http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/26/n...s-sound-snooki-alert.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
Beachgoers headed to the Hamptons on Friday via the Cannonball express from Penn Station
Beachgoers headed to the Hamptons on Friday via the Cannonball express from Penn Station
As Boozy Invaders Hit Beach, Hamptons Sound a Snooki Alert
By JIM RUTENBERG
AMAGANSETT, N.Y. — For generations, few beaches in the Hamptons were more coveted and jealously protected than Indian Wells.
Its high dunes and wide stretches of clean white sand have inspired painters and writers, and have fed real estate values of up to $20 million for the mansions that face it. And only cars with the blue-and-white permits of town homeowners can be parked in its lot, giving the beach an exclusive, local flavor.
Then, last summer, they started arriving by bus and by van, including one with an ominous black pirate flag: hundreds of young partyers from parts unknown, hauling kegs and cases of beer with them, guzzling it down fraternity style and, in a couple of cases immortalized in police summonses, relieving themselves in the dunes. The local newspaper, The East Hampton Star, called it The Invasion of the Beery Beach Blanketeers.
Now, in the quieter precincts of the Hamptons, some residents are fearing that the shift in the societal order could be made worse this year by a new wave of partyers, some of them driven north by Hurricane Sandy rebuilding efforts at New Jersey’s rowdy beaches.
They raise the question with only half-mock horror: Could Nicole Polizzi — a k a Snooki — be far behind, she who came to personify beach-side, drunken, disorderly conduct on MTV?
The worry is less about the newcomers’ origins, they say, than about their tranquility-shattering behavior.
“You don’t want to come across as snooty, but it’s about peace and quiet for all of us,” said Dayna Winter, 49, a registered dietitian and a year-round resident who watched with dismay last summer as some of the partyers tried to entice her 15-year-old niece to join them. (They failed.) “It’s not a party scene; it’s not what we want it to become.”
“With the devastation of Sandy,” she added, “we’re all a little nervous.”
Every year there is a new sense of invasion in the Hamptons, much of it based on perception and anecdotal evidence that the crowds keep getting larger and, recently, louder. But some statistics back it up.
Hampton Jitney, the largest city-to-East End bus service, says its ridership has grown by roughly 5 percent each year since 2008.
The Long Island Rail Road reports that summer ridership on its Hamptons-bound branch, the Montauk Line, increased by more than 30 percent — to 196,000 rides — from 2011 to 2012. Railroad officials expect it to rise that much more this season as they move the embarkation point of their crowded, Friday afternoon beach express, the Cannonball, to Penn Station from the less accessible Hunters Point, Queens.
The express’s two reserved cars on Friday had a backlog of 500 requests, this for a Memorial Day weekend that was predicted to be a chilly washout. “People want to get out there and they want to get out there in a hurry, and unless they have a helicopter, the railroad’s the best bet,” said the railroad’s vice president for customer service, Joe Calderone. This is not necessarily welcome news for the helicopter set.
The boom in public transportation arrivistes is in keeping with the latest phase in the Hamptons’ evolution, which has historically involved a tangle of class and sensibility issues, localism, and environmental concerns.
Long after English settlers barged in on the Montauket tribe, their fields of livestock and crops gave way to a privileged world symbolized by old-money estates, khakis and blue blazers. Eventually came the nouveau riche with their mega-mansions, corporate planes and over-the-top tent parties.
That invasion continues, exemplified by Jennifer Lopez’s recent purchase of a $10 million home in Watermill and the gridlock of helicopters at local airports.
Now there comes a new, and apparently thirstier, group of day-trippers. “There was a time when you had to be on the inside to be part of the Hamptons, and that’s not true anymore,” said the East Hampton-based author Steven Gaines, whose 1998 book “Philistines at the Hedgerow” gave him something approaching Walter Cronkite status on the East End. “It’s become a tourist stop, and it has lost some of its exclusivity.”
But, he said, perhaps this is inevitable in the Hamptons, where “it’s always a conflict between Them versus Us, and Them always wins.”
Longtime residents say they have been here before. David E. Rattray, 49, the editor of East Hampton Star, said similar concerns swept Amagansett when a new group of young partyers took over a different part of the beach — which locals named Asparagus Beach, comparing the standing beachgoers to Asparagus stalks — in the 1970s. “It was the same kind of hand-wringing hysteria that ‘It’s the end of civilization as we know it,’ ” he said.
Mr. Rattray is the fifth member of his family to edit the newspaper over the span of three generations, with roots in the community since the 1600s. “To us it’s one big blur of people from ‘away,’ ” he said. “That fear of Snooki thing may be the last people in pulling the ladder up behind them.”
Councilwoman Sylvia Overby of East Hampton, who has been working on a plan to avoid the same beach drinking antics this summer, said she was concerned that the Indian Wells beach partyers represented something different from the merry denizens of Asparagus Beach.
“A lot of those people ended up second-home owners out here and thinking about this place fondly; it wasn’t a hit and run,” she said.
The situation at Indian Wells — in the East Hampton hamlet of Amagansett — was a couple of years in the making. A group of dozens of young merrymakers started having parties there toward the end of the 2011 season.
Through word of mouth and then a post about the scene there on the plugged-in party Web site, Guest of a Guest, the crowd last summer grew into hundreds of people hauling pony kegs and cases of beer across the beach. And, in what Capt. Michael Sarlo of the East Hampton Police Department called “a new phenomenon,” there was the jarring arrival of packed buses and vans driving through the residents-only parking lot, dropping people off and picking them up.
“It blew up out of nowhere,” said Kieran Brew, a local real estate agent.
Marc Schultz, Ms. Winter’s husband and an investor, went so far as to suggest in a letter to the Star that authorities eliminate drinking during lifeguard hours.
In a place where a couple of afternoon beers by the ocean is kind of the whole point, the idea fell flat. “Even friends were like, ‘What is he? Out of his mind?’ ” Mr. Schultz said.
He added: “I just want us all to enjoy our summer without Spring Break in Cancún.”
Less radical countermeasures are being considered, including a weekend plan to ban from the parking lot non-resident vehicles longer than 30 feet or carrying more than eight passengers.
As for Snooki herself, she showed up in Seaside Heights, N.J., on “Today” on Friday to declare, “Everyone’s here and it’s getting rebuilt.”
But an MTV spokesman, asked whether Season 3 of her new show could take her to the Hamptons, said, “You never know where it will take them.”
