Little Hamptons Stories: Empty Storefronts, Wainscott Chapel and More

Here, Dan offers a trio of little, Hamptons-related stories pulled from recent headlines.

MURALS FOR MAIN STREET
There are many empty stores on Main Street and Jobs Lane in Southampton now that summer’s over. It makes the place look lonely. So the Village last month proposed a new ordinance. If you own a vacant storefront that is unoccupied for 30 days and haven’t gussied up the show window, you could be fined $750 to $3,000 and spend up to 15 days in jail. Best thing to put in a show window, I think, would be a full-color 10-foot mural of a crowd of shoppers outside the store, trying to be the first ones getting in.

NEW JERSEY & CANADA
The design of the new New York State license plate was announced last month. Because the Governor believes in democracy, he had the citizens vote on a choice of six. The winner—and this new license plate will be the one for the next 10 years—has on it small drawings of the Statue of Liberty, Niagara Falls, the New York Skyline and the Montauk Lighthouse. I wrote about it.

In return, reader Ward Brooks wrote to remind me that the Statue of Liberty is in fact surrounded by New Jersey waters. He also noted the drawing of Niagara Falls is not of the American side, but of the Canadian side.

Can anything be done about this? I guess it’s too late. Montauk Lighthouse is still in New York State, right?

WAINSCOTT YARD SALE
The Wainscott Sewing Society during the summer of 2018 held a rummage sale at the Wainscott Chapel. The Sewing Society owns the chapel, but all were welcome to contribute for the big day.

A few months later, it was noticed that a painting of the chapel by Shirley Overton Voss hanging on the interior wall of the chapel there for the past 32 years and not part of the rummage sale was gone. As a result, WANTED posters, like the kind you’d see on a post office wall with a picture of a bad guy, were put up on the walls at this year’s sale. Now, a year later, the mystery of the missing painting has been solved.

The East Hampton Star reported that a woman (who has not been identified) at this year’s rummage sale at the chapel told a cashier that she had purchased that painting at last year’s sale because it was among other paintings in the entryway of the chapel that were for sale. She also said it was now hanging on the wall in her mother’s home in Pennsylvania, and would be returned. It was.