and fewer whales to be harpooned, the future was not on the side of whaling towns such as Sag Harbor.

In late 1849, the news that gold had been discovered in San Francisco sent an electric shock through Sag Harbor. Almost immediately, practically every ship in town, a total of 134 of them, pulled anchor and headed off to that place. There was GOLD to be had. Here, the economy dropped like a stone. Those that remained were in a virtual ghost town.

And so, in 1870 a group of concerned merchants of Sag Harbor took it upon themselves to approach three brothers in New Jersey who owned a watchcase factory that was being closed. Sag Harbor had an empty wharf and warehouses, docks, and a labor force with a whole lot of nothing to do. The Fahys agreed to relocate to Sag Harbor and so built their factory.

For the next 80 years, the Fahys’ Watchcase Company, along with other smaller enterprises were the economic backbone of Sag Harbor. But in 1950, as the factory owners in the Northeast began to move south to places such as North Carolina where the labor was cheaper, it became apparent that Sag Harbor could suffer an economic collapse to rival that of 1850. The watchcase factory was, by that time, a division of the Bulova Watch Company. But when the Grumman factory in Sag Harbor, and several smaller factories moved away, Bulova sadly closed their factory too. The 1960s and 1970s were among the most difficult of times for that town.

The new economy arrived in the 1970s in the form of tourism. With its narrow and winding residential streets, Sag Harbor, even with most of its homes abandoned, was one of the cutest little waterfront towns anywhere. You could buy a small cottage built in the 19th century for almost nothing. This was a perfect situation for newly rich New Yorkers who wanted to find inexpensive yet charming summer residences to restore and fix up. Today, Sag Harbor is like a fairyland of village chic, small-town character and in the summer about twenty 150-foot yachts in berths right where whaling boats had been before. It has been an amazing transformation.

Attempts were made in the 1980s to create an apartment building out of the watchcase factory, and in the 1990s to create a shopping mall and an arts complex. But all failed because the hundred years of making watchcases had caused large amounts of pollution to accumulate underneath the factory. The government declared the place a Superfund Site. It would all have to be removed before anything could be done.

Over a five-year period, from 1998 to 2003, various cleanup methods were instigated, including one where fresh water was continually flushed under the building to clean out all the pollutants created by the earlier tenants. The flushing system worked, but would take two years to complete its work. And so a narrow channel was dug from the factory building out into a woods, so the water, with the pollutants strained out, could flow down to one of the large ponds that sits between Sag Harbor and Bridgehampton.

This, it turned out, created a problem for a species of migratory frogs that every spring would hop through the woods to reproduce themselves in an adjacent pond to the one the water flowed into. Environmentalists pointed out that the migration had to cross the channel. And they feared the frogs would not make it, instead getting drowned at worst or at best swept into the wrong pond. They’d miss the mating. This was a major environmental disaster about to happen.

As a result, a wooden and earthen overpass was created to cross the channel, deep in the woods, with one foot tall walls made of tin along the sides of the overpass so the sex-crazed frogs wouldn’t fall off. The system worked. The building site was cleared. The frogs survived, and presumably did what they had to do.

In 2002, the Bulova Company donated a giant antique replica of a clock that was placed on a stanchion on Hampton Road near the factory as part of both the cleanup of the factory building, and the restoration and reconstruction of Hampton Road itself. Hampton Road was narrowed. And “traffic calming” obstructions, curbing, rumble cuts, bike lanes, center islands and planters were put in. The big clock became part of that effort.

In 2003, a whole wall of bricks fell from the third floor of the building, actually opening up the outside to the inside for all to see, and making some think that the many years of abandonment had made the building unsound. However, a building department inspection revealed that the structure was sturdy and in good condition. It was also free of any pollutants now, both inside and out.

And so, today, Cape Advisors is moving forward, looking to get approval to turn this place into 72 apartment spaces and 26 townhouses.

Interestingly, one of the descendants of the Fahy family just ran for the Democratic Presidential Primaries in 2004 and for a while seemed destined to become the Democratic candidate for President. Howard Dean, the former Governor of New Hampshire, a former physician, and now the Democratic National Chairman, grew up summering in East Hampton where his family, descended from the Fahys, held and continues to hold a membership in the Devon Yacht Club.

The Village of Sag Harbor is currently reviewing this application for the restoration of the Fahys’ Watchcase Factory building. The only other option that seems possible for this property is to clear the old building and make it into a big parking lot for downtown, which the main street now very much needs. It could park 90 cars. But the building is historic, though Dickinsonian, and tightly knit downtown communities can find other ways to deal with parking, from parking garages to trolleys that can take people to outlying areas. Sag Harbor, in case you hadn’t noticed, is a wonderful walking town.

This newspaper hopes that the restoration, once it meets the village guidelines, is approved and goes ahead. The last big abandoned building in Sag Harbor, and, in fact, all the Hamptons will have sprung back to life.