The Hamptons Most Loathsome Awards
We are proud to announce that, for the seventh year in a row, the award goes to East Hampton. Yes, with the exceptions of the movie theater, White's Pharmacy and Bookhampton, there is virtually nothing left of the sylvan and arty East Hampton of old.
Once, East Hampton had the only hardware store for miles, not to mention the best blueberry muffins. The Ladies Village Improvement Society Fair was a small, friendly event in which doilies and secondhand books were the most exciting goods sold. When someone would say, "Let's drive to East Hampton!" our eyes would shine. There we could get ice cream cones and walk by the beautiful pond and see geese.
Today, you can't get near that pond for the Porsche traffic, and the Ladies Village Improvement Society Fair is indistinguishable from a street fair in Manhattan, if you can get a parking place. And there are so many people in line to get ice cream that it resembles shopping in Shanghai at lunchtime.
If you can get to the pond without being clipped, the serene nature of the place?the gorgeous weeping willows, the lovely, soft green grass?is obscured by the sound of helicopters overhead, flying the newly superrich to their endless supply of landscape-designed great lawns. Jonesing for cilantro? Don't worry. You can get it in East Hampton.
So, in recognition of its ridiculously trendy restaurants and its ruined Main St., its East End chapter of Music Together and its really frightening number of exercise studios, we give the Most Loathsome Hampton Award to East Hampton.
Our next award is The Most Loathsome New Place within a Hampton. This is given to a store that's just appeared in one of the Hamptons or Sag Harbor and has no earthly business being in a summer community where everyone's at the beach all day. This year's award goes to Svenska in Sag Harbor. Purveyors of that incredibly boring blond Scandinavian furniture and of terrifyingly useless crystal vases in odd shapes, Svenska has not only opened a giant showroom steps from Main St. in Sag Harbor, it has actually built an entirely new building in a horrifying and truly anachronistic modern brick design. Outside, Svenska has gone further and has hung giant, ugly flags advertising its wares.
No store this season has done more than Svenska to truly destroy the early American character of an historic town. We are proud to honor Svenska.
The Most Uninviting Mall Award goes this year to the strip of stores along Highway 27 in Wainscott. From the greenish-gray pseudo-wood shingles that cover many of its stores to the incredible difficulty and actual danger of turning off the highway to reach them, Wainscott Mall's owners have gone out of their way to create a shopping strip that is incredibly offputting. With the exception of the South Fork Animal Hospital, which has the only 24-hour emergency service this side of Riverhead, and Pet Hampton, which caters to tropical-fish lovers, we cannot think of a single reason to go there. That's why we give them this award.
This year we give a new award for Lack of Humanitarianism. This award recognizes absolute greed in a store, township or even individual who clearly values profit over the welfare of an entire Hamptons community. We are proud to say that the judges were unanimous in honoring the Bridgehampton Mall's new Kmart store, which had to be stopped by year-round residents from selling guns in its sporting section. Congratulations to Kmart and welcome.
We regret to announce we will not be giving the Most Loathsome Hamptons Architect or the Most Loathsome New Fake Street awards this season. There were so many submissions that the judging panel simply could not and, in some cases, would not visit the professionals and streets in question. And there was a tie again this year for The Most Loathsome Hamptons Charity Host. Once again, Chevy Chase and Alec Baldwin shared the award, with Baldwin getting an extra chevron for appearing in the Thomas the Tank movie.
Our last award is a special one. It celebrates a piece of the Hamptons that has become absolutely inaccessible to taxpayers either because of cost or traffic. In the past we have honored Sagg Main Beach in Sagaponack for its perpetually filled parking lot and Espresso Italian Deli for its $12.95 square of lasagna, but this year the award for Most Inaccessible Hamptons Place goes to the ice cream shop on Long Wharf in Sag Harbor, which, by charging $2.75 for a kid's cone, has made one of summer's sweetest pleasures a rarely obtainable treat for the kids of all but the moneyed classes.