Letters

Surely you know why the powers-that-be in your village are planning to plant flowers over Pond Lane, to divide Pond Lane from needed access for visitors to the Pyrrhus Concer house, and from unwanted access to the valuable properties lining “Upper Pond Lane”:

They’re building a “cordon sanitaire” around the Concer house to prevent those busloads of Black tourists and other Black visitors in their own cars from wandering off into the estate section after visiting the museum being erected above Lake Agawam and adjacent to the Cultural Center.

That gift to our village Black community had to be made by then-Mayor Mark Epley because of the threat of a nasty lawsuit stemming from the history-ignoring destruction of the original Concer house in order to preserve the value of that 2 acres of property that the village then bought, at an inflated price. The other reason, of course, was former Mayor Epley’s wish to keep getting the vote of our valued middle-class Black residents.

I mean, how else would you be able to keep “those people” from wandering up the current open Pond Lane, or driving up that way, to see how the other half (or is it the upper 1 percent) live in fabled Southampton?

And what would happen to our inflated estate land values if there were suddenly droves of Black tourists driving or walking by, and trying to look into the privet hedges?

P.S. Our own village Black residents are now being driven out of our village because of escalating land values, as were, 20 years earlier, the middle-class local residents of the Rosko Place subdivision and of other longtime local families whose little local streets were taken over by those environmentally disastrous McMansions, which our longtime village residents could not afford, and only newly rich mullets bought, thinking that they were now in the prized village estate section.

I guess that’s what we call progress in this country: What used to be done with white robes, guns and burning crosses is now being done by planting over lovely old Pond Lane.

Of course, now that people like that Florida governor and loud and ignorant parents in parent associations are fighting to rewrite American history, and keep our electorate as ignorant as it is, we will consider this extension of the park at Lake Agawam another step toward beautifying our village.

Oh, Nancy McGann, where are you now that we need you to put a pretty face on political chicanery?

Evelyn Konrad

New York City