But foremost, the highway has remained an important real estate landmark. Over the centuries, as stronger houses were built, storms were no longer reason enough to build homes far inland, and because the land south of the highway was limited—as opposed to the tens of thousands of acres available to the north—this narrow band of property became the most prestigious and desirable, increasing its value tenfold. While north of the highway was mostly wooded, south of the highway boasted the kind of luminous landscapes that made the Hamptons legendary: shingled farmhouses and red barns surrounded by flat fields, swatches of green and toffee-colored farmland interrupted only by a pond just beyond the ocean’s reach.
Some of the stigma about living north of the highway has been diminished, since there are many beautiful waterfront vistas facing Peconic Bay. Still, over the years living south of the highway has acquired a mythical aura. It is reputed that the temperature is always ten degrees cooler in the summer or five degrees warmer in the winter, or that the highway creates an invisible wall over which the humidity will not pass, or that there are fewer bugs. (“Ocean breezes when there is no air a quarter of a mile inshore,” says a turn-of-the-century brochure for a rooming house, “and at this spot, no mosquitoes.”) Indeed, because the land south of Route 27 is closer to the cooling breezes of the Atlantic, the temperatures are lower and the air feels less humid in the summer, and the converse is true in the winter; it actually does snow less south of the highway because of the proximity to the salt air. But most reputed benefits of living south of the highway are pure hogwash; there are not only mosquitoes south of the highway but also flies and ticks, and none more privileged than those to the north.
One’s location relative to the highway—and when one arrived there—is sometimes discernible through one’s telephone prefix. In the mid-eighties, when the phone company used up its ten thousand combinations for the two main telephone exchanges, 283 for Southampton and 324 for East Hampton, it added 287 and 329, respectively. New houses north of the highway were more likely to be assigned 287 and 329. So terrible was this numerical stigma that summer renters turned down houses that had the déclassé exchanges. Brokers were amazed to be told sometimes that the sale of a house was contingent on whether the seller would include the phone number as part of the deal; the phone company reported being offered bribes for the old exchange. One Southampton hostess in a 287 rental printed the 283 number of a secretarial service on the RSVP of her party invitations rather than give her shameful home number. The summer that Calvin Klein rented while his house was being renovated, he put up with phone calls for the previous occupants so as not to lose the house’s 324 exchange. He lucked out when he got a 324 for his house on West End Road, as did Ron Perelman and his then spouse, TV gossipeuse Claudia Cohen, who were fortunate enough to inherit the previous owner’s 324 exchange when they bought a Lily Pond Lane house. “Thank God,” Cohen said drolly. “This means we won’t be socially ostracized.”
Worse than a 287 or a 329 exchange, however, is 288, the prefix for Westhampton Beach, or “Wronghampton,” as it is sometimes called. Snobs like Schneider don’t even consider Westhampton a part of the Hamptons at all, since it is on the western side of the Shinnecock Canal and is basically a modern creation of developers who gave it its “-hampton” name. It is considered a predominately Jewish community (although in reality it is probably no more Jewish than East Hampton is) and also suffers from a dearth of big-name star power (since Bob Fosse died, its most noted resident is Marvin Hamlisch). One summer a Westhampton man accused the Southampton restaurant basilico of anti-Semitism, claiming it refused his reservation because he had a Westhampton exchange. The owners of the restaurant denied it, but the issue was taken seriously enough to be reported in the New York Times.
Allan Schneider played to the weaknesses of the status seekers, and the summer renters were perhaps the most desperate. “Own or rent?” is a typical gambit at a Hamptons cocktail party, and although renters are paying through the nose for the privilege of a temporary residence at the seaside resort, they are dismissed by owners as second-class citizens. (“North or south?” is the next most frequently asked question.) Allan loathed dealing with rentals and turned them over to his salespeople, but he always cautioned, “This year’s renter is next year’s buyer.” Smiling beatifically, he would tell a young couple hoping to rent for $25,000 for the season, “For fifty thousand dollars you get a wonderful house, a divine summer, and lots of new friends between May and September.”
As the stock market continued its upswing, real estate prices began to skyrocket. In 1980 the price of an acre south of the highway jumped from $75,000 to $125,000, and by 1990, $250,000 for an oceanfront acre was not uncommon. A shiny new four-bedroom house on a potato field in Sagaponack, with a heated swimming pool and Har-Tru tennis court, that would have cost a whopping $300,000 in 1978 was commanding at least $800,000 five years later. When a buyer said that he wanted to buy a house for $200,000, Schneider chortled and said, “Forget it. This isn’t Flushing.”
The Wall Street money also ignited the greatest speculative housing explosion on Long Island since Levittown was built at the end of World War II. There just weren’t enough existing mansions for all the hungry new money, so new ones were rushed onto the market by the thousands. The eighties’ real estate boom became the ruination of two of the most beautiful hamlets of the Hamptons, Bridgehampton and Sagaponack. They had been relatively forgotten communities, overlooked in the desire to live in the more fashionable Southampton and East Hampton. But it was Bridgehampton and Sagaponack (which comes from the Indian word meaning “land of the great ground nuts [potatoes])” that had the desirable expanses of potato fields. Within the space of a few years, the sweeping fields began to look as if they had developed a pox. New arrivals used their homes as calling cards, erecting thousands of what they saw as architectural “personal statements.”
The roots of this kind of house can be traced to 1965, when Charles Gwathmey, then a student of architecture without a license, designed for his artist father, Robert Gwathmey, a cedar-clad house of basic geometric shapes in a field in Amagansett. So beautiful was Gwathmey’s house that it won over even the staunchest traditionalists, and it became an icon of the kind of grace a modern house could command on an open field. It also became the kind of house to which every two-bit architect and nouveau riche millionaire aspired. There was only one Gwathmey, but lots of imitators; before long everywhere you looked, there was a modern house being framed up on a potato field—each one a geometrically shaped Bauhaus rip-off. Even with three-acre minimum plot sites, the 10,000-square-foot modern and postmodern houses, pool houses, tennis courts, and swimming pools seemed to abut like status shrines lined row on row. The implications of what the East Hampton Star had called “staggering” twenty years before was now simply disastrous.
Paul Goldberger, architecture critic of the New York Times, described the glut of new homes as “architecture of shrill egotism—whose arrogance says as much about its owner’s aesthetic tastes as about the extent of their responsibilities to the land on which they have settled.” Parsonage Lane in Sagaponack, which ran through the center of large tracts of rich farmland, became so defiled with multimillion-dollar homes as to render the landscape unrecognizable. The Hamptons natives renamed it “Parvenu Lane.” The rest of the hamlet is carved up with pocket communities built on dead-end streets, pretentiously called “closes” and often named after the builder’s granddaughter or niece. One of the most grievous examples of the narcissistic assault on the fields stands on Fairfield Pond Lane, down the road from the house formerly owned by author John Irving and only half a mile from the Sagaponack dunes. A wealthy local man built a house made of corrugated steel. The rippled structure, which looks like the home of the tin woodsman from The Wizard of Oz, is surrounded by a moatlike pool, six feet wide, crossed by a paved footbridge. The house, galvanized and shiny, catches and reflects the brilliant Hamptons sun like a magnifying glass, and is visible fo
r miles around as a burning mirror of light. The hapless couple who owned the property next door were blinded by the tin house at certain times of the day and spent $40,000 on trees and landscaping to cut off the view. But within months it was all dead: The house reflected the sunlight with such ferocity that it scorched the new landscaping to death.
2
WITH MULTIPLE OFFICES and a well-trained sales staff of more than seventy employees, the Allan M. Schneider Agency was like a tsunami rolling over the Hamptons real estate market. Schneider worked at it with zest. Bright and early every morning he was in his Bridgehampton office, crisp and sharp no matter how late he had been up or how much he had had to drink the night before. He supervised every deal that went through the company’s many offices via a network of “managers,” often fielding fifty phone calls a day from his salespeople, advising, cajoling, teaching. His mouth watered as he read the county clerk’s transfer of deeds, and he tracked not only the sales of his own offices but those of every other broker. With his remarkable recall, he became a walking resource of every house, vacant lot, and fishing shack for sale on all the East End.
As the money poured in, Schneider began to live in a grand manner. In 1988 he bragged to Manhattan Inc. magazine that he had spent $1 million the previous year supporting his lifestyle, which included maintaining a pied-à-terre with a book-lined library on Central Park South in Manhattan. In a stroke of reverse chic, he also bought a five-bedroom vacation home in the WASP fortress of Dark Harbor, Maine, a house that once belonged to Lee Fencers, the owner of the Marshall Field’s department stores. He began to spend every August in Dark Harbor to get away from the crowds in the Hamptons, and he would flatbed his Mercedes and white MG Roadster up to Maine and ferry his weekend guests, including Paul Koncelik, back and forth on a privately chartered plane.
He became much more pretentious now that he was rich. At the office he insisted that coffee be served to him and his clients on a Paul Revere silver tray, with hunting-motif china; at home only Absolut martinis were poured for guests into nine-ounce chilled Baccarat crystal stem glasses. He bought Noël Coward’s cigarette lighter for his coffee table and a Lakeland terrier named Duff, that bit people. While he could be petulant and demanding, he was also boundlessly generous with his friends and employees. It tickled him to invite friends to go shopping with him at an exclusive store and then insist that they pick out something for themselves as a gift. At Christmas his bonuses to salespeople were better than those of any other agency in the Hamptons, and even his household staff received Hermès wallets stuffed with $100 bills. There was no employer more understanding when asked for an advance against next month’s pay, and many of Schneider’s close friends even say that they felt a sense of security in knowing him, that they could turn to him in an emergency and borrow five or ten or twenty thousand dollars without his ever bringing it up until they were ready to pay it back.
In May 1987 he and Paul moved into the historic Tyler House at 127 Main Street, which he bought from Ted Conklin, the owner of the American Hotel, for $700,000, over a few martinis. Conklin had purchased the old house two years earlier from the Riverhead Building Supply Company, which had taken it over when a contractor defaulted on a $550,000 bill. Conklin had made the place livable. It was an old-fashioned country home, with a formal central dining room, den, spacious living room, and four bedrooms on the second floor. Schneider spiffed up the entrance by adding Greek columns and in the back built an elegant pool house with sphinxlike statuary. A Manhattan decorator created the dominion of a WASP dreadnought. Schneider also acquired a doting housekeeper, Eula Ellsworth, who polished and cleaned and looked after him like a jealous mother. To complete the picture of a country squire, he hired a full-time French chef, Jean-Claude Lacosse. The young Frenchman was thin and effeminate, with a large nose and a thick Parisian accent. He was only slightly less grand than his employer, and Schneider especially liked the way Jean-Claude pronounced his name, “Mr. Schnei-dare,” making him sound very Continental.
Even with his tremendous success, Schneider was outspending his income, leveraging considerable debt for his major purchases. A man of less pride might have cut back on his high living when in 1987 the Hamptons real estate market came crashing to a halt only seven months after he moved into Tyler House. On October 19, in what was the biggest calamity since the great crash of 1929, the Dow Jones plunged 508 points. Two years later the stock market took another historic dive, this time for 190 points. The impact on Hamptons real estate was about the same as jamming a crowbar into the spokes of a speeding bicycle. The rental market was the first to crash, down 30 percent the summer of 1988, and then the speculative housing market nosedived. Brokers scrambled for customers, and the fields of Sagaponack and Southampton were strewn with half-finished gargantuan homes, abandoned midstream by either their speculative builders or would-be homeowners who suddenly couldn’t support a 10,000-square-foot house with Corian countertops in the kitchen. South of the highway became the Hamptons version of Tobacco Road, with mansions standing empty on muddy, unlandscaped lots, signs hand-painted on pieces of plywood nailed to the front door, HOUSE FOR SALE, CALL OWNER.
Schneider thought it unseemly—and bad for business—to fuss too much about the recession. Things would turn around before long—and he was right. In the long run, the crashes of 1987 and 1989 were but blips on the real estate radar screen. But in the interim, between all the houses and offices and employees, Schneider started to fall behind in his bills. There were telltale signs, like one night at the Laundry restaurant when his American Express card was declined. The caterer had to wait for his check, and he told the plumber, who gossiped to the oil delivery company; eventually half the town knew Schneider was overextended. He began to borrow large sums of money to cover his debts—often from Ray Wesnofske, sometimes as much as $20,000 at a clip—but as soon as a real estate deal closed, he’d pay it right back. Schneider became adept at juggling creditors, but toward the end of the 1980s money was so tight that he even borrowed $6,500 from Paul Koncelik, wiping out the unemployed carpenter’s savings account.
Paul Koncelik had been along on Schneider’s incredible ride the past ten years, but being stuffed into the jump seat hadn’t been very kind to him. He was still adorable and entertaining, although now his dimples were hidden in deep smile lines and his frame had disappeared under a layer of pudgy edema. Koncelik hadn’t worked in years, despite the desk that sat waiting for him at the Allan M. Schneider Agency. Things would not have been so bad for him, perhaps, if every night didn’t end in a blind drunken rage, bellowing at Schneider, who was mean and goading. Koncelik, in turn, seemed hell-bent on embarrassing the proper broker. One night he arrived at Schneider’s $10,000 table at the Hampton Classic Horse Show so drunk that he fell face forward into his food. Another time he appeared at Tyler House in the middle of a cocktail party and, marching up to Schneider, bellowed something about “sucking cock!” Allan was so stunned and mortified that he let his martini glass tilt, all the vodka pouring out.
Increasingly the disagreements would dissolve into fisticuffs, ending with Schneider shouting to Jean-Claude, “Call the police! Call the police!” After these rows Koncelik would pack his one suitcase, throwing the rest of his belongings in a garbage bag, and drive into the woods, where he would sleep it off. Then a few days later, in need of clean clothes and a bath, he’d sheepishly turn up at Tyler House under the disapproving eye of the housekeeper.
The ultimate blowout was set off when Koncelik had the temerity to ask about Schneider’s last will and testament—or lack of one. Schneider never wrote a will or assigned a power of attorney, afraid it would bring him bad luck. Koncelik brought up the issue because loyal Jean-Claude had been diagnosed with AIDS and had recently made out a will leaving all his earthly possessions to Schneider. Koncelik began to think that he had spent nearly twenty years at Schneider’s side, as his companion as well as his bane, and wanted to make sure he would get some of the riches Schneider had promi
sed him over the years. “You know, you’re not that much older than me, Allan,” Koncelik said to him one night in November 1991, “so maybe we should get it in writing. You know, I’m only eleven years younger than you, and longevity runs in your family.”
Schneider tossed him out that night, vowing that this time he would not let Koncelik back in. Desperate to stick to his word, he rented a small house for Koncelik in Sag Harbor and had his company pay the bills. “Maybe this will be the best thing for him,” Schneider said wistfully as Koncelik came to pick up his belongings. “He’ll never get better living here.” It broke Schneider’s heart to see him leave, and he made sure to send over brand-new Ralph Lauren sheets and towels so that Paul would be comfortable. But Paul never actually lived in that house. Sometimes he slept in the guest room at Tyler House, and sometimes he just disappeared. Schneider really didn’t care anymore. He just wanted him gone. He hadn’t seen Koncelik for several days that December day in 1991 when he was celebrating the contract signing for his new Amgansett office.
Schneider was coming off one of his famous three-hour lunches at Gordon’s restaurant when Bruce Cotter saw him in the street in East Hampton at about 5:30. Cotter realized that Schnieder was too drunk to drive, so he suggested that Schneider come home with him—his wife, Carol Lynn, would cook them up some steaks for dinner.
3
ALLAN SCHNEIDER was declared dead at Southampton Hospital at 8:30 P.M., December 6,1991, although most likely he was already dead on the floor of Bruce Cotter’s dining room. The autopsy revealed that a second piece of steak, almost four inches long, was caught farther down his throat, half chewed in his drunken state. The Heimlich maneuver had managed only to revive him with enough air left in his lungs to apologize before he died of a massive heart attack.
Philistines at the Hedgerow Page 4