Delving Into The Watermill Center's Past

The Watermill Center’s history may begin with the artistic vision of its founder, Robert Wilson, but the legacy behind the land where it sits certainly does not.

It predates the art laboratory by half a century.

Today, the more than 20,000-square-foot building is an abode for artists—a place where innovation and boundary-breaking is encouraged—and the same can be said about its atmosphere in the mid-1920s, with two key differences.

One, the artists were engineers. And two, the creative center was a war technology think tank.

Last week, an intimate audience gathered in the Rehearsal Hall of the South Wing for a talk on the Watermill Center’s background—one that was relatively foggy until recently published in the book “The Watermill Center—A Laboratory for Performance: Robert Wilson’s Legacy,” which is a compendium of documents, text, images and contributions from those who witnessed the center’s formation firsthand.

The book was edited and compiled by Sue Jane Stoker, Jörn Weisbrodt and José Enrique Maciàn.

“When I was approached in October 2010 to edit this book, I was confronted with the issue that the center’s founder, Robert Wilson, likes to tell a lot of stories, and sometimes these stories become mythic in their size and scope,” Mr. Maciàn said during the talk, which he hosted with Ann Lombardo, the Water Mill Museum’s board president and director.

“So our task was how are we going to shoo away these mythic legends to get to the root of what the Watermill Center is, its history, the way it got to the way it is today?” he continued. “And one of the biggest legends that surrounds this center is its origins in Western Union.”

The building on Water Mill-Towd Road lived another life before falling into ruin for more than 20 years and eventually becoming what it is today. It was one of two major research centers for technology development for Western Union, the leading telecommunications corporation of its time.

At the turn of the 20th century, Western Union was rolling in its success of inventing the undersea wire that connected America to Europe, allowing the flow of telegraphs across the Atlantic Ocean.

But in the early 1920s, RCA invaded the market with the invention of long-range radio technology, Mr. Maciàn said. The higher-ups at Western Union realized this would pose a threat to the company’s monopoly on transcontinental communication, and so, the company began investigating the same short- and long-range radio communications.

The only problem was extreme interference at the company’s two laboratories in Manhattan and New Jersey. Western Union turned to a mere engineering assistant, Howard Post Corwith, for help, Mr. Maciàn said.

Upon graduating from Cornell University, Mr. Corwith had started work at the company’s Manhattan location in 1916. On the weekends, he would return home to his family’s Water Mill farm and conduct experiments in the milk house.

“Yes, 98 percent of the people who lived in Water Mill were farmers,” Ms. Lombardo said. “And the activities were all about agriculture and the farm.”

Western Union’s connection to the East End is thanks to Water Mill’s agricultural lifestyle, she pointed out, because lo and behold, there was no radio interference on the farm.

In 1924, Western Union sent Mr. Corwith to Water Mill with two fellow engineers, Edward C. Homer and L.G. Pollard, and they set up shop in the milk house. The location where the milk house once stood is now on the current-day site of the Watermill Center.

“RCA was the other radio research company in the area,” Mr. Maciàn said. “They befriended the engineers at RCA and became spies. It’s kind of sad and kind of funny. They borrowed machinery, borrowed tools from the building.”

The engineers’s experimentation quickly took off. In a year, the men outgrew the milk house, so Western Union purchased a 22-acre tract of land from the Corwiths.

“They put dynamite to trees, blew everything up and built a center brick building,” Mr. Maciàn said. “When they opened, they realized their friends from RCA wanted to come over and spend time with them. But they were spying on them! So they built this fence and hung up a ‘No Admittance’ sign on the door to keep their very interested friends away.”

After 11 years, the staff had grown to 10 engineers, Mr. Maciàn said. By the early 1940s, war seemed imminent for the United States, and the Water Mill laboratory began to conduct classified research for the government.

“Western Union put all of its force here at the laboratory toward the war effort,” Mr. Maciàn explained. “It was one of the few labs in the country that was dedicated to the war effort. At that time, they then added these two giant wings to the building.”

Both wings were complete by 1942.

“The reason the building had these mammoth wings, which may seem a little strange for a building that started so small, is that the architect they hired was from New York and had only designed skyscrapers,” Mr. Maciàn reported. “So he was only aware of how to use steel and concrete. He came here and designed the building, and instead of using steel and concrete, he used steel and wood. So he built the building as if he was building the base of a skyscraper.”

At its height during the World War II, the lab reached its highest numbers with nearly 80 employees, who developed new frequency standards for facsimile and cable photo circuits, the “concentrated arc lamp,” a precursor to the laser, and the night flight simulator—all among the company’s many patented advancements during the war effort.

In 1951, Mr. Corwith publicly demonstrated the invention for which the lab became best known: the high-speed fax machine, which was developed in the late 1940s and operated 10 times faster than the conventional Telefax.

Ten years later, the Air Force accepted a prototype from the laboratory of the Display System 210-A Bomb Alarm, a system that would quickly inform government and military command posts if there were a nuclear attack on the country, as well as the blast’s location. The sensing devices were made to look like utility transformers mounted on telephone poles and reacted to the light flash of thermal radiation, Mr. Maciàn said.

Mr. Corwith died in 1962 and the Water Mill laboratory was closed down three years later. Western Union simply picked up and left, leaving much of its machinery and chemicals behind.

The building stood abandoned for more than two decades, attracting the attention of curious teenagers and even local residents, such as Warren Kass.

“We live six-tenths of a mile down here on Towd. I know that because I was a marathon runner,” Mr. Kass explained at the talk. “I’d come right past the gate here in the ’80s that I believe was locked, except on either side of it, there was nothing.”

He paused as the audience burst into applause and claps.

“I’d just skirt past the gate and run around here,” Mr. Kass continued. “I saw this being developed and wondered what was going to happen. And this wonderful place has happened here. It’s just amazing, thrilling, to have this right here.”

The building first caught Mr. Wilson’s interest during his first visit on August 27, 1986. After much consideration, he decided it was the space he was looking for and reconstructed it from the bottom up—a project that wasn’t fully complete until 2006, according to the center’s website.

“Maybe it’s lucky for us that he kept to the original blueprint of the building, to the placement of the windows,” Mr. Maciàn said. “What was interesting, in starting this research—and I know this is far-fetched and a little crazy sounding—but it seems that buildings and land have memory. There were many similarities between this being the Western Union Laboratory in the ’40s, ’50s, ’60s, and what is the Watermill Center today.”

According to Watermill Center Director Sherry Dobbin, today the center is a place for experimentation, where artists can visit, work and break rules, proving that avant-garde isn’t reserved for an exclusive group.

“I went to see Terrie Sultan for a tour of the new Parrish Art Museum, and she said the most amazing thing,” Ms. Dobbin explained at the end of the lecture. “‘Watermill is the Switzerland of the Hamptons. It’s neutral. It’s cultured.’ I couldn’t agree with her more. I think that’s the perfect description.”

In the spring, the Watermill Center will continue to host a series of talks with individuals involved with the making of “The Watermill Center—A Laboratory for Performance: Robert Wilson’s Legacy.” Dates have not yet been scheduled. For more information, call 726-4628 or visit watermillcenter.org

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