Great Buys

It’s not every day that an opportunity comes along to buy a castle. But that’s exactly where Southampton Town officials found themselves this week.

Using $4 million in proceeds from the Community Preservation Fund, the Town Board agreed to buy the Casa Basso property in Westhampton — which contains a restaurant and a 120-year-old diminutive reproduction of a Spanish castle. The town plans to create a waterfront park on the newly preserved property.

And not only did the town buy a castle, in a separate transaction it also agreed to buy 25 acres in East Quogue — 10 acres of farmland that will be preserved, and 15 acres for a new public park — for about $5.5 million in CPF monies.

Both are exceptional purchases that illustrate the tremendous benefit the CPF has given to the South Fork over the past several decades.

The Westhampton purchase checks a number of boxes: It satisfies the requirements for historic preservation, open space preservation and expanding recreational resources in the town. The East Quogue purchase, similarly, creates new recreation space and also preserves working farmland.

The addition of a waterfront park in Westhampton is particularly appealing — for the uninitiated driving by the Montauk Highway property, and noticing only the trademark fencing statues greeting visitors, it’s not evident that it is a waterfront lot. But it’s a beautiful property and will surely become a showcase in the town’s park system.

The historic castle on the property — built in 1902 as a pottery studio by Theophilus A. Brouwer Jr., a celebrated pottery maker, sculptor and inventor — has long been an iconic focal point along the highway, marking the entrance to Westhampton. The long-celebrated Casa Basso restaurant will be torn down to make way for the park.

In East Quogue, the CPF purchase will preserve three properties in the historic farming community along Lewis Road. The town will buy the 15-acre future park property, complete with walking trails and a bald eagle’s nest, outright, and the development rights to two smaller farms, totaling almost 10 acres, which will continue to be farmed and can only be used for food crops.

The town has preserved so much land over the past two decades that it seems almost second nature, but these are two wonderful and unique purchases that should be celebrated by the community — that the town CPF staff and the Town Board should be celebrated for moving forward with these two historic deals.