Neighbors Rebuke Bay Avenue Blight

Frank Lenihan described, with awe, sunset at the Bay Avenue Marine Park, down the street from his home in East Quogue. One could sit on one of the benches near the purple martin gourds along the Shinnecock Bay shoreline and look across Weesuck Creek to the Pine Neck preserve and, he said, at that time of day, “everything is painted gold.”

But after the sun sets, in the darkness at the other edge of the park, activities that are far from bucolic ensue. A huge house, once owned by “Mrs. Hamm,” and purchased by Southampton Town as part of the overall park acquisition in 2006, sits neglected and decaying, an attractive nuisance for kids to vandalize and gather, breaking glass, painting graffiti.

Kristin Regan, who lives several doors down Bay Avenue from the house, works in a restaurant and often comes home late at night. She said she sees young people in the building doing what they shouldn’t.

It’s clear they’re doing it often.

A sagging porch on the south side of the once graceful structure is littered with glass, boards nailed across windows provide little protection and appear to simply challenge trespassers eager for entry. At the rear of the property, rusted Bilco basement doors are “secured” with nothing but two chunks of concrete. On the north side, a sagging fence has toppled, offering neighbor Marilyn Aldrich a view of the forsaken landscape.

A resident in her 1910 home since 1968, Mrs. Aldrich said she’s sometimes nervous at night, worried about the unsavory activities next door. But overall, she’s more unhappy about observing the deterioration of the house in the years since the town purchased it.

“All of us locals have contributed to buying this piece of shit, and now we have to look at it,” Mr. Lenihan said. He spoke of repeated pleas for action to town officials, and myriad promises made, then forgotten. “It’s just a crying shame. We have appealed to the Town Board and nothing happened, and it just goes on and on and on.”

Officials repeatedly told community members they’d take the structure down and many of the neighbors are eager for action. About a dozen gathered at the site on June 18, expressing wishes for resolution to a long-lived problem in their otherwise lovely neighborhood.

Historian Carol Combes pointed to a unique diamond-shaped window in a roofline dormer, and said that the second story of the house was once a bathhouse that the owners of the Oakland boarding house used for their guests. It was jacked up on top of the cellar and first floor of the house, Ms. Combes said, and was built during the late 1930s.

Mrs. Hamm owned the house from 1949 until her death in 1992. There were four cottages on the property, and she rented rooms in the big house, eventually adding on to the front of the first floor for space where she did hair. “Everybody in town had their hair done in that beauty parlor,” Ms. Combes recalled. She remembered, as a child, “We played canasta on that side porch day in, day out.”

In 2006, town officials formed a plan for the property. They would buy most of it with money from the Community Preservation Fund. The CPF is a dedicated fund that garners revenue from a 2 percent tax on most real estate transfers in town. At the time of the purchase, money from the CPF was only available for the acquisition of open space, farmland and historic properties.

If CPF had been used to buy the house along with the land, it would have had to have been torn down.

Town officials had other ideas. They envisioned a community center, a homebase for the East Quogue Historical Society on the first floor, then two affordable apartments upstairs. According to Ms. Combes, the town paid $189,000 for the house. CPF records show $2.2 million for the remainder of the property. Town officials replied to June 24 Freedom of Information request for the resolution showing the exact cost of the Hamm House stating the town was in the process of locating the requested records and a response could be expected no later than July 29 – more than a month after the request was made.

It was, Mr. Lenihan said, “a good plan that went awry.”

He said the town officials didn’t do their homework, and plans to use the house fell through once the condition of the building became clear, after architectural and environmental studies took place in 2008. “It was structurally unsound,” he said.

Since then, the building languished, becoming more and more of an eyesore and a draw for youthful shenanigans. Ms. Combes reported being out for a walk recently and seeing a youngster smashing a window inside the house. “Oh, they were just having a ball in there,” she recalled. Not a particularly safe ball, though. Mr. Lenihan noted the easily accessible structure is dangerous.

“This place is long overdue for demo,” neighbor Barbara Marks said.

Marissa Bridge of the East Quogue Beautification Society noted the town had recently given the group a grant to build a native plant garden near the cottage on the shore at the park. Concurrently, the town trustees are working to repair the bulkhead and dock. Removal of the house is the last piece in the puzzle.

And it might happen soon.

Earlier this year, the town transferred the house into CPF management, explained Lisa Kombrink, the town CPF manager.

“CPF will now handle the demolition,” she said. “We have an estimate for the work, but it’s over a year old and has to be updated. There is asbestos, so that has to be dealt with also. Luckily, we have a DEC permit in place already.” She said that while there was no timetable yet set, “the work will get done.”

“I was under the assumption the house had already been removed,” Southampton Town Supervisor Jay Schneiderman said Friday. The timetable is in the CPF department’s hands, he said, adding, “Sometimes these things take longer than expected. … I’m sorry it hasn’t happened quicker.”