To Remember 'The Swamp' Group Proposes Resurrecting the Dance Floor

When the dilapidated former nightclub and restaurant building that had been home to the Swamp, an anchor of the South Fork’s LGBTQ community though the era of gay liberation and the AIDS crisis, was torn down after the land was purchased by East Hampton Town, Tom House resolved that history of the Swamp would have to be commemorated.

He formed Hamptons Pride, an LGBTQ advocacy organizations that has since gone on to organize the now annual Hamptons Pride Parade, specifically to spearhead the creation of a memorial to the nightclub.

On Saturday, House and renowned architect Gustavo Bonevardi revealed the designs for the memorial that they plan to propose to town officials to be built on what is now known as the Wainscott Green.

The plans call for the Swamp’s dance floor to be recreated, in stone, in exactly the same spot on the southeastern portion of the property it had originally occupied. It would be raised, so its edges can serve as a bench, a walking path tracing the outside of the former nightclub building, and an elevated back representing the former bar area in the club, which was two steps higher than the dance floor.

In Bonevardi’s vision for the memorial, which he and House previewed for the Wainscott Citizens Advisory Committee on Saturday, October 7, the tiles of the floor will be inlayed with the names of songs harking to the disco era, and the path with the names of those from the LGBTQ community who died during the AIDS epidemic.

“I love the idea of it being a surface you can dance on,” Bonevardi said on Saturday. “So as you’re walking around it, you read these song titles and the melodies come back to your head and you’re sort of hearing the songs.”

The memorial will also be anchored by a separate historical marker, a pyramid of pink glass disco balls, arranged like a pyramid of cannon balls. The design, Bonevardi said, would hark to the role disco played in the era of the Swamp, the war for gay rights and against AIDS, and to the pink triangle symbol adopted — reclaiming it from Nazi’s who had used as a marker for gay prisoners — as a symbol of unity by the gay community.

“This club was not only a place that had significance for the local community but it marked a very important period of gay rights in America,” said Bonevardi, who was one of the team of artists and architects who conceived and produced the Tribute in Light memorial to the September 11 terrorist attack victims, “from Stonewall to the era of gay liberation and gay rights, up through the AIDS crisis.”

The Swamp opened in 1976 and closed in early 2001, when it was replaced by the Star Room, which became a chic, celebrity-soaked hotspot for several years before morphing into a chronically problematic nightclub for the decidedly un-glamorous. The town purchased the property in 2018 for $2.1 million, after years of struggling with proposals for a car wash to replace the defunct and by then crumbling nightclub building.

Residents of Wainscott pleaded for the land to be preserved as open space, a green square of airy space in a congested corridor of hodgepodge commercial uses and bumper-to-bumper traffic.

“Hamptons Pride exists because of the Wainscott Green,” House, a high school English teacher who bartended at the Swamp and Star Room for 20 years, told the Wainscott CAC. “I read an article in The Star about the bench and I met with Rick Del Mastro and the Friends of Georgica Pond and we agreed that there needed to be something besides a bench. We saw there needed to be an organization to pay for it, and that was our founding goal — we’ve branched out since then.”

House said that he wants the memorial to be a gathering place and also a welcoming safe haven. He envisions the memorial having a tech aspect to it — utilizing QR codes that a visitor could scan and be led to information about the history of the spot, the club and the gay rights movement.

House and Bonevardi will present the plans to the Town Board on November 14.

Councilwoman Sylvia Overby said that the plans would need to make accommodations to ensure that liability issues are not a problem for the town, but otherwise saw the design as a nice one.

“I think that will be a joyful place,” she said.