John Paulson’s Dream Proposal at Lake Agawam in Southampton

John Paulson, a money manager, made a real estate purchase that could dramatically enhance the very center of the Village of Southampton. It’s the talk of the town.

What did he do? He bought two large mansions facing out onto Lake Agawam. Total cost? About $25 million. He doesn’t need these mansions. He intends that they be torn down so the land, thus made vacant, can become a waterfront park. He will then deed the properties to the village and the Lake Agawam Park Conservancy, then donate a further $10 million as an endowment to provide maintenance for the park.

The park will not only be beautiful — it’s proposed as a botanical garden of flowers and trees you can stroll through — it will also jump-start a stalled plan designed to clean the polluted waters of this lake, now declared one of the most polluted bodies of water in the state of New York.

This couldn’t happen without this purchase. Here’s why. Lake Agawam’s most northerly cove backs up into the center of this town. At its headwaters is the small 3-acre Agawam Park with a monument honoring the town’s war veterans. Concerts are held here. Movies are shown. People picnic here.

On the eastern shore of the cove where it reaches its headwaters, a children’s playground sits waterfront. Next to it is a wooded one and a half-acre parcel owned by the Village, also waterfront.

On the western shore of the cove across the way, a narrow two-lane road, Pond Lane, runs parallel to the shore and just 10 feet from it. There is no shoulder and no sidewalk. So oil and gasoline from passing vehicles can flow into the pond. It’s also dangerous for pedestrians. They have to walk in the street.

Running along the western side of this road, facing the road and the cove beyond are — side by side — the Southampton Cultural Center, the Southampton Veterans Memorial Hall, a vacant lot where an honored early 1800s slave named Pyrrhus Concer lived in a modest home, then the two mansions. After that, Pond Lane makes a sharp turn away from the lake and continues into the estate section.

These two mansions are what Paulson bought.

And why does this matter? Efforts to halt the worsening pollution of the lake during the last 20 years have gotten nowhere. It just gets worse and worse. A few years ago, however, it was learned that a newly invented machine could sit in a small building on the banks of any polluted lake, take in a stream of water, remove the pollutants and then return the freshened water to the lake. Over time, the lake becomes pristine again.

Of course, the powers that be are eager to get such a machine. And all eyes turned to that wooded waterfront parcel, owned by the village, south of the playground.

But the rules say that if you take over such an undeveloped waterfront parcel, you have to swap it out with another undeveloped waterfront parcel somewhere else of similar size. Since almost all of Lake Agawam is bordered by large summer mansions, it seems impossible to imagine that any homeowner would give up a part of his property to become undeveloped publicly owned land. A fight to find such a parcel could take decades.

Paulson doesn’t own a mansion on the lake. But he stepped into this situation and, discovering the mansions were being offered for sale by developers, paid the price and bought them. With the mansions gone, there would be more than enough land to allow the water-purifying building to be placed across the way. The conservancy has proposed banning vehicular traffic on Pond Lane. With the safety and pollution issues gone, the lane would still be there but only for walkers, bikers and joggers. It would be a downtown treasure. And if planted with flowers that extract pollutants, it would further assist in returning the lake to its pristine sparkle.

I mentioned that the small former home of Pyrrus Concer stood until recently next to the two mansions and the VFW Hall. Five years ago, some greedy people bought it, declared the tiny house an eyesore and tore it down to enhance the value of the property. They then turned a profit by selling the vacant land to the now desperate village.

Concer, a Black man who was sold into slavery when he was 5, was freed, became a whaler, and made a modest fortune which he then donated to build a new church in town. In his retirement, he captained a small sailboat to taxi residents of the village across the lake from Jobs Lane to the beach. Efforts underway to recreate Concer’s home as a museum are now greatly enhanced by Paulson’s gift.

This is, all together, a gigantic grand slam home run for Southampton Village.

Will this project go ahead? I sure hope so. I’ve read about and listened to all the objections to it. One is well, why hadn’t we the public heard about this before? Why was it just sprung upon us? Another is that closing Pond Lane to vehicles would create a traffic crisis. No, it wouldn’t.

And then there was the stunning petition against the project. Fifteen hundred villagers had signed it. Half the population of this community. Except when people looked into it, they found it to be from a national website where anyone in the country could sign it anonymously, according to the conservancy. And only 1,500 did. Fake news.

One woman, a well-to-do homeowner who lives in the estate section and traces her ancestry back to the 1600s, objected in a letter to The Southampton Press saying that most folks have their own gardens and don’t need a new one. “Will this space,” she continued, “be used primarily by day trippers who spend no money in the village? If they picnic in the park, who will pick up after them? Will the garden close at dusk? Who will enforce that? How will we handle people who stay overnight in the garden?”

As for Paulson, this is the second big gift he has given to this community. Ten years ago, he and his wife donated $20 million to Southampton Hospital so a wing could be built dedicated to cancer care. His funds also refurbished the hospital’s emergency room.

He’s done amazing things.