Wild Hamptons Real Estate Stories Through the Years

As a journalist deeply entrenched in the ever-evolving landscape of Hamptons real estate, I have encountered some truly fascinating stories over the years. Here are a few that stand out.

HAMPTONS REAL ESTATE STORIES

SAGAPONACK

The country prospered mightily leading up to the great downturn in 2008. One man who did very well on Wall Street bought a 15-acre farm in Sagaponack. A farmhouse was on it, but this fellow had married a very demanding woman, and she had insisted on building a second mansion on the property, but closer to the ocean. When finished, you’d drive down a long driveway, passing the old farmhouse, to get to the mansion.

One day, as the man drove down this  driveway, he noticed people sitting on the front porch of the farmhouse. He stopped and got out of his car.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“Oh, we just bought this farmhouse. Who are you?”

A frosty conversation ensued. He told them that he owned the farmhouse, and they’d have to leave. They told him that they had just bought it. And they weren’t leaving.

In the end, the man retreated, continued on to the big mansion and told his wife about the confrontation.

“I was hoping you wouldn’t notice,” she told him.

“Notice what?”

“I’ve been doing a lot of shopping. It’s much more than what we agreed upon. So I sold the farmhouse. It’s just one acre. I hope you’re not too upset.”

HIGH SOCIETY

Years ago, Billy Joel gave me a tour of the mansion on East Hampton’s Further Lane that he had purchased with his wife, Christie Brinkley. With Christie away, he’d parked his Harley on the dining room’s tiled floor — a move she disapproved of, but one he indulged in when she wasn’t around. He also told me he’d bought the mansion from a longtime member of New York high society. There was a restriction in the deed which said that the mansion could not be sold to “Jews, Negroes or entertainers.” But rather than battle the archaic restriction, he had a well-connected friend buy the property, remove the clause, and then resell it to him the next day.

“I’m two out of the three,” he said.

Many other mansions, including the Jewish Center on Woods Lane in East Hampton, were bought with similar maneuvers. Other mansions still have that restriction.

WESTHAMPTON BEACH

For many years, a house in Westhampton Beach facing the ocean had a big window on the second floor facing inland that looked like the fingers on a hand. Four of the five fingers were short, but the middle finger stuck up — built that way to insult someone whose house was just behind his and who complained to the authorities that the house just built blocked his ocean view.

Take that, complainer.

ALLAN SCHNEIDER

Between 1975 and 1991, the leading figure in Hamptons real estate was the broker Allan Schneider. His family crest — he was an Englishman — was sewn on the breast pocket of all his suit jackets.

I asked him one day to tell me an interesting story about real estate.

He’d agreed to take on a small split-level home on Mitchell Lane, he said.

“I told the owner he could get $45,000 for it. But he demanded $200,000. So I’d have to live with that. Nobody ever bid on it, of course. But a year later, I was taking some folks out by helicopter to look at various mansions and they looked down and said, ‘Oh, that is so cute. We’d love it.’ I told them the price. They didn’t blink. The owner got his full $200,000.”

Wow.

When Schneider died suddenly in 1991, suffocating at dinner with a piece of steak blocking his throat and nobody doing the Heimlich Maneuver, his grieving mom and dad came up from Florida for his funeral. They were Saul and Celia Schneider, a Jewish couple from Fort Lauderdale.

WATER MILL

For a long time, the huge waterfront mansion on Montauk Highway in Water Mill, Villa Maria, was a religious retreat for nuns.

The Mother Superior took me on a tour of the property one day. It had originally included the triangle next door upon which today sits the beautiful town windmill.

The owner they’d bought the mansion from in 1931 was Irene Coleman, a star of stage and screen who held wild parties there.

“After we bought it, a group of locals asked to buy the grassy triangle that came with it for a dollar. Put the town windmill on it,” the Mother Superior told me. “We agreed, but only if the sale guaranteed peace and quiet. So, a codicil was put in saying we could have it back for the same dollar if there was misbehavior on the triangle.”

“So everybody better watch out,” she said.

A PERSONAL STORY

One year, I bought a lot on Grant Avenue in Hither Hills that had an ocean view and, along with others, exclusive rights to half a mile of beach across Old Montauk Highway just 300 yards away.

Those rights are still there today. In 1968 when I bought it, I paid $2,500 for it. Three years later I sold it for $5,000. Doubled my money. A killing. Recently it sold for $1.3 million.

AGAIN IN SAGAPONACK

One year a friend bought a home in the Art Village in Southampton, a historic 19th century community whose property line abuts the busy Hill Street thoroughfare.

We were attending a hearing in Southampton where my friend was hoping to get permission to create a grassy berm between the house and the traffic to muffle noise.

Just before us on the agenda was a man who owned a property in Sagaponack that included an old barn almost on the property line adjacent to a neighbor. This was far too close considering zoning, but the building was grandfathered in, built before zoning. Nevertheless, he’d been dragged into the hearing because he’d built a bow window on the side facing the neighbor’s property and it stuck out 3 feet up but also 2 inches across the line. There was no law against this, but the situation annoyed the neighbor who complained that the barn was now being used as a guest house, and that was illegal.

At the hearing, local farmers offered support. They said that as kids, they’d slept in the barn, so now that established legal use.

The board asked questions. Was there electricity in the barn? Running water? Did they sleep on beds? Or folded cots? The answer mattered.

The board postponed their decision. They also postponed the berm. Oh, well.

For more Dan’s columns go to any platform and search for “Dan Rattiner’s Stories.”