Broad Support

It’s rare to see a large group of people in Sag Harbor agree on most anything, but last Tuesday, at Southampton Town Hall, more than two dozen speakers came out to support the town’s involvement in preserving the Sag Harbor home of author John Steinbeck, where he wrote “The Winter of Our Discontent” and, a year later, won the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature for his remarkable body of work. No one spoke against the purchase.

The Southampton Town Board is considering using $11.2 million in Community Preservation Fund revenue to buy the development rights to the Bluff Point Lane property. In turn, the Sag Harbor Partnership, the nonprofit that has led the effort to preserve the home, would spend an additional $2.3 million to secure the property, which would then be turned over to a new nonprofit organization that would use the property as a writer’s center run by the University of Texas.

In addition to the speakers at last Tuesday night’s meeting, Canio’s Books co-owner Kathryn Szoka — another leader in this effort — has collected over 33,000 signatures supporting the purchase. Nada Barry, a pillar in the Sag Harbor community, whose husband, Bob Barry, was Steinbeck’s best friend, said there was nothing more the writer would have wanted than to see this plan come to fruition and to know that others would be honing their craft on the waterfront parcel.

While the public hearing was adjourned until February 14, and while the Town Board works with organizers to confirm a public access plan for the property, there is no doubt that this is a CPF purchase that has broad support. A comprehensive public access plan already has been proposed, and it is heartening to see the Town Board work to ensure that the public at large — and not just the writers who would take up residency on the property — will have access to this important piece of Sag Harbor history.

While Sag Harbor Village has benefited from CPF purchases in the last decade, residents of the greater Sag Harbor area have certainly paid more to the fund than they have gotten back over the course of this successful preservation program. Losing a property with this kind of cultural and historic significance, in a community that has come to be defined, in large part, by artists and writers who have called it home for decades, would be an immeasurable loss — one the Town Board should not allow to happen.