Sag Harbor Express Person of the Year: Kathryn Szoka, 'The Vision Leads You'

When the news broke early in 2021 that the Sag Harbor home of the Nobel Prize-winning author John Steinbeck, who spent most of the last decade of his life in the village, had been put on the market for $17.9 million, many in the village shrugged their shoulders and said that with that steep of an asking price, preserving the place would be out of the question.

Not Kathryn Szoka.

“I knew,” she said, “if I didn’t fight for this, I’d never forgive myself.”

So she started an online petition drive, helped drum up local support, and joined the Sag Harbor Partnership in an effort to transform the property into a writer’s retreat.

Szoka’s dedication to preserving Steinbeck’s home, which supporters are optimistic they will ultimately succeed in doing, is one reason she is being honored as The Sag Harbor Express Person of the Year for 2022.

While working on the Steinbeck project, Szoka also found time to help lead the successful effort to get the Community Housing Fund approved by voters in the four East End towns, help run Canio’s Books with her partner, Maryann Calendrille, and pursue her longtime passion for photography.

Szoka, who pointed out that Steinbeck belonged to an exclusive club as one of only 13 American writers to win the Nobel Prize, said she could think of no better way to celebrate the village’s literary heritage than by protecting the home of the most famous of the many famous writers to have called Sag Harbor home.

“At the breakfast table, she was transfixed,” Calendrille said of Szoka’s laser focus on saving Steinbeck’s house. “She kept saying, ‘We have to try, we have to try.’”

“You have to have a vision,” Szoka said. “And if you have a vision, the vision leads you forward, and the vision was to protect and preserve this.”

Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr., who has worked with Szoka on both the Steinbeck preservation and affordable housing efforts, said she played a key role in both.

“With the housing initiative, she was one of several. When it came to Steinbeck, that initiative started with her,” he said. “I don’t think I’m telling tales out of school, but when she started, people thought it was a long shot, a pipe dream.”

The journalist and author John Avlon, who is the spokesman for the Sag Harbor Partnership on the Steinbeck project, said a handful of people thought the house could be saved early on, but Szoka brought her organizing ability and her “flinty, common sense” to the cause.

“She’s obviously smart, and breathtakingly level-headed, and she has a real passion for Sag Harbor and its literary tradition,” he said. “Along with April Gornik, Susan Mead and the Sag Harbor Partnership, she provided the kind of convening power that helped take it from an idea to execution, knock on wood, God willing.”

Thiele said it was the dedication of Szoka, Michael Daly and Bryony Freij of East End YIMBY, and a small cadre of other volunteers, that helped push the Community Housing Fund referendum over the finish line in November’s election.

“After seeing the poll numbers where the referendum stood at the beginning of the campaign, I’d estimate they helped make it about 10 percentage points higher in East Hampton and Southold,” he said. “And they were probably the difference in Southampton, and certainly the difference in Shelter Island.”

Freij, a newcomer to the East End, said she first met Szoka when she wanted to get involved politically in response to the election of Donald Trump as president in 2016. Everyone pointed her to Szoka, one of the founders of Progressive East End Reformers, she said.

After Governor Kathy Hochul signed the legislation enabling the East End towns to put the housing funds on their ballots, Freij said a small group of volunteers approached Thiele, assuming there was already a committee in place. “Fred said, ‘Great, you’re it,’” she recalled, adding that he encouraged them to raise $250,000 for the political battle ahead.

Thus was born Vote Yes for Community Housing.

Szoka, she said, “is a master of grassroots organizing. She knows how to run a meeting of 100 people, or three people. She is an incredible leader and someone you want on your side.

“She never loses her cool, she never lashes out,” she continued. “She makes her point in such a diplomatic and respectful way and is so direct about what she feels is right.”

Although Freij said she was a neophyte in the world of political organizing, “a lot of my growth is from learning from Kathryn.”

But Szoka, who played college basketball for the University of Maryland in the late 1970s and likes to compare political activism to sports, said the spotlight should never be focused on just one person. One of the gratifying aspects of volunteerism “is the teamwork that’s created as each person steps in with their talents to help us reach our common goal,” she said.

Szoka said she has been interested in housing issues on the East End since the early 2000s, when she was involved with the Long Island Progressive Coalition and it was already evident a housing crisis was brewing.

“It seems to be a right — health care and housing — in the richest country in the world,” she said. “In one of the richest areas of the country, with the brain power we have at our disposal, there should be some way to figure it out so we can have housing for the people who live in the community, work in the community, and make the community what it is.”

Szoka said she was thrilled the Community Housing Fund legislation passed in all four towns. “I feel strongly that a tide has been turned as far as housing is concerned,” she said. “People are ready to acknowledge we must do something.”

But she cautioned that it will take time for the fund to accrue the kind of money needed to make a serious dent in the housing crisis.

“It’s not going to solve all our housing problems,” she said of the fund, but she added that the beauty of the legislation is that it allows towns to develop a broad range of measures to address the issue.

Amy Turner, a member of PEER, echoed Freij’s feelings about Szoka’s skills as an organizer.

“Everything she does is based on the most positive, inclusive approach, no matter what the topic,” she said. “She takes the long view. If a setback occurs, she asks, ‘What happened and how can we fix it? How do we move on?’

“She does so much — it’s incredible all the issues she is involved with,” she added. “I watch her and she just doesn’t burn out. She’s got her business and her photography, but she always keeps her eye on the ball.”

Tom House, the founder of Hamptons Pride, who coincidentally is being honored as The Express News Group’s Person of the Year in East Hampton, said it was an easy decision to choose Szoka, along with Stony Brook Southampton Hospital’s chief administrative officer, Bob Chaloner, as grand marshals for the inaugural gay pride parade that his organization sponsored in East Hampton Village in June.

“Who’s a gay person who has given a lot to the community?” he said. “It seemed like an obvious choice.”

Like others interviewed for this article, House said Szoka had supported any number of causes in the LGBTQ+ community over the years, but one little thing she did stood out to him.

Two years ago, after East Hampton Town had purchased the site of the former Swamp, a pioneering gay nightclub, on Montauk Highway in Wainscott and began work to turn it into a park, House said he grabbed his gay pride flag and a lawn chair on Pride Day. “I decided to go sit in the park and invite people to stop by,” he said.

“Only about seven people showed up — but Kathryn was one of them.”

Sigrid Meniel, a Hampton Bays resident and patron of Canio’s, which Szoka and Calendrille have owned since 1999, said Szoka “knows what it means to live in a democracy. You’ve got to be involved, you’ve got to show up.”

Like House, Meniel said Szoka makes it a habit to show up for her friends. She added that Szoka regularly took the time to visit Antje Katcher, a stalwart among those who held a years-long vigil against the war in Iraq, when she was in the hospital dying of cancer.

“I was raised to have a very strong sense of moral ethics and taught to look out for other people,” Szoka said.

Although she is best known as a community activist and business owner, Szoka is also known as a gifted photographer, whose work has been shown locally and in the city.

Her “Vanishing Landscapes” series, in which she photographed farm buildings across the South Fork, many of which have since gone the way of the wrecking ball, is perhaps her best-known work.

Bob DeLuca, president of the Group for the East End, where Szoka volunteered after moving to the East End in the 1980s, said her photography had played a significant role in raising awareness about the importance of protecting the local environment.

“Through the lens of her extraordinary artistic talent, she was able to reach thousands of people who could, perhaps for the first time, visually bear witness to the impact of the steady and pernicious transformation of our rural character into a slowly growing suburb,” he said.

DeLuca said that Szoka’s photographs illustrated the impact of development better than any discussion of planning or zoning could do. “For most people, the world is visual. If you see something like that, it makes it more clear,” he said. “What she was able to do was fast-forward the Ghost of Christmas Future.”

Szoka said while many people know she is a photographer, most do not know that she was a professional, who still teaches regular workshops. She said she was introduced to it by her father, an amateur photographer himself, who gave her her first camera and loved to take her on drives in the country to both see the scenery and photograph it.

“I do like to consider myself as a photographer of communities in transition,” she said of her work, which has included a series about the changing demographics along the Bridgehampton-Sag Harbor Turnpike, and a more recent series on shrubbery that is wrapped for the winter.

“They are aesthetically arresting. They grab you, which is the goal of any artist, to make work that is going to make people stop in their tracks and make them think for more than a few seconds,” she said of the wrapped shrubbery series.

Szoka said it is difficult to separate her work as an artist from being an activist, a bookseller, or even an athlete.

“My photography is what led me to my activism,” she said, “because it made me fall in love more with the community than I previously had after first coming here.”