Three Men And A Main Street

It’s still hard for me to fathom, but Chris Francescani, Tim Laube and I, for a brief period in the mid-1990s, constituted the entire news and sports output for what was then called The Hampton Chronicle-News. We’re all still friends, still like to get together when possible, and still love downtown Westhampton Beach, where we all basically grew up.

The news that the village has a sewer district on the way has us all pretty excited, and we got to talking about the possibilities outside a local bar/restaurant on Saturday night. Below is some of that conversation.

Chris (now owner of the new local business Sunset Beach Films): Do you want to talk about the fact that I literally showed up in blue suede shoes?

Motz: Fabulous. Westhampton Beach is on its way to having full sewage, which means they can be anything they want to be. They could be Sag Harbor if they wanted to. Downtown Sag Harbor, by the way, if you haven’t been there recently, is mobbed in January.

Chris: Why didn’t they have sewage before? Don’t most towns have sewage?

Laube (now a top local school administrator): (Explains the ins and outs of sewage, why it’s needed, and efforts dating back to the early 2000s as deputy mayor of Westhampton Beach trying to get it done.) There actually was a lot of support for it. It’s the only way to save your downtowns.

Motz: So now Westhampton Beach could essentially be Sag Harbor if they want to — bars, restaurants, apartments. So what would you do?

Laube: I think you do what the market dictates. The idea is you want to buy a property because you can expand your footprint — you can have more tables, you can wash more dishes and have more people. So that makes it more attractive for investors. And it’s symbiotic relationship with shopping. You’ve seen that with downtown Patchogue. Thirty years ago, there were storefronts with broken windows. Now it’s booming.

Motz: It used to be tumbleweed rolling down the street on a Saturday night.

Chris: I’d expand boat access to Main Street.

Laube: The village was almost built incorrectly. But who could have had the foresight 100 years ago to take advantage of Moniebogue Canal and build the storefronts along the water instead of private residences?

Motz: The cops caught us drinking there once in the ’80s and made us dip one of our friends into the canal, fully clothed, to retrieve a beer can. The water was just putrid, Technicolor with pollution. I’m surprised the lower half of his body didn’t fall off.

Chris: They literally dipped him in? That was like the Gowanus Canal of the Hamptons.

Laube: So Billy [Thorne, former proprietor of the beloved and defunct Magic’s Pub and Artful Dodger] told me that he did a dye test in his bathroom — they flushed orange pellets down his toilet. A couple of ours later, the orange dye was floating up in Moniebogue Canal.

Chris: Oh, that is so disgusting.

Laube: So sewer districts, it’s kind of an oxymoron, but they’re good for the environment and good for business. You don’t usually hear business and the environment going together.

Motz: (Pitches an idea for a downtown statue of John Murray, former leader, now deceased, of the St. Patrick’s Day Coneheads.) In full Conehead regalia. Who wouldn’t stop in and take a picture with that statue?

Laube: He’s the only man to hit a golf ball straight down Main Street … (This is another Conehead story, which leads to another Conehead story, ad infinitum to eternity.)

Motz: I don’t understand the reluctance to put in apartments a few stories high. Hear me out. You want to take drunks off the road? Put more apartments downtown. You put people near transportation hubs. You put customers near the stores. By providing more housing for people downtown, you’re taking the development pressure off our remaining open spaces. So what is the reluctance?

Laube: Everybody gets so panicky about going up. You’ve got to go up. (He expresses confidence in the current mayor and trustees to make the proper decisions about the appropriate level of downtown development.) Let’s do something with apartments on Main Street, because there’s a bigger issue here: You can keep young people in Westhampton Beach. Because they’re all leaving!

Motz: Who would object to more customers downtown?

Laube: I’ve heard people say over the years, “I don’t want Westhampton Beach to be crazy busy. I like it quiet.” (Notes that many business owners these days aren’t residents, inhibiting their ability to impact needed change. Billy Thorne is again invoked, this time for his purported influence on downtown decision-making.) Despite the fact that he was Billy, people still listened to him.

Motz: I once saw Billy get up to speak at a Village Board meeting, begin to make an astute point, excuse himself, go to the bathroom, loudly relieve himself, come back out, finish the astute point, and sit down. Let me ask you this: Does anyone not think that the biggest issue for downtown Westhampton Beach in the last 20 years is that Billy Thorne and Magic’s is not there? Do you need that core restaurant, the place everybody goes to?

Chris: I think you do. It’s the anchor of Main Street. It was the place where everybody went to see everybody.

Laube: When he left, the heart of the village got cut out.

Motz: Can we just bring him back and plop him on a barstool?

Laube: (Moves on to the importance of moving downtown offices to second floors, a topic he used to discuss with former Mayor Bob Strebel.) You want restaurants and retail on the first floor. You can’t make them leave, but maybe you can incentivize it.

Motz: You could change the zoning to do that, to encourage second- and third-floor apartment building …

Laube: Yes, you could say a certain amount has to be for apartments, or you could go second-floor restaurants. That would be attractive, a second-floor restaurant with a balcony looking over Main Street. How do you establish a place like Fellingham’s, or Magic’s? How do you get that back?

Motz: You can’t manufacture it. It has to happen organically.

Laube: It takes years to develop that kind of …

Motz: What is in Magic’s now? I drove past it the other day I literally couldn’t figure where it used to be …

Chris: To get back to your point, you’ve got to make Main Street, Westhampton Beach, a year-round anchor like Sag Harbor, and the way to do it is to bring in more restaurants …

Laube: This is a fresh start. So you’re not going to have that established place. And you’ve got some things to start with. You have a walkable downtown …

Motz: They did a nice job with that …

Laube: They’ve made it look very nice.

(Discussion ensues on making better use of the water access and Village Marina, located a couple of blocks away.)

Laube: Even if you parked in the marina, it’s a short walk to Main Street.

Motz: Sag Harbor is rocking all the time. It’s not easy to find a parking spot in January. It’s a beautiful Main Street. And so is Westhampton Beach. Westhampton Beach may have the prettiest Main Street of all, but you go to Sag Harbor, there’s a ton of restaurants, bookstores and coffee shops are buzzing. They could do that here.

Laube: Not that we need another Billy story. But this is like an intellectual Billy story …

Motz: An intellectual Billy story?

Laube: … Well, it’s analytical. July of 2004, I’m standing in front of Magic’s with Billy on a Saturday night, the village is packed. I had just been elected, and I’m, like, “Billy, isn’t this great?” He goes, “Tim, this sucks.” I thought he’d be happy it was busy.

He grabs my shoulders and he goes, “Look, what’s in those people’s hands?” I said, “What do you mean? There’s nothing in their hands.” He said, “Exactly. They’re not buying anything. Business is dying on Main Street, Tim. We’re dying. Something’s got to be done.”

Wilbur Breslin used to say to me, “You put in a sewer district and you’ll start getting the restaurants, you’ll start attracting anchor stores like Ralph Lauren, even a Gap.”

Chris: Those are huge.

(Discussion ensues on whether or not such stores are drags on existing retailers.) He said, “You’ll pull someone in with the Ralph Lauren, but they’ll hit 10 stores. And then they’ll eat at a restaurant. And that’s how it works.” This is a guy who’s a billionaire and he’s been in the business his whole career.

Laube: Greenport, is what it could become.

Chris: Greenport!

Motz: Greenport is the perfect example … that place is just kicking … more bars and restaurants than you could possibly go to.

(Much discussion about Riverhead, Patchogue, what’s worked, what hasn’t.)

Laube: You could open up the zoning, but I don’t think you want the five-story buildings. You want the individual buildings with several apartments on top.

Chris: A second-story restaurant would be so good, because to look down — I know this from flying my drone over Main Street … it’s beautiful.

Laube: (Discussion of a new Main Street bar/restaurant, Salt & Loft.) The bar opens out to Main Street. It’s a great addition. And 20 years ago, that space was a polluted corner that had to be remediated.

I think you’ve got the right ingredients here, that once the sewer district is done, I think you’ll see immediate investment dollars.

(Pause). I think people will fall over each other to get in there.