By Jonathan S. Foster
It’s Jane Jacobs vs. Robert Moses all over again.
East Hampton’s North Main Street is in need of some help. The current traffic is unmanageable at times, and the neighborhood has returned to a time 20 years ago when it had a major neighborhood-demanded upgrade.
The current Town Board is planning on giving the parkland to Suffolk County to create a traffic circle at the Sherrill Park intersection. Giving the land to the county to take care of is a violation of the trust given to the town by the Lions Club — the Sherrill family trusted the town with its preservation, as is clear in the donation agreement.
A traffic circle would bring more chaos and disruption to the area instead of making it calmer and safer. It is the wrong solution. Better solutions are available, less time-consuming and less expensive.
Creating a calm neighborhood requires reinforcing the good amenities and removing problems. The triangle park needs to be cleaned up by removing all the dead trees and creating an open landscape that would resemble the small grazing zones that inhabit the village; this was once was used for grazing, after all.
The objective when the land was donated to the town by the Lions Club and the Sherrill family was to create an entry to Springs. This traffic circle solution reminds me of Vincent Scully’s comment about the destruction of Penn Station: “One entered the city like a god. One scuttles in now like a rat.” We in East Hampton can do better than that.
What is the image we want and need? Look to the history of the town and its growth. One important feature is that East Hampton has a rare, ideal colonial Main Street, and it still exists. Another requirement is to discover and preserve strong images: East Hampton had historically powerful horizontal vistas, vast farmlands, at times ending in dunes and the ocean. North Main has great potential, with a 20-acre open farmland, a large passive park potential and a farm museum on land that the Dominy family used to build their windmills.
Historically, the early businesses on North Main were owned and operated by the landowners who would live there and have a business on the street, as was the tradition of the village Main Street. It would be a good planning goal to recreate the sensibility of continuity of Main Street extending from the village green to the Triangle Park.
A traffic circle here is like trying to solve a traffic problem without acknowledging the whole problem: the disintegration of the neighborhood since its upgrade 20 years ago.
At that time, the Town Board wanted to put the proposed new post office behind one of the gas stations on a lot one-third of the required size. I did a study of North Main Street at the time and had hundreds of signatures for a revitalization study and a documented townwide disapproval for the post office location. The most stated comment about North Main Street by village area residents is that they “close their eyes” when they get there. While it may be apocryphal, it is a significant statement on the quality of the street environment. It is not the image one wants in their town.
What happened to the previous street upgrade? Why did it fail? Twenty years ago, we all wanted to revive North Main Street from the IGA to the Sherrill Triangle to become the good neighborhood that it had been earlier. There was a serious attempt by planners and the county Highway Department to calm the traffic and to improve life in this busy stretch.
These recommended needs included:
• Residential zoning overlay on the east side.
• Rebuilding the street to provide better drainage in storms.
• Providing underground electric; North Main Street electric wiring was underground through the 1950s and 1960s.
• Traffic lights and pedestrian crosswalks.
• London plane trees on both sides, uniting the street.
• Making the whole Sherrill Triangle a park, such as the small common pastures in the village.
• Enforce clean property rules for businesses generally, to remove the auto junkyard quality.
All of these would help create a better, safer, calmer North Main Street.
Even without the town doing most of the above, it became noticeably calmer, quieter. Property owners fixed up their properties, both residential and commercial; new businesses came in and invested in a handsome new building approved by the Architecture Review Board. There was a lot of optimism on North Main Street.
This was a short time, several years, when the traffic was calm, one felt safe riding a bike into town — everything was neat and orderly. But the care stagnated when the town allowed a food market to be located next to a gas station, violating state regulations for gas station parking requirements and the closeness of the market to the gas station. Additionally, it violated the town’s newly approved residential zoning overlay and its traditional rules on grandfathering.
This increased traffic seemed to create enough chaos that decency became rare, and a “why bother if the town doesn’t even care about maintaining their fresh revitalization?” attitude dominated.
The situation we are in now is the product of not only the introduction of the market illegally but also highlights what was not done in the original plan. It was a failed renovation. Calming traffic and creating a pleasant neighborhood require a thoughtful intervention. None of the actual traffic specific suggestions were followed — no traffic lights, no pedestrian crosswalks. That’s one reason it failed. But enacting some of the earlier suggestions and maintaining and reinforcing the property rules is critical.
We can make a North Main Street better for traffic calming, and better for the residents, and better for the businesses and East Hampton. We don’t need to give the responsibility to the county to keep East Hampton beautiful. Look what happened when the Village Board gave Main Street to New York State: signs and chaos.
We should not give the Triangle Park to the county. We should not have a traffic circle. We should take care of North Main Street and bring it back into the East Hampton community.
Do not vote for this county takeover of the park.
Jonathan S. Foster is an architect who resides in East Hampton. He is a former member of the East Hampton Town Architectural Review Board.
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