Rowdy Hall Owners Sue East Hampton ARB, Want Rejection of Black Paint Scheme Scrubbed

The owners of Rowdy Hall have filed a lawsuit challenging the East Hampton Town Architectural Review Board’s rejection of their proposal to paint the facade of their new building solid black — which they did anyway.

An attorney for Honest Man LLC, the restaurant group that owns Rowdy Hall, Nick & Toni’s, Townline BBQ and Coche Comedor, filed the lawsuit in Suffolk County Supreme Court on November 21, asking the court to overturn the ARB’s rejection of the black color scheme. The suit argues that the board had not been able to offer sound reasoning why it found the business’s preferred facade unacceptable and had been given poor legal advice on how to apply the town code’s architectural guidelines for the Amagansett Historic District.

Jon Tarbet, the attorney for Rowdy Hall’s owners, acknowledge that convincing a judge to overturn a ruling by municipal regulatory board’s is always a difficult task, because courts give broad discretion to municipal agencies to make value judgments as long as they are appropriately reasoned.

But the town has lost four such cases this year and, Tarbet said this week, the ARB’s October decision in the Rowdy Hall matter seemed to lack the sort of specifics in its reasoning that a court may see as grounds for overturning a fifth.

“The ARB members are sort of given an impossible task, because the code is extremely vague when it comes to these guidelines — maybe on purpose,” he said Monday. “But they couldn’t explain to us why a green building they approved a year and a half ago was okay, but not black. I think they had bad legal advice and were left on their own to figure out what these standards mean.”

Over four hearings before the board between July and October, the ARB and the Rowdy Hall representatives wrestled with how the new pub, which was preparing to relocate from a back alley in East Hampton Village to one of Amagansett’s broadest storefronts — within the designated historic district of the town’s second oldest hamlet, should look.

Rowdy Hall’s owner said the solid black facade with gold lettering that adorned the East Hampton location for 26 years was important “branding” for the business that they wanted to bring with them to their new home.

When the ARB blanched at the proposal, the restaurant owners agreed to not extend the black coloring along the exterior sidewall of the building and submitted two alternative color schemes — one showing a primarily dark green facade with red accents, the other a mostly gray frontage with a black banner nameplate across the top and black window trim.

With the restaurant’s owners drumming up community support and packing the audience of the meetings with acolytes, the ARB said it would accept the gray proposal and was prepared to vote to approve the application. But in a confused and contentious exchange at a meeting in September, Rowdy Hall’s owners objected, saying the other color schemes had only been offered “out of respect” to the board’s requests for alternatives and in hopes that the ARB would land on the black facade being acceptable in the end. They officially withdrew the other proposals from the application, forcing the board to vote only on the black facade.

In a pained review by board members — some of whom acknowledged the difficulty in taking a duty-bound stance against longtime personal acquaintances — three of the four ARB members present said that while they didn’t necessarily dislike the black frontage, the town’s code requirements for the historic district seemed to direct them to approve only a look “harmonious” with the historic aesthetic of white, wood and brick structures.

The black scheme was “the opposite of white,” the board’s chairwoman Kathleen Cunningham, said. One board member — the board’s one requisite licensed architect, Frank Guittard — voted in favor of approving the black facade, saying that he thought it necessary for the downtown to be allowed to “evolve” within the framing of the historic district.

The week after the ruling, Rowdy Hall shuttered its East Hampton location, with plans to open in Amagansett about two weeks later — with the facade matter still unsettled. Two days before its doors opened, painters arrived and painted the front of the building solid black and mounted the gold nameplate lettering and two ornaments of Bacchus, the Greek god of wine, above the doors. Town Ordinance Enforcement issued a stop-work order and a citation for not having requisite permits — but did not halt the opening of the new restaurant.

The lawsuit seizes on the matter of whether the town code really does bind the hands of the board members, preventing them from approving something that is not expressly quantified in the law.

“These guidelines are meant to provide structure for the ARB to follow, but are merely guidelines and not restrictive,” the complaint against the ARB reads. “During the fourth hearing, the chair of the ARB, without any changes to the code, randomly and without any discussion, decided to announce that the board was restricted by the code and could only approve white, close to white or natural wood facades.”

The complaint, which wades through the history of past looks of the building that now houses Rowdy Hall calls that stance by the ARB majority “inconsistent with its own precedent” and “an irrational reading of the code.”

Tarbet this week said that if the code said that buildings could only be painted certain specific colors, that would be different.

“Why don’t they say you can only use two colors and they have to be from the Benjamin Moore Historical Collection,” he said. “Why do they get into this guessing game.”

In September, a county judge sided with the ARB against two Amagansett homeowners whose proposal for a gate across the front of their property was denied by the ARB — saying that the homeowners, who were also represented by Tarbet’s firm, had not proven that the board’s finding that the proposed gate was “not harmonious with the rural charm and essential character of the neighborhood” was inappropriate.

Tarbet said the Rowdy Hall lawsuit is in no way meant to be an effort to slow down, or speed up, the resolution of the code violations regarding the business having seemingly ignored the ARB’s barring them from using black color scheme.

He reiterated the claims made by Rowdy Hall co-owner Mark Smith on the day the building was painted: that the black washing was simply a primer coat meant to cover up the old facade, a foundation for whatever color scheme the business and the ARB ultimately reach an agreement on.

Some have demanded that the Town Board intervene in light of the apparent snubbing of legal powers of the town by the popular business. A former councilman, Jeff Bragman, said the town cannot allow the affront to its authority and should seek a court injunction, ordering the business to paint the facade a neutral color while the matter is adjudicated.

The Town Board — dominated by Democrats who held their election night reception at one of Honest Man LLC’s restaurants on the night before the front of the Rowdy Hall building was blackened — has taken no action, but did shelve the awarding of a $100,000 grant to help fund the replacement of the building’s septic system.

Town Attorney Rob Connelly said he was not prepared yet to comment on the Honest Man lawsuit.