Letters

Like the puffy, poisonous toadstools that appear overnight, so it is with the rampant fungus of dead-white houses invading the streets of Southampton Village. As identical in their sterility as they are in their sameness, they have imposed a strip mall aesthetic and deadened street after street, as charming houses, patches of open space, and trees and gardens are destroyed to accommodate “mall mansions” and the needs and pretensions of their owners.

Said owners (parve), new to the area, are preceded by fleets upon fleets of trucks choking the streets, as busy workers toil (late into the night, weekends, holidays; prohibitions: no problem) to fit up these palatial sheds with every trick and gimmick and new “must have” heralded in the magazine world. Mountains of cartons festoon the requisite pillared porches (always too shallow to be impressive), and the shrill back-up alarms of the delivery trucks cut through the silence.

Then the day comes, and “they” arrive. The dead structures are lit 24/7 from within, like stadiums; there is shrieking and screaming at the pool and 48 hours of the inescapable, never-ending throbbing beat of their music hammering all that surround them. The garbage is massed, and — poof! — they are gone.

Because these LLC-ers don’t live here. The houses are rented or empty most of the time. They sit as trophies to conformity, consumerism, egotism, philistinism and entitlement, sucking the life and vitality out of formerly neighborhood streets.

Development and servicing of these suburban eyesores and their LLC owners have gridlocked the highways and residential streets; small businesses don’t cater to their bourgie needs and are priced out; restaurant tabs have soared to their expectations, and if The New York Times is to be believed, the Hamptons has “lost its chic” and its cache.

What would the old-money WASP chronicler Henry James have made of this nouveau turn of events? He was, for those who remember, properly horrified when Midwestern heiresses, the beneficiaries of fortunes made from “trade and the manufacture of rude items,” hit Europe and went after titles. But their penchant was to restore crumbling palaces, not line the streets with pop-up, pseudo-residences, then decamp.

In the village, this deplorable transformation has occurred under the fussy, inconsistent oversight of the Architectural Review Board — often torturing ordinary residents who want to gussy up existing windows, or paint a trim that doesn’t meet their exact hue, with their high-handed dictates. Paradoxically their stance and stern pronouncements dissolve when it comes to builders. Sending out mixed messages, providing startling concessions disregarding their own rulings, and washing their hands of responsibility, they have encouraged developers to do as they please. Enablers who have become the standard-bearers in the “March for Mediocrity.”

Frances Genovese

Southampton