East Hampton Town plans to tear down the 8,000-square-foot barn that is the lone structure on the property widely known as “555” in Amagansett, which was the focus of heated debate when the property was purchased by the town for more than $10 million.
The Town Board on Thursday, November 16, issued a request for bids to demolish the structure, which a board member said is deteriorating despite being only 15 years old.
The barn, the only remnant of the former owner’s attempts to develop the property as an equestrian facility, contains a collection of stables, an indoor riding ring and living quarters on its second floor, intended for employees of the planned horse farm.
But the town says it has no use for the building, cannot rent it out because of legal restrictions on the use of publicly preserved lands, and cannot justify spending money to maintain it.
“When we bought it, the idea was that it would be kept for agricultural use,” Councilman Peter Van Scoyoc said. “But we have come to the conclusion that some kind of passive recreational use is probably best for that property, not agriculture. So there’s really no use in keeping it. It’s been our policy to demolish structures on CPF properties.”
The town’s purchase of the approximately 19-acre property, in 2014, was both applauded and pilloried. The former owners, the Principi family, had built the barn in 2002 but abandoned their own plans—the horse farm and a collection of residential homes on adjacent properties they also owned—within a few years. They then reached a deal to sell the land to a development company that pitched a proposal to construct a 79-unit apartment complex instead.
Those plans caused an uproar among Amagansett residents, and the town stepped in with an offer to preserve the land as open space using Community Preservation Fund revenues.
But the presence of the barn became a sticking point for some, who flagged legal restrictions in the CPF that bar the purchase of buildings that are not historic or related to an agricultural use.
The Town Board justified the purchase by saying it would lease the barn space to farmers for an agriculture-related use. Proposals for it becoming the home of a new farmers market were met with criticism, and no other agricultural use for the land was found, since the rich farming soils that had once covered the acreage had been scraped off and sold, in preparation for the horse farm.
The sale itself was, in some form, the topic of interest to the Suffolk County district attorney’s office—though beyond the 2015 subpoena of documents related to the sale, the DA never raised any legal issue with the deal.
Ultimately, after two years of debate, the town gave up on finding an agricultural use for the land and resigned itself to leaving the parcel largely as it is, and continuing to allow its use for occasional charity events, like the annual Soldier Ride benefit, and as a needed landing area for Medevac helicopters in emergencies.
Mr. Van Scoyoc noted this week that if the barn itself had been subdivided from the rest of the 19-acre 555 parcel and purchased with money from the town’s general fund—as some at the time suggested was the only legal way to proceed with the purchase—the town would have more options for finding other uses for the building.
“It is attractive—it’s got that horse stable-y look to it,” Mr. Van Scoyoc said, though he added that it’s already deteriorating. “When we bought it, the decks were coming apart. The foundation has major cracks and flaws in it. It wasn’t particularly well built.”