Hamptons Pop-Up Disasters: Air Store, Broccoli Restaurant & More

I don’t know about anyplace else, but this past summer there were more than two dozen pop-up businesses in the Hamptons. You might have thought there were just four or five — some of them did last for the entire summer — but other than those few, the place was just littered with pop-up businesses that failed.

Special Air was one of them. It opened on Jobs Lane in Southampton on the Fourth of July in the now defunct Billy’s Hardware Store location. It lasted just 10 days. Special Air sold half-gallon bottles of air from well-to-do resorts around the world. There was air from Rio de Janeiro, air from Palm Springs, air from Biarritz, air from Positano and air from Tahiti and St. Barts.

Prices ranged from a few hundred dollars for air at Cape May, New Jersey to $500,000 for a half gallon of Palm Beach air.

During the first five days, Special Air was mobbed by the rich and famous, but on the sixth day, when a surveillance camera the owners had installed to spot smiling celebrities walking out with a bottle instead filmed footage of some summer interns working long hours in the back packing air into the bottles using a bicycle pump.

Special Air closed its doors the very next day and left in very spectacular fashion — rising up with its inventory in a giant helium balloon and heading off to the west.

Another pop-up that did not last was the Broccoli Every Which Way Restaurant which opened in the location of the former Tractor Propane Filling and Potato Barn just to the east of the Long Island Rail Road station on Railroad Avenue in Bridgehampton.

Broccoli Every Which Way Restaurant was started up in early July by Chef Wayne J. Townsend, a descendant of the early settlers who used to work at the popular Broccoli Forever Restaurant in Wainscott. Broccoli Forever has been a mainstay for many years and Townsend, disgruntled for some reason, essentially stole their menu items.

Broccoli soups, broccoli salads, broccoli dipped in cookie batter, it went on and on, and loyal patrons of Broccoli Forever said this theft left a bad taste in their mouths. Other patrons said that Broccoli Forever folded because its Zagat review said its bad taste was not in bad taste, it left a bad taste because of the lingering odor of propane on the property. In any case, it lasted only three weeks.

Another pop up was Southampton Cardboard Tesla, which opened briefly on August 1 at the corner of County Road 39 and Hampton Road. It seemed at first it would be a big hit. If you expected that the main showroom, which had been originally built as a car dealership for Plymouths and Oldsmobiles in the 1940s might display shiny new Teslas you could take out and test drive, think again.

Instead, you were given a Tesla manual, and for $500 they would wheel out a flat cardboard replica of a Tesla which handsome salespeople would unfold to a full size. Then they would allow you to sit in the driver’s seat and manipulate the fake steering wheel while you picked out a color for the real one you were asked to order.

You could also manipulate all the buttons and dials on the cardboard replica that did this and that, which no other cars did.

On August 27, however, it all ended in disaster. A prospective customer somehow figured out how to drive the replica out onto the road where, as its Wi-Fi reached its limit and brought the vehicle to a halt, it got hit and flattened by a Spike’s Garbage Company truck heading up from Flying Point Road.

Other pop-ups that failed were the Prada Knockoff Pocketbook Store in East Hampton which only sold paperback copies of a book by Prince Prada, the heir apparent to the Kingdom of Transylvania, written in Romanian.

Turned out there was some kind of missed communication between the prince, who did not speak English, and his publisher, who spoke only Bulgarian. It opened in the morning on the site of the former and now defunct Western Union building on Newtown Lane, and then closed later that same day.

Then there was the Star of India pop-up on Main Street in Westhampton Beach. It was a jewelry store that sold only one thing, the gigantic star, made of a carefully cut South African diamond the size of a watermelon. It was priced at $423 million and day after day people came to see it but nobody offered to buy it.

Eventually, the owners of the store, delighted with all the interest but very disappointed that nobody bought it, at first announced a half-price sale on Black Friday in October, which still didn’t interest a buyer, and then declared it could be carefully cut up into eight pieces if a family of six children and two adults wanted to each pay a part of the price.

And then when that failed, in early November — with the star never cut up like that — they closed up shop and wheeled the Star of India out on its pedestal to a waiting black SUV where, just before it was moved to the back seat, it suddenly disappeared. Poof! Some sort of sleight of hand. It’s never been found.

We may never see the likes of these pop-ups in the summer of 2024, particularly because of the lawsuit. On August 3, a pop-up called Yak — the Prime Meat of Bolivia — sprang full-grown out of the ground in the empty lot next to the Crabclaw Restaurant in Montauk, and in doing so, severely injured three people: Jackie Botero, a Montauk real estate dealer, Hartford Huntington, the billionaire owner of the Plain Aspirin holding company on Wall Street; and Henry “Bub” Wilson, a resident of Bay Shore who was carrying a 53-pound striped bass he’d earlier caught off Coxes Ledge from the railing of Montauk’s largest open boat, the Star of Block Island, that he hoped to sell to the Crabclaw for dinners.

All remain in the hospital today. “Bub” holds court with his other fishermen friends at his bedside, Botera has lost her short-term memory of what has happened, and Huntington is in a coma, which has resulted in a great scrambling of lawyers looking for his will. And so far — nothing.