Overwhelming Support for Steinbeck Purchase Offered at Southampton Town Board Hearing on Use of Community Preservation Fund Revenue

There was unanimous support among the two dozen people who addressed the Southampton Town Board on Tuesday for the expenditure of $11.2 million from the Community Preservation Fund to buy the development rights to the former Sag Harbor home of the Nobel Prize-winning author John Steinbeck.

The Sag Harbor Partnership will chip in an additional $2.3 million for the property, which will be turned over to a new nonprofit organization and leased to the University of Texas as a writer’s center.

The board would have most likely approved the deal on the spot but for details of the public access plan that have yet to be completed. Instead, it adjourned the hearing until February 14.

Supervisor Jay Schneiderman said he expects that a final version of the access agreement will be hammered out by early next week. The goal, he said, is to provide additional opportunities for the public to visit the site during the spring, fall, and winter, while limiting visits during the summer when a writer will be in residence.

“We are trying to create a path for the public to have access, and they are trying to create a writer’s retreat,” Schneiderman said after the hearing. “It gets complicated. Every time there’s a change, I have to bring it back to the Town Board, and they have to bring it back to the neighbors.”

But on Tuesday afternoon, speaker after speaker made clear that they wanted the proposal to go forward.

The author and journalist John Avlon, who has served as the spokesman for the Partnership in its effort to save the property, described Steinbeck’s home as “a sacred place” for writers and a symbol of the East End’s literary character. “It would be a tragedy if we lost it on our watch,” he said.

Instead, he said, a grassroots effort that took hold when the property was put on the market two years ago was at the cusp of its goal of protecting it for posterity. “It’s something that we’ll look back on with enormous pride — that we did the right thing,” he said.

“I want to thank the board for their vision in working hard to get to where we are today,” said Kathryn Szoka, an owner of Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor, who launched the preservation effort with an online petition drive that collected 33,000 signatures. “For me, personally, it’s a huge milestone to be able to stand here and be on the threshold of preserving the jewel in the crown.”

Szoka said Sag Harbor played a major role in Steinbeck’s success. “The book he wrote on Bluff Point Lane, ‘The Winter of Our Discontent,’ is the reason he won the Nobel in 1962,” she said.

Szoka also pointed out that Steinbeck’s wife, Elaine, deserved recognition, too, noting that she was the first woman to be a stage manager, when she did so for the Broadway musical “Oklahoma!”

Szoka read a letter from the author Colson Whitehead supporting the purchase, and the author Jay McInerny added his voice in person. “There has been an extraordinary parade of authors, from James Fenimore Cooper to Colson Whithead, E.L. Doctorow and Nelson Algren, who made Sag Harbor their home,” he said, “but none more distinguished than John Steinbeck. It’s impossible to overstate his position in American letters.”

McInerny said he visited the property about a dozen years ago. “I couldn’t believe what a magical place it was. I just felt Steinbeck’s presence. I felt something very special there. I thought how much I’d love to write in his little octagonal writer’s cottage,” he said. “And I also feared that someday, I would read that a McMansion was being built on this beautiful spot.”

Several other Sag Harbor residents, including April Gornik, Neil Slevin, Nancy French Achenbach, Hilary Loomis, Jayne Young, and Kathleen Mulcahy also spoke in favor. But longtime resident Nada Barry, whose husband, Bob Barry, was Steinbeck’s best friend in Sag Harbor, put a personal stamp on it.

“Having known John, there is nothing he would have wanted more than for his property to become a writer’s retreat,” she said.

Bret Anthony Johnston, the director of the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas, said preserving the property would be “a once-in-a-lifetime gift” for both writers and the community. “Neither the Michener Center nor I would have any interest in this project if it were not largely vested in the community,” he said.

The writers who would be awarded fellowships would be expected to present a plan for community engagement that could range from workshops for students to programs at local libraries. “Writing does not happen in isolation. It happens in solitude, and it happens in community,” he said, “and that’s the model John Steinbeck has given us, and that is the model we want to continue.”

Rex Baker, the president of the University of Texas Foundation, which has promised to raise a $10 million endowment for the project, said he was excited about the prospects for the center and pledged to be a good neighbor. “We understand that we are your guests,” he said. “We are in your community, and we will be humble, and, hopefully, worthy stewards.”

When the idea of creating a writer’s center was initially announced, there were concerns that neighbors would try to block the effort, but Councilman Tommy John Schiavoni held a number of meetings with them to try to win them over. That effort appeared to have paid dividends, as Luke Babcock, Tracy Mitchell, and Cee Scott Brown, all neighbors, said they supported the project.

“I think I can speak on behalf of the neighborhood and the broader community to say what has been agreed upon is something we can all be proud of, that I’m very excited about, and what I think will be a greater asset to the greater community,” Babcock said.

Mitchell, the executive director of Bay Street Theater, pointed out that Elaine Steinbeck was on Bay Street’s founding board. She admitted she had initial concerns about the writer’s center as a homeowner, but “I’ve come around fully and am in complete support of this as a neighbor.”

Brown, who lives next door to the Steinbeck property, also gave his stamp of approval. “I think the entire neighborhood is extremely supportive of this,” he said.

Schneiderman said it was important that the access agreement be as fair and broad as possible.

He said the plan now calls for open houses when visitors, by reservation, will be allowed to tour the house and grounds on the Memorial Day, Labor Day, and Columbus Day weekends. The July Fourth holiday has been dropped. Originally, the plan had been to allow visits on the grounds only, by appointment, on Saturday afternoons from June through August, but that has been changed to only allow such visits on two Saturdays a month during that period in exchange for extending the season into the spring and fall and possibly the winter months.