Philistines at the Hedgerow

by Steven Gaines

  Schneider insinuated himself into the life of Paul Koncelik and his wife, Carol. He took up the young couple like a hobby. He dined with them a couple of times a week at his house in Mecox or took them to dinner at expensive restaurants. He adored their little boy, Jesse, whom he showered with expensive gifts, and was eventually named Jesse’s godfather. When Paul needed money, Schneider gave him work painting and renovating his house; when Paul wanted to build a spec house, Allan loaned him $40,000. Even when the sale fell through and the bank foreclosed, Allan forgave him the loan.

  In return, all Schneider seemed to want from Koncelik was companionship. Schneider sometimes discussed his “lady friends,” saying things like “Linda forgot her shoes at my place the other night.” But clearly he doted on Paul, who was constantly cheered by the attention and support. As the years passed, the two drinking buddies and confidantes fell into a deep and abiding friendship.

  4

  RAY WESNOFSKE, the chairman of the board of Bridgehampton National Bank, lives in a French château—style house with a mansard roof, high on a ridge of land overlooking the village of Bridgehampton, a considerable chunk of which he owns. Directly below the house, workers with heavy machinery harvest potatoes from rolling farmland, and in the distance the white spire of the Bridgehampton Presbyterian Church emerges from a dark canopy of autumn leaves. Beyond it all, the Atlantic Ocean shimmers, miragelike, across a pale blue horizon.

  Of the many providential moments in Allan Schneider’s life, one of the luckiest was in 1969 when Wesnofske, the scion of the South Fork’s premier farming family, called the Carolyn Rose Agency and by chance got Schneider on the phone. “My father had given me a piece of property,” Wesnofske remembered. “My wife and I decided to sell our old house and build a new one. I called the Carolyn Rose Agency and Allan showed up to look at my house. My wife, Lynn, and I enjoyed him very much. The guy was brilliant. He had a photographic memory and he could remember everything people said. He knew every house in Bridgehampton and not just who every farmer was but the names of his wife and children.”

  At one time Ray’s dad, Remi Wesnofske, farmed or leased more than 1,000 acres of South Fork farmland, buying when it was cheap. Now, in Ray’s custody, the land was making the family rich. Ray Wesnofske was no country-bumpkin farmer either; he was a Cornell graduate, an imaginative businessman, and a clever real estate speculator. Many of the other landholders who got rich in the Hamptons housing boom of the past thirty years were from families like Wesnofske’s, the children and grandchildren of Polish and Irish immigrants who owned valuable fields south of Montauk Highway, the fertile, flat farming area closest to the ocean.

  Beginning in the mid-1800s, the Hamptons had become the destination of an exodus of Polish and Irish farmers who came to America looking for fertile soil to till. Arriving first in Brooklyn and Queens, they worked their way eastward, to Hicksville, like the Wesnofske family, then to the East End, drawn by the legend of the Bridgehampton loam. The so-called no-fail soil is perhaps one of the most unusual natural blessings of the Hamptons. The result of a glacial moraine rolling over the surface of the East End 6 million years ago, the soil is nearly stone-free and very mineral-rich. This unusual soil is also porous and spongy, with little runoff on the flat terrain, so it holds water like a camel’s hump and needs little irrigation except in dry spells. So plentiful is the groundwater that the entire population of the Hamptons still depends on it for its drinking water.

  It was the Poles who began to plant large fields of potatoes, the food of midland Europe, fat and heavy Katahdin, Chippewa, and Cobbler potatoes. Before the Poles, the crops had been mostly fruits and other vegetables. They tilled the land of others, first as hired hands, then by leasing, and finally by buying up tracts. In 1908 there were six Polish families in Southampton; in 1918 there were 331. The Irish farmers were originally servants who bought out the little shanties they lived in and started to farm. By the end of the century, immigrant Polish and Irish farmers owned an estimated 70,000 acres of land.

  These farms did well for two generations, until competitive prices from industrial farming and easy refrigerated truck routes from the Midwest changed the economics of the business. World War II hurt the farmers further still, and things got worse as taxes soared in the sixties and seventies and vacant land was taxed at its “highest and best use,” which of course was for real estate development. The farmers’ children had to pay estate taxes on the land when they inherited, a financial time bomb. Rather than burden their heirs with huge taxes they would be unable to pay, the farmers began to sell off half an acre here, an acre there. Years later, working farms were given a tax break if the farmers would forever dedicate the land to agricultural use, rendering it unavailable for resale. The attrition rate of working farms in the East End was dramatic. In 1875 there were 218 farms in East Hampton; in 1935, only 117. By 1940 there were only 55 farms; and in 1966, only 20 in what was once the greatest agricultural resource of New York State.

  The Wesnofske family was smarter than most farmers, and they began to farm less and speculate in real estate more. Allan Schneider became Ray Wesnofske’s personal real estate broker, finding him properties and giving him the edge in a fast-moving market. “He’d hear about a property for sale that was a good buy and he’d call me up and say, ‘You must buy this! You must!’” That’s what happened in 1975 when a small two-bedroom farmhouse on Montauk Highway in Bridgehampton, most recently a marble and tile showroom, came up for sale at a good price. “He kept pressuring me into buying it,” Wesnofske said. “‘What am I going to do with that building?’ I asked, and he said, ‘You are going to rent it to me.’” Schneider had rancorously outgrown being an employee at the small Carolyn Rose Agency, where he had become the top earner, and wanted to strike out on his own and keep all the profits. He felt the time was ripe in the Hamptons for a sleek, modern real estate office to open, one that would cater to the nascent upscale market, something that looked and felt chic, not dowdy, something called the Allan M. Schneider Agency. “I don’t think it’s necessary for someone to all of a sudden have a lobotomy when they start dealing in country properties,” Schneider said, “to suddenly put on Oshkosh B’Gosh shoes and sit around a cracker barrel in a sweater with holes.”

  Wesnofske bought the building, and Schneider had it painted pristine white, the shutters deep hunter green, the same dark color he chose for the walls of his office, which he decorated with tasteful rows of equally spaced framed Audubon and hunting prints. Out front he hung a shingle on a signpost and parked his Mercedes by the front door. “From the day he opened the door of that first office,” said Wesnofske, “it looked like he already made a million dollars’ profit.” As time went by, Wesnofske noticed that Allan gave the impression that he owned the building, and Wesnofske, who was amused by Schneider’s airs, let it pass. Over the years, Wesnofske became Schneider’s silent partner and closest business ally.

  Schneider built his business by creating a brilliant salesforce of local people, “discovered” from other walks of life. He’d meet people, get to know them, and one day unexpectedly ask, “Did you ever think about selling real estate? I think it’s worth talking about.” His first “discovery” was Peggy Griffin, a Bridgehampton housewife who drove a school bus part-time. She also happened to be a Hildreth, one of Southampton’s founding families, and she was trusted and admired by the local farmers with land to sell. Next came Price Topping, from another founding family, one that owned horse farms. Paul Brennan, whom Schneider first met when Brennan was thirteen years old, was the son of an Irish farmer whose father owned one of the largest farms south of the highway in Bridgehampton, ripe for being chopped up and sold. In East Hampton he enticed Charles Bullock, a Maidstone Club member with a house on Lily Pond Lane, into running the East Hampton office, and in Southampton he hired Richard Harris, the retired owner of a shipping line, who provided entry into the Southampton Association estate owners and the Meadow Club. Schneider was a brilliant tutor t
o his discoveries and nourished his sales staff, referring to them as his “family.”

  Perhaps Schneider’s cleverest innovation was to open up multiple offices, one for each village, and cover the Hamptons octopus-like; first in Sag Harbor, then East Hampton, Southampton, soon Amagansett, each office identically outfitted with hunter green shutters, billiard-table green walls, and rows of beautifully framed hunting prints. He opened shop every morning by nine o’clock sharp, always dressed in a starched Oxford shirt, suit and tie, with fox-hunt-motif cuff links and tiepin. Salespeople were expected to dress appropriately as well, and he could not tolerate clutter on desks. “Get rid of those cardboard coffee cups,” he would scream, aghast. He never complained if an employee used the company charge account to order fresh flowers for the office.

  Although he was good to his “family” and engendered a loyal staff with long-term relationships, he did not suffer fools gladly and, after one of his famous three-hour lunches, could turn cutting and nasty. “He would hunt you down and dismantle your personality,” one of his brokers said. It was no wonder that when the receptionist in his Bridgehampton office saw his car pulling up in the parking lot, she shouted out, “Here he comes!”

  The distinctive green ALLAN M. SCHNEIDER, REAL ESTATE BROKER shingle, with a silhouette of a three-story white farmhouse, began to appear on the front lawns of the finest estates in the Hamptons. It became a status symbol to have the Schneider seal of approval on a home, and he could pick and choose which houses to spend his time marketing. Although a spate of other brokers sprang up out of nowhere, from 1975 on Allan Schneider “owned the Hamptons,” said Robert Keene, Southampton’s official historian. “His name was the magic word.” He reached another milestone in 1981 when he signed an exclusive agreement with Sotheby’s International Realty to represent its interests in the Hamptons, and now a second picture joined the one on the wall of the first little farmhouse that he sold. This one was of Amanda Burden, the daughter of Babe Paley and wife of Carter Burden, alighting from a private helicopter in the field just next to the Allan M. Schneider office in Bridgehampton, clients now literally dropping out of the sky for him.

  5

  IT WAS ALSO IN 1981 that Schneider solved his “empty house” problem. That spring Paul Koncelik arrived at Schneider’s Mecox house, teary-eyed with the news that his wife had asked for a divorce. In the ten years Schneider had been his close friend and supporter, things had not gone well for Koncelik. His drinking had worsened, and for some years he and his wife had lived separate lives—Koncelik on one side of the house, Carol on the other.

  “Well, it’s her loss,” Schneider said, consoling Koncelik and fixing him a drink.

  “I was very upset about the divorce,” Koncelik remembered of that night, “and Allan knew I was in a low slump. I was very down. I had nowhere to live, and Allan said, ‘Okay, Paul. I’ll rent a little house for you to live in.’ So he rented a little house for me, and I wound up staying there only one night.” The other nights Paul and Allan got very drunk together—Paul would pass out in the guest room. Eventually, “Allan asked me to move in with him because he was fond of me.”

  Koncelik knew what he was doing, even as he got entangled in the sterling-silver web of Schneider’s life. He began to feel a little embarrassed by the implication of the situation, as Allan tried to polish his “diamond in the rough.” He bought Paul a Dunhill suit and sent him to real estate school. He gave Paul a car to use—leased to the company—and a gas credit card. He had Koncelik put on the company health plan and made him a signatory on all his local charge accounts, including ones at the grocery, drug store, and liquor store.

  When the Mecox house got too small for the two of them, Schneider moved them to a series of rented houses on Further Lane in East Hampton, each one grander than the former, until in 1983 he bought Easterly, a gracious shingled farmhouse at Hither Lane and Cross Highway, just down the road from Brigadoon, the famed estate of Evan Frankel, for $300,000. He spent more than a year and nearly $1 million in improvements before they moved in; while Easterly was being renovated, they traveled to Nantucket and Key West.

  They drank more than their share; and inevitably the drunker Paul got, the more he hated himself. Some nights he would stalk off, leaving Schneider shattered, sitting alone in the house. Other occasions the real estate broker would wait for Koncelik to come home for dinner, only to wind up eating alone from a tray in front of the TV set. Allan could swear off the booze for a month or two and get the toxins out of his system, but Paul found it impossible to stop, even for a day—and Allan made it easy for him to continue. He also made it easy for him to come back. After one spat Schneider took him out to the garage, where a green 1953 MG was waiting. “Oh, look what we have here!” Schneider cried in mock surprise and handed Paul the keys—but not the title.

  Allan finally admitted to Paul that there had once been someone special in his life, a man he knew from the city named John Phillip Nagel, who was married to a wealthy woman. Nagel, Schneider explained, bought a Georgian-style mansion on the ocean in Wainscott on Schneider’s advice, but the house was in danger of being washed away by storms. Nagel had no insurance against beach erosion, but he did have fire insurance—when the house burned to the ground, he was accused of arson. Nagel was never convicted, but his life was ruined, his marriage was in shambles, and he later killed himself in a hotel room in Baltimore.

  Paul Koncelik felt sorry for Schneider. “There was no one closer to him than I was,” Paul said. “He didn’t let anybody else but me inside.” And so, as odd a couple as they were, they made a life together for ten years. “I was there for him when he got off from work to lay his thoughts on me,” Paul explained, “and [to tell him] what I thought about different things, and he’d run things by me, about his business. He would say, ‘Stick with me, Paul, you are going to be a very wealthy man,’”

  Dr. Watson

  BUY EVERYTHING in sight! Hock your gold teeth!” Allan Schneider told anyone who would listen to him. As the go-go eighties stock market pushed the Dow Jones toward the 2,000 mark for the first time in history, freshly minted millionaires were being pumped out daily. They were the cream of the baby-boomer generation: spoiled young urban professionals—stockbrokers, lawyers, junk-bond kings, financiers, and self-styled corporate raiders. This crop of brash “Masters of the Universe,” as Tom Wolfe called them in Bonfire of the Vanities, was seeking not only second homes but an arena in which to compete socially. For them, the Jersey shore was too bourgeois. Connecticut was hot and buggy. But the fabled beaches of the Hamptons, a society unto itself only two hours from Wall Street, seemed just perfect. To own a home in the blue-blooded Hamptons was to have arrived. And so, pockets stuffed with cash, a generation of arrivistes invaded the East End in numbers never before seen.

  Since they couldn’t develop a caste system based on breeding (“Their money is so new, the ink is wet,” Schneider sneered), the newcomers determined status the only way they knew how to—on the basis of possessions. The battle cry of the buyers in the eighties was “south of the highway.” In the Hamptons, property value and social status are defined by location relative to Montauk Highway. Route 27, as it is also known, is a nondescript two-lane blacktop stretching west to east, thirty-seven miles long from the Shinnecock Canal to Montauk Point. It is the jugular vein of the Hamptons, the only road in or out. It cuts a swath through class lines and the hearts of the status-conscious. For the past 350 years, the highway has been the boundary against which all land is valued.

  This peculiar arbiter of status was originally the cart path of the Puritan settlers, who also moved their cattle and cows through its mud and over its deep wheel ruts. The road was laid out to be far enough inland from the ravages of the ocean (approximately two or three miles) for it to be protected from nor’easters and hurricanes—and to skirt the chain of ponds and kettle holes. Even when railroad tracks were extended to Montauk in 1894, they paralleled the highway (but were far enough north of it so
as not to frighten the horses). The Indians had taken a less inland route and built a log bridge across Sag Pond. The bridge was so significant to the settlers that they even named the area Bridgehampton.

  This former cart road has become a major vexation to people in the Hamptons; crowded, dangerous bumper-to-bumper traffic sometimes backs up for miles. Every summer the same tired jokes are told about drivers growing beards while waiting to make a left turn. One year New York magazine infuriated homeowners north of the highway by publishing maps of alternative routes through residential neighborhoods. Only the greenest Hamptonites complain about the traffic, it is said, with renters being the worst, spending all Saturday talking about how long it took them to get there the night before and worrying the whole next day about how long it will take to get back. The prevailing wisdom in the Hamptons is that if you have to work on Fridays in the summer, or be back in the office on Monday morning, you’re not successful enough to live there.

  But more than being an inconvenience, the highway is also dangerous. The only hospital is in Southampton, and the constant traffic makes it nearly impossible for ambulances and emergency vehicles to pass. In the sixties a plan was put forward by the state Department of Transportation to build a new, $50 million, four-lane highway about two and a half miles inland of the present one; it would have completely bypassed Southampton, Bridgehampton, and East Hampton, letting out east of Amagansett. An organization called Halt the Highway insisted that bigger and better roads would only bring more traffic, not less, and that easier access would turn the Hamptons into yet another Long Island bedroom community.

  “But we’ve already been discovered” was Schneider’s opinion. “We should plan for it.” Yet in 1974, after environmental groups claimed that the runoff from the new highway would adversely affect the natural aquifers (which supply all the drinking water for the Hamptons), the East Hampton town supervisor asked that the highway bypass be struck from the state budget, and the idea was killed forever. Traffic on Montauk Highway in the summer is a deadly bane to daily life in the Hamptons.