With lilting birds, sunset views, and plenty of prime real estate, Georgica Pond is perhaps the most exclusive neighborhood in the Hamptons. Few summer people are aware, however, that the 290-acre body of water has been the center of unending controversy — and the scene for more than one whodunit — over the past century.
It all started back in 1686, when the governor of the province of New York (and errand boy for King James II), Thomas Dongan, granted a board of trustees nearly absolute power over East Hampton’s beaches and bodies of water. The declaration — or, “patent,” officially — lives today on a vellum scroll at City Hall, and also enables trustees to purchase land from “Natives Indyan Proprietors.” More than three centuries later, the Trustees of the Freeholders and Commonalty of the Town of East Hampton remain in power — even though Georgica Pond residents have long dreamed of fomenting revolution.
Formed by a glacier, Georgica Pond is thought to have been named after the Montauk Indian Jeorgkee, who is said to have made the pond’s shores his home in 1679 and “assisted the settlers with their beach whaling,” according to a 1922 report in the Times Union newspaper. One hundred years later, the first A-lister moved in: Revolutionary War hero John Dayton, who bought his 70-acre plot for $0.70. Roughly 100 years after that, the Tile Club — a group of NYC artists including Stanford White and Winslow Homer — descended and formed the invite-only Georgica Association, which persists to this day. The Tile Club lent a certain cachet to the marshy land, and in the decades to follow Georgica Pond became a clubby neighborhood of the Manhattan elite.
That hasn’t always sat well with the locals. For one, the hordes of incoming summer people made for a brutally competitive real estate market (nothing new under the Hamptons sun). Second, the village of East Hampton has allowed the pond residents to restrict access to locals, forcing boaters or fisherman to go the long way around to gain entry.
Above all, however, the pond has seen the fiercest battles over a seemingly insignificant issue: the pond’s water level. Way back in the time of Jeorgkee, Native Americans cut a “release valve” of sorts into the sandbar separating the pond from the ocean at intervals throughout the year to lower the water level. As early as 1900, the white settlers had made it an official process: On November 2, 1900, the Times Union newspaper out of Brooklyn reported that “a channel to the ocean has been cut across the beach to Georgica Pond,” in order to “freshen its stagnated water, improve the fishing, and lower the water level.”
Especially after the disastrous hurricane of 1938 flooded most of East Hampton and killed 600 people, the twice-yearly “letting” of the pond was seen as a prudent and ecologically sound tradition that would keep the flora, fauna, and fancy people equally happy. Alas, that wasn’t to be.
As early as 1962, a snarky report in Newsday pointed to bubbling tensions between the Georgica Pond residents and the keepers of the water level, the trustees. “An old problem caused by a picturesque pond in this town — a problem that has been known to stir bluebloods to civic combat — is again generating heat…” the breathless report began. “It’s a question of how to best make the pond less sloppy and less smelly.” It was quite the conundrum for home owners: “Too much water makes the surrounding land messy and floods cellars; too little makes the neighborhood smelly.”
The homeowners even offered to give the town $30,000 to build a self-regulating pipeline at the time, an offer the trustees resisted. The traditional letting process, they insisted, was carefully calculated to have maximum benefit for the delicate coastal biome — and not the human inhabitants and their summer plans. Some explicitly claimed to be carrying on the traditions of the Native American forebears they had essentially deposed. The spring and fall letting continued.
In 1985, the standoff exploded when Hurricane Gloria brought the pond to precarious levels. Former Congressman Stuyvesant Wainwright complained to the New York Times about “the smell of rotten eggs” caused by overflowing cesspools.
Writer and Georgica Pond resident B.H. Friedman blamed the trustees for refusing to act: “It’s as if they resented the people who settled on the pond,” he told the Times. “It’s the old town and gown syndrome.”
Artist Alfonso Ossorio agreed in an interview with Newsday: “There is vindictiveness here. They hate the money values.”
Town Supervisor Judith Hope brushed away claims of class warfare in an interview with the Times. “If it is a class conflict, I’m sure it’s an unconscious one,” she said, while admitting, “They are an independent lot historically. I couldn’t get anywhere with them.’’
Indeed, Stuart Vorpahl, the clerk of the Board of Trustees and a professional fisherman railed to the Times, “The same nonsense with people complaining about the pond being too high or too low has been going on for 200 years.”
And while the summer people may come and go, he said, the trustees had the institutional knowledge to make the right decisions for the pond and its aquatic inhabitants. “We’re going on more than 200 years of tradition,” he intoned. “We’ve been learning about the management of a coastal pond since 1650 when the trustees held their first election. There is no better knowledge.”
Fellow trustee Cathy Lester offered a similar argument in Newsday: “The Indians used to open the ponds in the spring and fall. This knowledge of when to open the ponds is handed down from bayman to bayman as far back as I know. If we changed the times of opening, it would change the entire ecology of the pond.”
That sense of stewardship (and superiority?) was on display when one homeowner sicced his attorney on the trustees during a meeting over the 1985 flooding. “You don’t seem to realize that the pond is on my client’s lawn,” the attorney told the trustees in a courtroom scene recounted in the East Hampton Star.
One trustee responded smugly, “And you don’t seem to realize that your client’s lawn is under our pond.”
Needless to say, the homeowner was left to deal with the flooding on his own.
Four years later, one of the first out-of-season drainings took place in mid-July 1989, when the trustees approved a special undertaking to relieve water levels “after dozens of homeowners complained of flooded basements and washed-out cesspools,” Newsday reported at the time. But homeowners would quickly find that such concessions would be the exception — and not the rule — from the trustees. As the years went on, the board became ever more set in its ways and determined to maintain the twice-yearly schedule — no matter what the Pond people wanted.
Accustomed to getting their way in all other areas of life, the Georgica Pond crew decided finally to throw their money and power at the problem by way of a lawsuit. In spring 1991, they filed a class action suit against the trustees, demanding “a permanent solution to the chronic overflow of the pond, because it damages our property, ruins the environment, and is a public health menace.”
Ultimately unsuccessful, it was the first of many such suits brought by disgruntled homeowners.
Finally, at least one homeowner decided to take matters into their own hands — literally.
On March 27, 1994, Newsday announced “An LI Whodunnit” that had left the Hamptons in an uproar. Imagining a wanted poster that had “a middle-aged man in a Polo shirt, his khakis rolled up above his ankles, a shovel in his hand and a Rolex on his wrist,” the paper reported how someone — presumably a Georgica Pond homeowner — had dug a 50-foot channel to the ocean in order to lower the pond’s water level. The trustees offered a $1,000 reward, but the culprit was never nabbed.
Perhaps emboldened, someone struck again just four years later: “Georgica Pond Leak No Accident,” a July 31, 1998, headline in Newsday trumpeted. According to the paper, in the early morning hours of July 27, “someone let about half of the water escape into the Atlantic Ocean,” making the pond “more mud bath than waterway.”
“The leak was caused by someone digging a trench through the sand barrier that lies across the inlet connecting the pond to the ocean,” the report continued, noting that trustees had offered a $1,000 reward yet again for information leading to the identification of the culprit.
At least one local thought that this time, the Secret Service was to blame, noting that the lower water level “would make it easier to keep waterborne gawkers away” from the home of Steven Spielberg, where President Bill Clinton was making a visit. Martin Walsh, head of the Secret Service on Long Island, insisted, “We had nothing to do with draining the pond and we would do nothing to hurt the environment.”
The stealth digs would continue years later, long after Clinton and the suits had left. In summer 2003, George W. Bush was President when the Georgica Pond shovel crew struck again. Sometime on the evening of July 1, 2003, or early morning hours of July 2, the Georgica Pond was swept out to sea, leaving a sea of muck and a handful of stranded sailboats in its wake — and it didn’t appear to have been an act of nature. By all appearances, it seemed that a frustrated homeowner, a coterie of locals, or their hired hands had taken matters into their own hands — literally — and dug a channel to drain the pond.
According to one city official, the clandestine canal was likely 50 feet in length and anywhere from 1 to 3 feet deep to start. Local police noted the absence of machinery tracks, suggesting it was created using shovels.
However, whoever did the deed was unfamiliar with the way that the pond would react. Due to the nature of the dig, the water filling Georgica Pond rushed out with such force that the opening exploded to an estimated 150 feet wide. As a result, most of the pond’s wildlife was swept out to sea. Snapping turtles, blue crab, flounder, minnows, killifish, eels, and perch that normally called the pond home all vanished. The 70 species of bird that normally made a meal off of the fauna were disrupted as well, including the state- endangered piping plover and the state-threatened least tern.
“It’s an ecological disaster,” attorney and Georgica Pond homeowner Michael Kennedy told Vanity Fair at the time.
The trustees were quick to confirm that this draining had not been of their doing. Soon suspicion turned to others who could be blamed for causing the pond’s water level to plummet. Nearly everyone, it seemed, was suspect.
Wainwright, who was at the forefront of the 1985 pond kerfuffle, was one of the early suspects. His lawn had flooded and the head of trustees, James McCaffrey, told Vanity Fair that Wainwright had been making angry calls. Coincidentally, his home was located across from the normal site of the inlet. In addition, he was one of the only locals to have resided at the pond during each of the stealthy shovel attacks. (Wainwright died in 2010.)
Philanthropist Arthur Ross was one of those who’d been fighting the trustees for decades, too, and he also came under suspicion.
Former trustee Stuart Vorpahl called to mind the catch phrase of the 1985 faceoff as he recalled to Vanity Fair, “One time he wanted to impress on me how high the Georgica Pond had flooded his lawn. He gave me a pair of galoshes with buckles…. I said, ‘Mr. Ross, I believe you have things backward here: your lawn is in our pond.’”
Both Wainwright and Ross fervently denied any involvement. Letting out the pond was not a violation of village code, those who fell under suspicion were quick to protest their innocence — in some cases doing so even before their names were thrown into the mix.
Although Spielberg’s caretaker had reportedly called the trustees to complain about pond conditions in the past, the director insisted that he had no motive as his home had not been one of those affected by the flooding. In fact, the draining of the pond had not impacted his property. So, Spielberg insisted, he had no motive. (He had his own history with the trustees, though: In 1995, they threatened to remove a dock he’d built at his estate due to a missing permit.)
Others pointed the finger towards Calvin Klein. His then-wife, Kelly Klein, lived in an oceanfront home that had a boathouse perched on Georgica Cove’s mouth. The designer reportedly shipped in 4,000 square feet of pine trees and 70,000 dune grasses to make the home just-right. Were the Kleins driven to vandalism upon the sight of their greenery submerged in brackish pond water? They insisted no.
What about Martha Stewart? She certainly could have ordered her staff to arm themselves with shovels in an attempt to protect her property on the northeast shore, Georgica Pond’s lowest-lying area. Stewart claimed at the time that she would never do anything of the sort due to her pro-environmental stance. Besides, she asserted, she barely spent time at the home due to her own personal feud — not with the trustees, but with neighbor Harry Macklowe.
Another of Stewart’s neighbors, Ron Perelman, also reportedly raised a few eyebrows since he and those on his payroll were known to repeatedly complain to officials whenever pond levels rose too much and threatened his 57-acre property, the Creeks. In fact, the previous owner of the property was forced to build a retaining wall in a bid to keep the pond’s water away. Yet, he denied it too.
The days and weeks ticked by without answers, and the chances of authorities nabbing whoever was responsible for draining Georgica Pond evaporated like the pond itself — for at least the third time. Still, one thing was certain: As the sandy barrier reformed and water levels in the pond slowly rose thanks to springs and groundwater, the rumors, like waves, kept rolling in. They still do, and likely will for decades to come.
