Here’s something to think about.
There are resort hotels on the beach near Montauk, on Long Island, just east of Hither Hills State Park, where camping reservations need to be made a year in advance. You can book rooms at some of these resorts in Montauk about six months in advance if you want oceanfront, but it will cost you more than $300 per night. that’s more than a luxury hotel on Central Park South in Manhattan.
The strange thing is except for Fire Island, with a few little towns accessible only by ferry, and segregated by income and sexual orientation, you have to travel seventy miles west before you find another beachfront hotel, and that is in Long Beach, not too swift. then you have some swamps, JFK airport and then pretty much the next stop is Coney Island.
All of those miles of beautiful beachfront have been carved out for private homes and the occasional town beach, excluding all nonresidents with just a few exceptions (Jones Beach, Robert Moses State Park and Smith Point Park), and the remainder, including large chunks of Fire Island National Seashore, has been transferred into private hands under circumstances that are murky to say the least. A local journalist tried to look into it once — tracing the details of title transfers of oceanfront property from public to private hands, back in the 70’s. He quit after receiving death threats to his family. True story.
The most peculiar thing about this observation is that it is so obvious, and yet so obscure to the two or three million people living on Long Island, not to mention the millions more living in New York City. Of course its no accident that they are kept out of so much of what should by all rights be more accessible. But the folks who own it now, as well as the folks they’re trying so desperately to keep out, are all living in a bubble.
Its odd how complete the encapsulation is for most “wrong islanders” being as they are extraordinarily proud of the beaches from which they are for the most part excluded. Its a strangely linear existence marked mainly by your exit from the L.I.E. or your stop on the L.I.R.R. all the way out to the end of the line, your measure of success is how far you have gone, like degrees on a thermometer, you’re either hot or you’re not.
But for the millions of folks who know they’ll never be able to afford to live out past exit 72, on the beach, where for the hundreds of years previously when more sensible folk would never think of living — its kind of like the Californians who live on the fault line — living in their own bubble.
Its remarkable in a way how little is know about this strange enclave, how perfectly self-contained it is, and given its proximity to New York City and the generally high achievement level of the people living there that literally nothing has been written about it, at least nothing significant since F. Scott Fitzgerald I guess, nor anything of the fact that the rest of the universe likes it just that way — keep Long Islanders barely contained, like so many Africanized bees.
Yet Long Islanders in general look with disdain on everybody else, too, and their resort areas — wouldn’t consider a summer vacation to the mountains — “where’s the beach?” and if they have a beach “where’s the surf?” and likewise wouldn’t consider traveling to any other beaches than “their own” (which of course, or rather ironically, they’re not really). New Jersey beaches? Please. Cape Cod? too cold, and anyway the people are stuffy, never mind that they hate New Yorkers, with all the limited passion they can muster. all those pushy Jews, smelly, hairy Italians, or drunk Irish, and they’re all too loud and just take over a place when they come in, so don’t make them welcome, don’t feed them, or like stray dogs, they might just stay. its a kind of prejudice, just short of that reserved for blacks, but don’t worry, Long Islanders have plenty of that animus of their own. they all hate each other just as much as everyone else hates them. Long Islanders from exit 62 look down with pity on those from Queens, just as they are in turn looked down upon by those further out.
Let’s just skip over Virginia Beach, and people literally look at you blankly when you inform them that yes, Delaware and Maryland do in fact have nice sandy Atlantic beaches. Forget the Carolinas and Georgia, all that Deep Fried South stuff. more of that mutual antagonism and the southerners are just as happy to be overlooked. next stop, south Florida, there’s an exception. and if you go there, its like a Long Islander’s dream. that’s why there’s so many retirees living down there, at least from the previous generation, because it seemed reasonable, but not so much anymore, and with the combination of rising prices in Florida and reduced opportunities in New York you have an equation that makes it tougher for folks from my “not the greatest generation” to make the transition.
But like so many parts of the country these days, most of the island is little more than a worthless succession of strip malls separated from one another by fig leaves of tree stands, here a decrepit old school building, there a tract of a thousand decaying split level homes built in the fifties or sixties, there so many McMansions popping up in the sand dunes like mushrooms after a rain. its all the same, merely a matter of degree.
But here, let me say that Long Islanders are strong, capable, and hyper energetic, even aggressive people, despised by practically everyone who knows them as something as desirable as fire ants, but who live more or less contentedly inside their own little world which encompasses New York City and the boroughs, except Staten Island, which is for some reason beneath contempt, sort of like New Jersey, of which it is really a part, geographically speaking at least (look at a map). the Bronx, which is a kind of no-man’s land, don’t ever go there, ever. for any reason, except maybe a Yankees game. or Brooklyn, from which most of our parents escaped, or Queens from which our cousins and peers may still be trying to escape, and into which the current flood of immigrants pour, just like our grandparents did, only now not from Italy, Ireland and Germany, but from Korea, the Phillipines, Russia, and Latin America.
And these odd little carbuncles of the Hamptons lie out here, with their Sotheby’s realtors and their queer chi-chi clothing shops and tons of traffic you don’t even want to think about on the weekends, all wealthy New Yorkers, or as my brother John once quipped “Creepus Jersiam in Hamptonia est,” paraphrasing Dad’s oft mumbled complaint of “Jersey creeps” (think mobsters) via Caesar’s Latin which pretty much sums it up in a nutshell, when you think about it, especially if you knew my brother and my Dad.
But the Hamptons don’t want you, either, whoever the fuck you are, and just wish you would go away, and everyone is thinking ‘we came out here to get away from all this crap, and all you low-life creeps, but we forgot to put up a fence so here you are’ but what they usually don’t realize is that everyone they’re looking at is thinking exactly the same thing about them.