Couples experience it all the time: You agree on the big picture but can’t stop arguing about the details. It can take a wonderful thing — a Hawaiian vacation, a kitchen remodel — and turn it into sheer agony.
Sag Harbor Village has a terrific opportunity, full of prestige and community benefit, to pay tribute to the brightest star in the village’s literary firmament. It’s an idea everyone loves. But if there’s anything that will drag it down, it’s fighting over how to make it happen.
Preserving the Sag Harbor home where Nobel Prize-winning author John Steinbeck spent much of his late life, and wrote a beloved chronicle of an American expedition, as well as a novel set in a very familiar waterfront town, has almost everyone’s support. Despite the eight-figure price tag, since the modest Steinbeck abode sits on land that has soared in value, a dogged group of local residents have taken bookstore co-owner Kathryn Szoka’s idea and run with it. With the involvement of Southampton Town and its Community Preservation Fund, plus a state grant, and interest from the University of Texas, it’s plausible that it might be preserved as a writer’s retreat.
Mayor James Larocca has jumped on the bandwagon, and rocked it a bit. The mayor’s enthusiasm for the project is sincere — his appreciation for Steinbeck was a youthful obsession — and he has pledged the village’s help in getting the job done. But he’s also been critical of details about how the preserved property might be managed, and how the community can most benefit.
Village support is essential, and there’s no reason for things to turn adversarial when everyone is pulling in the same direction. The mayor’s best play is to set aside any concerns and turn his focus instead to helping the purchase across the finish line. It’s going to be in the neighborhood of $15 million, and the town’s CPF won’t be able to pay that much — a cold appraisal of the property doesn’t consider who lived there — so until enough money is raised and an offer is accepted, all the chatter about how the property might be used is premature. It could, sadly, be for naught.
A discussion last week of Steinbeck’s time in Sag Harbor brought Richard Hart, a retired professor at Bloomfield College in New Jersey and a member of the editorial board of The Steinbeck Review, to town. Standing comfortably sheltered from any local ill winds, he said this week, “I am so very hopeful that the purchase of the Bluff Point property reaches a successful outcome. I strongly suspect it is what Steinbeck would have wanted, particularly inasmuch as it will provide writers a place of quiet and reflection and bring school kids and others into the literary world of one of America’s truly great writers.”
Kathryn Szoka has called the property “a jewel in our midst” — there’s plenty of time to talk about how best to polish it. First, let’s save it.
