Outgoing East Hampton Town Board Republicans, in a parting gesture of defiance, last Thursday night approved a hotly debated measure to expand the Town Trustees' authority over waterfront development.

The incoming Democratic majority, however, called the action futile.

Supervisor Cathy Lester said the new board's "first order of business" would be to repeal the Trustee environmental review permit, as the law is known.

Another Hearing

The new law gives the Trustees authority over all waterfront land in town, except in Montauk. And it appears that the law may take effect for at least a month before it can legally be overturned.

Cynthia Ahlgren Shea, the returning town attorney, noted the town was required to file the approved law with the state within five business days, meaning by today.

The Democrats cannot repeal it without a new public hearing, she said, which cannot be held until late January or early February because of advance-notice requirements.

At that time, she said, the comments made at the hearing should be a factor in the board's decision to repeal or not.

Indignant Councilwoman

Still and all, Ms. Lester admonished the Republicans for adopting lame-duck legislation at their last formal meeting as a majority and said overturning that night's 3-to-2 vote would be the Democrats' "first order of business" when they took control at the annual organization meeting, on Friday, Jan. 2.

"It's very unfair to not even give this a chance," countered Councilwoman Nancy McCaffrey, with obvious frustration.

Mrs. McCaffrey, who leaves office on Wednesday, sponsored the resolution to adopt TERP. The idea to expand Trustee powers originated with Councilman Thomas Knobel, who likewise leaves office next week.

Z.B.A. Excluded

The law will, at least temporarily, eliminate the Zoning Board of Appeals from the review of most waterfront projects. All such projects are now reviewed by the Z.B.A., and by the Trustees as well when Trustee-owned land is involved.

Jay Schneiderman, the Z.B.A. chairman, said a few pending applications could be called into question while TERP is in effect.

"Terminated"?

One is that of Dieter Hach, who applied for a variance to build a revetment off Louse Point Road in Springs and was required by the Z.B.A. to perform an environmental study first.

In another, a hearing on Andrew Marks's plan to rebuild and expand a retaining wall on the eastern shore of Three Mile Harbor was adjourned to mid-January.

Richard Whalen, the deputy town attorney who drafted the TERP law, said he believed those and similar applications will be "terminated" by its passage.

The Z.B.A.'s jurisdiction over them will end, he said, and the property owners will have to start all over again by applying for a Trustee permit.

Wait For The Dust

It is conceivable, said Mr. Whalen, that the Trustees could make an entirely different decision from the Z.B.A.'s - in Mr. Hach's case, for example, by granting him a permit and ruling the study unnecessary. But, he said, that was unlikely to occur before the new Town Board repeals the law.

"The smartest thing would be for these applicants to wait until the dust settles," said Mr. Whalen. Their Z.B.A. applications will probably continue when that happens, he said.

Mr. Marks's retaining wall was on the Trustees' agenda Tuesday night.

The public response during an August hearing was evenly split, though both Democrats and Republicans have claimed overwhelming support for their position.

Harks To Trustees

Supervisor Lester and Councilman Peter Hammerle voted against TERP last week. Councilman-elect Job Potter, whose November victory created the Democratic majority, told The Star he too was opposed to TERP and would vote to repeal it.

But Mr. Potter said he heard an underlying message - that the Trustees' authority needs to be acknowledged and strengthened in some way. Perhaps, he said, the Z.B.A. and the Trustees could hold a joint hearing on each application for developing the Trustee-owned water front. There are, he noted, just a few per year.

"And I would hope [the Trustees] make better use of the Planning Department than they do," he said, adding the election of four Democrats as Trustees, just one short of a majority, could make that more likely.

The Fourth of July fireworks display in Montauk was shut down about 15 minutes after it started on Monday thanks to what may have been a defective shell.

"It was closed down because there was an explosion that was not part of the show," said James Dunlop, East Hampton Town's senior fire marshal. Mr. Dunlop, who was in charge of safety, stopped the display a little more than halfway through to prevent further explosions caused by the ensuing sparks.

Mr. Dunlop would not comment on whether the technician in charge of the Bay Fireworks display showed signs of being intoxicated. However, Town Police Chief Todd Sarris confirmed yesterday that he had been given a sobriety test.

"He passed it," Chief Sarris said. "There was an indication that showed he may have been drinking, but there was a question of when and whether he may have had a drink - before or after the fire marshal closed down the site."

Town police said between 10,000 and 15,000 spectators showed up to watch the fireworks, which were launched from a roped-off section of the ocean beach near the east end of Old Montauk Highway. The event typically draws a large crowd and this year may have attracted extra people from East Hampton, whose July Fourth fireworks were canceled to protect piping plovers.

Dave DiSunno, the town's chief fire marshal, said a shell went off halfway through a cylinder, which fell over and continued to explode on the sand. The impact knocked over several other cylinders, starting a chain reaction of explosions and spreading sparks that ignited nearby beach grass.

According to Mr. Dunlop, as the beach crew within the roped-off area was trying to stomp out the smaller fires, sparks blew toward the explosives for the pyrotechnic finale, set up a few feet away. Beach crew members, among them Mr. Dunlop and Bay Fireworks employees, were afraid the fireworks for the finale would all ignite at once, causing a huge explosion.

Mr. Dunlop decided to call for help from the Montauk Fire Department, which sent two brush trucks and about 20 firefighters just in case. "It was a pretty hairy situation for a while," he said.

"It's a miracle the technician wasn't hurt. There were sparks flying all over him," said Larraine Creegan, the executive director of the Montauk Chamber of Commerce, which sponsored the $18,000 event. The show was supposed to last 25 minutes, she said; instead, it started at 9:28 and was called off at 9:45.

This was not the first time the chamber was disappointed with Bay Fireworks, which is based in Huntington Station. The 2001 July Fourth display, which was set to go off in Lake Montauk, started two hours late and lasted only about five minutes before it was deemed unsafe.

At the time, the chamber blamed the Bay Fireworks technicians for arriving late. Bay Fireworks claimed the barge the chamber provided from which the technicians were to launch the explosives was too small, and that the display had to be redesigned.

Spectators near Umbrella Beach, from which the fireworks were launched on Monday, could see heavy smoke and an amber glow radiating from all the inadvertent fires there. Complaints about the show could be heard that night, but Ms. Creegan said no one had complained to the chamber.

She said one group on the ocean beach downtown had an impressive cache of fireworks of their own. "There were a lot of other fireworks on the beach that saved us," Ms. Creegan said.

The chamber's board of directors called "an emergency meeting" yesterday to discuss what to do about Monday's foul-up. On Tuesday Mr. Dunlop said his office had not cited Bay Fireworks and was waiting to see the results of the company's own investigation.

After the launching site was shut down on Monday, a team from Bay Fireworks was dispatched to dismantle the remaining launch tubes and remove them. The last of the material was taken from the beach at 4:30 a.m.

Mr. Dunlop, who was at the beach several times during the set-up and from 5 p.m. on, finished his work day at 5:30 a.m. on Tuesday.

Bay Fireworks did not return phone calls by press time.

Huddled Leadership

East Hampton

December 9, 1997

Dear Editor:

It is downright incredible to get the facts about our little itsy bitsy town straight from the mouth of a national newspaper, specifically the Sunday, Dec. 7, New York Times. It seems the new buzz word is trash-speak, referring, of course, to our beloved landfill.

Aren't we lucky that the elections are over and now the real issues can surface. The bogus airport issue can now be allowed to die so that the shock of a $95 million landfill fiasco can be addressed and a scapegoat found.

Through mismanagement, incompetence, and the lack of foresight, we will be saddled with an $80 million debt. Add to that another $15 million lawsuit filed by the Bistrians, which in all probability is a response to the town's arrogant stand on their golf course development. This, of course, is not a problem since it will insure all those politically connected law firms work defending the town's indefensible actions.

The Democrats shrewdly diverted the issues regarding the enormous cost of various town expenses by focusing their campaign on the "great airport scare." The reality of the airport issue was to simply repair an existing 100-foot-wide runway in order to make it safer for all aircraft. In no way could our present runways accommodate larger commercial aircraft than are currently using it to date.

I can just imagine the leadership huddled together behind closed doors, saying, "Since our property taxes are lower than all the other towns in Suffolk, it will be easy to sell them a major tax increase and at the same time take a tough stand on spending by cutting medical benefits." As for the rest of the money, we'll beg from the state and Federal Government." That scenario sounds about right for these forward thinkers.

Of course, a couple more screw-ups like the landfill and the only other course of action will be to forget completely about the environment and downzone building lots so that we can have more houses and developments in order to enlarge our tax base.

Isn't it unusual that The Star never reported any of this information to us? Whether it be good or bad for a particular political party has no meaning when it comes to the health of the East Hampton Town citizen!

Sincerely,

EUGENE Z. HALLER, D.C.

P.S. I just received my new tax bill for December 1997. My taxes were raised $400. This is only the beginning. . . .

See an editorial on this subject in this section. Ed.

Their Little Hearts

East Hampton

December 18, 1997

To The Editor:

God bless their little hearts!

To anyone who has ever experienced the horror of divorce, my heart goes out to you. Not only is letting go of the ones you love the most difficult thing I have ever tried to accomplish, it's also the most painful, heartbreaking experience I have ever encountered and, when children are involved, God bless their little hearts!

I can just imagine what goes through a 5-year-old child's mind when they are told mommy and daddy are not going to live together anymore. They are told you can visit daddy every Tuesday and Thursday evening for two hours and every other weekend you get to sleep over on Saturday night, isn't that great?

You're going to have two homes now, two yards to play in, two bedrooms, two bicycles, two swing sets, isn't that exciting? This Thanksgiving you're with daddy, and mommy has you for Christmas, oh boy.

We can't tell them the truth, you're being robbed of your right to a real family, you are now a broken-home statistic with two mothers and two fathers. You get the pleasure of being jerked back and forth for the next 15 years, you're the rope in a tug of war game that nobody wins, lucky you.

You get a stepparent, what fun. I don't care how much therapy you give them, they know who their parents are and that man that sleeps with mommy is not daddy. No matter what any counselor or doctor may tell you, you will never love this child like your own, you may love them, feel them in your heart, but face the facts, blood is thicker than water and if there are other children involved there will be favoritism, it's only human nature. Everywhere you go, people just know, there goes a broken family. What a shame!

People may tell you, children learn to accept their stepparent, they adapt to their new way of life, everything will work out.

Yes, they accept, they adapt, but not because they want to, because they have no other choice and things do work out, they take the loss, they are robbed. I, being a father of two boys, 9 and 5 years old, am not proud of what has happened to our family.

When they get older and remember the heartache and pain we've caused them, I hope and pray they don't follow in their parents' footsteps and rob their children, knowing, as they've learned from their parents, how easily it is done! God bless their little hearts!

So if any of you out there is contemplating divorce with children involved, do whatever it takes to make your marriage work. Get help, seek counseling, change your ways, and above all communicate, sit down with your spouse daily and talk, without interruptions, feel what they feel, and hopefully with the help of God the love will last forever.

I do understand if the love is gone, you have sought help, prayed to God, tried everything in your power and still the love cannot be brought back, then you have no other choice. Living with someone you do not love is no way of life, for children with parents who do not love each other it is no way of life either.

So don't let this happen to you, do whatever it takes to make your marriage work. Give your 100 percent and if the love is there you will get 100 percent back. So please remember, family is the most important thing in life, family belongs together not apart!

God bless their little hearts.

Sincerely,

RON BENNETT

Voodoo Science

Sag Harbor

December 14, 1997

To The Editor:

I want to explain my objection to the methods employed by the groups that are attacking Brookhaven National Laboratory. It's not that their ideas are false, though I do think most of them are, but that they support these ideas using voodoo science.

What's voodoo science? It's a method that starts with a central assertion that is assumed to be true, and that then seeks to square all observations with that dogma.

An example of voodoo science is creationism. Creationism asserts not that the universe was created by God (a proposition in which lots of reasonable people, including scientists, believe) but that He created it exactly when and how the Book of Genesis, literally interpreted, says He did.

"Creation science" seeks to shoehorn all the observed facts of geology, biology, and astronomy into a 6,000-year time frame, rather than letting these facts speak for themselves.

Because the theory that a voodoo science seeks to protect is usually a fairly absurd one, it is generally necessary for it to have a fallback story to use when all else fails.

That fallback story of creationism is that God created the universe 6,000 years ago in just such a way that it looks considerably older, presumably so that He would have an excuse to damn all scientists to hell.

Similarly, the anti-Brookhaven movement is a religion (one with a devil but no God) whose central dogma is that Brookhaven National Laboratory is responsible for all ills on Long Island that are similar in any way to ones that have anywhere, under any circumstances, been caused by radiation. Its version of voodoo science seeks to tell, not whether a particular evil has emanated from the laboratory (guilt or innocence to be determined), but that it occurred (guilt assumed from the outset). This poses a problem, however. What does one do when even creative spin-doctoring can't produce a plausible guilt scenario?

That's when anti-Brookhavenism, like creationism, needs a fallback story. The fallback story here is that any results that appear to exonerate the laboratory must have come about through conspiracy and coverup.

This is not to say that conspiracies and coverups never occur. But to claim that government officials must be lying simply because they are government officials, without any evidence to that effect, is to ratify the world view of the right-wing militias and the Unabomber.

Sincerely,

JOHN ANDREWS

Note: For purposes of identification, I perform research on energy-efficient buildings at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

Please address correspondence to [email protected]

Please include your full name, address and daytime telephone number for purposes of verification.

Not to carp unduly about The Times, but we also have a quarrel with a signed opinion piece, called "Haul Seiners Have It All Wrong," that appeared in its Long Island section on Sunday.

It was written by the chairman of the Coastal Conservation Association of New York, Charles Witek 3d, who called haulseiners the "strip miners of the inshore sea," and said their nets kill thousands of bluefish and other untargeted species, even sea birds.

According to Mr. Witek, the haulseiners' sole motive is greed. He believes that if they are allowed to pursue a modified version of the fishery banned by the state in 1990, they would, in effect, deplete striped bass stocks singlehandedly.

This despite the facts that, under a proposal now under consideration, the nets would be shorter and the fishermen would not be allowed to set on weekends or without an independent observer as witness.

Opinions are opinions, of course, although we would have preferred to see Mr. Witek's as a letter to the editor rather than as an op-ed piece, which implies that what is written is responsible comment.

The best opinions are supported by fact and come from reliable sources. The Times should have identified Mr. Witek's organization for what it is: "one of the more radical sportfishing groups which advocates the elimination of any commercial striped bass fishery in New York," according to an official of the State Department of Environmental Conservation.

Mr. Witek blames "netters" for overfishing when in fact recreational fisheries have taken a far greater share of the popular inshore sport and food fish. State and Federal statistics also show that sportfishing has resulted in the harvest of as much or more fluke, winter flounder, blackfish, and sea bass than their commercial counterparts have taken over the past decade.

As Mr. Witek states, commercial bass fishermen have failed to fill their 520,000-pound striped bass quota in recent years. What he neglects to say is that, because they have no quota, sportfishermen were free to remove well over three million pounds of stripers from the sea last year, a trend that shows evidence of increasing.

When the disparity between the recreational and commercial catch of bass is acknowledged, the 35 East End haul-seine fishermen, especially with their quota, size limits, and the modified gear they now have proposed, present a rather weak threat, if any, to the fishery.

Just days after filing suit in federal court against Southampton Town, the county, the state, the governor, the Long Island Rail Road, three golf courses, and two real estate developments, the Shinnecock Indian Nation has run into potential legal barriers to their claim to 3,600 acres in Shinnecock Hills and Tuckahoe.

Their suit is based on the federal Indian Non-Intercourse Act, dating back to 1790, which declares that the taking of Indian lands is illegal without the approval of Congress. Claims based on the act have been highly successful in the past two decades, but some courts appear to be taking a different view now.

In March, the United States Supreme Court raised the issue of timeliness in a case involving the Oneida tribe against the city of Sherrill, N.Y. In deciding against the tribe, the court said the proposed remedy, a property tax exemption, would be too disruptive to the community at this point.

The Oneidas had bought new land on the open market more than 100 years after their membership vacated or sold nearly all the original reservation and left the state. Since these circumstances were unusual, experts in Indian law have been waiting for another case to be decided to see if the trend would hold.

It did. On June 28, the United States Court of Appeals, Second Circuit, dismissed a $248 million district court judgment for the Cayuga Nation of New York and the Seneca-Cayuga Tribe of Oklahoma in which they staked a claim to land upstate.

The tribes said the non-intercourse act had been violated in the state's appropriation of the land. Their suit was originally filed in 1980. In a 2-to-1 decision, the appeals court cited the Sherrill decision and said that in this case, as well, the tribes had waited too long to bring the action.

Gov. George E. Pataki has attempted to settle similar suits with monetary settlements and proposals for casinos in such areas as the Catskills. In the Cayugas' case, however, the state had appealed the earlier settlement, saying it was unjustified.

Mr. Pataki said in a statement that the decision was a "tremendous victory for the property owners and taxpayers in central New York. . . ."

"We will continue to take whatever steps are necessary to protect New Yorkers - from Grand Island to Long Island - as we move forward to resolve any remaining land claims within the state," he said. The mention of Long Island appears to refer specifically to the Shinnecock case.

Beverly Jensen, a spokeswoman for the Shinnecocks, said they had no comment on the matter. "Our lawyers are looking at the decision," she said, adding, however, that the Shinnecocks were confident their case would "be judged on its own merits."

Michael Cohen, an attorney with Nixon Peabody who has been representing Southampton Town in its litigation against the Shinnecocks' proposal for a casino, said the Cayuga decision had "significant implications for the Shinnecocks' complaint," which was filed on June 15 and seeks compensation for the land in Tuckahoe and Shinnecock Hills.

A claim cannot wait 150 years, Mr. Cohen said. "If tribes sit on rights they will lose them."

The issue is not only timeliness, but how the land has been used in the interim period between its appropriation and the lawsuit, he said: "It's not like the land in Southampton is all vacant, unimproved property."

Walter Olson, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute who writes about excesses of civil litigation as well as land claim cases, called the Cayuga ruling "a bolt from the blue."

"If upheld, it turns the field upside down," he said. "It extinguishes most or all of these claims."

However, Mr. Olson said judges might still be "queasy" about offering no remedy whatsoever and out of sympathy provide some cash settlement or other award. As it stands now, "a three-judge panel with one dissenter is not necessarily an accurate prediction of what the Supreme Court will do," should a case go that far.

After following the land claim cases of New York State's upstate tribes for many years, Mr. Olson said, he believed that the Shinnecock case could prompt Congressional action to prevent such claims from coming forward in the future - perhaps with legislation reversing a 1985 Supreme Court ruling that lawsuits like the Shinnecocks' were not subject to time limits.

Jon Schneider, a spokesman for Representative Tim Bishop, said that Mr. Bishop would be willing to talk with other members of Congress to see what the chances for such a measure might be. He said Mr. Bishop believes, however, that the Cayuga decision "really changes the landscape in a major way."

Mr. Bishop continues to maintain, as well, that the Shinnecock suit is without merit, because the tribe lacks federal recognition and because the reservation boundaries are well defined by state law.

In the meantime, some East End residents have reported that a company that shows up on their caller-ID as "Central Research" with a New York City phone number has been conducting a survey asking under what circumstances they would support a casino.

Ms. Jensen said she knew of no one representing the tribe who had commissioned such a survey, and wondered aloud if an independent group had done so.

Village Petition

solved, the residents of the proposed village will have 40 days to vote on whether to go ahead with it. Mr. Brown said he was confident that the petition would be upheld.

Among those who might mount a challenge are the proponents of the village of Dunehampton whose own petition was rejected by Mr. Heaney last year. Lawyers representing Dunehampton's supporters took the matter to the State Court of Appeals, which recently declined to hear the case. They have until Aug. 1 to challenge the Sagaponack petition, and only people living within the boundaries of the Sagaponack School District can do that.

Thomas Butler, a partner in the law firm Chadbourne and Park in New York City who represents Dunehampton's supporters, said they were reviewing the Sagaponack decision and considering their options. They plan to make a statement soon, he said.

A challenge on their part would be a pre-emptive strike defending their own petition for a village with roughly the same boundaries. It was filed under the name of Southampton Beach (Mr. Heaney deemed their Dunehampton petition insufficient, so they have filed a second one).

The petition for Southampton Beach will be eligible for consideration now that Mr. Heaney has made a decision about Sagaponack's petition. However, without the beachfront that would lie within a Sagaponack village, Southampton Beach would not have the required land or population to incorporate.

Sagaponack residents were among those who challenged the original Dunehampton petition, and tried not to repeat the mistakes made there - including the names of people who had died, for instance, or who were not permanent residents. "And they still met the test," Mr. Heaney said.

The push for a Sagaponack village was at first a defensive measure against Dunehampton's attempt to carve off its coastline, but Alfred R. Kelman said the mission had now united the community "to move forward as one village."

"The insular nature of Sagaponack and our community spirit was aroused by the aggressive action to redraw historical lines," he said.

Mr. Kelman said a Sagaponack village would "continue under a similar manner. There's no mystery here." The residents would decide what their relationship would be to Southampton Town, but would not form "a runaway village" and presumably would continue to use the town's services under contract.

But those details have not yet been discussed, according to Janice Kelman, Mr. Kelman's wife, who said there would be a series of meetings to decide them.

New zoning laws could be one of the changes on the horizon, however. Mr. Kelman noted that the hamlet considered incorporation when Ira Rennert's humongous house was approved by the town, but the consensus was not there.

"Residents who did not want to separate realized the lesson" when they were unable to stop the house, and also when they saw the "snake-like map of Dunehampton." They started to come around to the idea, Mr. Kelman said.

While Sagaponack residents were guarded about the legal challenges, they could not suppress some excitement. Noting the Aug. 1 deadline for a challenge, Ana Daniel said it would be good to have the incorporation vote in August because of the higher seasonal population.

Perhaps thinking about the Dunehampton supporters who tend to be second homeowners, too, and presumably would vote against the Sagaponack incorporation, Mr. Kelman said he would prefer September.

"It has to be a really ill wind that doesn't blow somebody some good."

Jack Youngerman, pacing around a phalanx of numinous wooden sculptures, was talking of World War II and the G.I. Bill, which enabled him to go to Paris and become a painter.

"Just as the war brought America out of the doldrums of the Depression and woke up the whole spirit of the country, so to me and my contemporaries it gave the impetus for change and the means to achieve it."

"You have to be fatalistic about the good and bad things that happen," he continued. "I'm sure I would have taken up art, but my life would have been different, my art would have been different."

Born To Poverty

But the thought lay unspoken that he might not, in fact, have managed to escape the vise of poverty and manual labor he was born into in Kentucky in 1926.

"Growing up was difficult and extremely confining. My only contact with a wider world was a little AM radio. There was no intellectual input from my family - it was as if people who had no choice but to go to work after high school just shut down their possibilities."

Fortunately, in those days lives were still changed by the town library. By reading the great Russian and European novelists, Mr. Young erman discovered there was more to the world than Louisville, Ky.

A Larger World

The war allowed him to see it. While serving in the Navy the artist saw his first painting, in the National Museum in Washington, and had his first glimpse of contemporary art.

This, he knew, was what he wanted.

But other returning G.I.s thought the same, and at the war's end the art schools in New York City were fully booked. So, the ill-wind metaphor still holding good, Mr. Youngerman went to Paris.

"Paris was my education," he said. "I learned French, I read French," and he immersed himself in the world of art.

Postwar Paris

"But it wasn't just seeing and learning about art," he said. "It was the whole intellectual climate of Paris after the war - Sartre, de Beauvoir - and it was about encountering ideas that went against one's culture and nature. Afterward, you moved on, but your mind had been opened."

Mr. Youngerman stayed in Paris for nine years, exhibited his paintings ("prematurely, I think") at Galerie Maeght, married, and had a son.

In the mid-1950s, the New York City art dealer and gallery owner Betty Parsons visited his studio.

"She looked around for 10 minutes and then said, 'Okay, I'll give you a show - but you have to move back to New York.' "

Crucial Decision

Mr. Youngerman was aware this was a decision that was going to change his life. He had barely enough money to buy one-way tickets to New York for himself and his family. Once there, they would have to stay.

"My level of personal stress when I first came to New York was so great that it lent a kind of urgency to my paintings that people appreciated," he said.

Among the first people he went to visit on his arrival was Ellsworth Kelly, who had been a friend in Paris. Kelly was living in the old Coenties Slip neighborhood by the Staten Island Ferry, and Mr. Youngerman soon joined the growing community of artists there, including Robert Indiana, Fred Mitchell, and Agnes Martin.

Family Breakup

"It was a bit romantic," he said, "a little bit heroic."

But in those days, city building inspectors were not sympathetic to lofts. Eventually the artists were evicted and the buildings were torn down.

At the same time, Mr. Youngerman's marriage to the actress Delphine Seyrig (of "Last Year at Marienbad" fame) was coming undone. His family returned to France.

Free-Form Abstraction

Abstract Expressionism was at its height. "The big thing for my generation was the bursting open of the possibilities of non-representational art," said the artist. "It was in there that most everybody sought their way."

But although he admired constructivist abstraction and was influenced by what was going on around him in the city, he did not, he said, feel entirely part of it, attracted as he was by a more free-form abstraction.

"And, with ups and downs and inconsistencies, that is where I have groped my way."

"Sixteen Americans"

Mr. Youngerman remained with the Betty Parsons gallery for 14 years and in the winter of 1959-60 was included by Dorothy Miller in the influential group show "Sixteen Americans," with Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, Mr. Kelly, and others.

The Guggenheim Museum gave him a retrospective in 1986.

"Professionalism is like a swamp you can drown in very easily," he said. "It's impossible not to become professional once you begin selling and being reviewed, and it's hard to hold on to the freshness of youth."

"First you have to deal with no success, and then you have to deal with 'success,' which is harder. Even a little can make you complacent and take away that edge you need to work well."

Austerity

That he has always hewn close to the line of abstraction, Mr. Youngerman attributes to the austerity of his Protestant upbringing. It is no coincidence, he thinks, that Catholic countries such as Italy, where artists are exposed from childhood to the gold and polychrome splendors and emotionally charged imagery of Baroque churches, have not produced the leading abstract painters.

"There was no imagery in our church," he said. "Just three words - 'God Is Love' - and some hymn numerals."

"There are two limits I have put on myself," he added, "and that is that the work should be, one, non-representational, and two, free-form. In everything else - surface, color, or edge - I don't limit myself at all."

Turned To Sculpture

In his early painting, Mr. Youngerman did limit himself - to two or three colors and stark, pared-down shapes.

This gave the work its quality, he believes, but also imposed a difficulty. Eventually he came to feel he could move no further in that medium.

Seeking other ways of working, he turned to sculpture.

A successful show of his latest work, an installation of stacked and laminated wooden sculptures, has just closed at the Joan T. Washburn Gallery in Manhattan. As arranged in the gallery, the pieces form a grove of spiraling, twisting, helical forms, each of which complements the next.

Not What But How

While at first glance the forms are rhythmical and straightforward, on a second look they are impenetrable, sensual, and mysterious. The immediate question that springs to the untutored mind is not What, but How.

Mr. Youngerman does all his sculpture in his studio on Scuttlehole Road in Bridgehampton, where he can work outside to avoid dust. He depends on his friend and neighbor Warren Padula, an architect, designer, woodworker, and photographer, to make the basic modules in his shop.

"I'm not a craftsman myself, nor particularly interested in crafts," Mr. Youngerman said, explaining that the quality of the wood was not the point; he works in plywood as much as in mahogany.

The Method

Wooden blanks - squares, figure eights, X's - are stacked on a rod, rotated to achieve the right form, and then glued into place. The rod is removed. After that, Mr. Youngerman sands the form to achieve its final shape.

Even when the method is explained, it is still hard to believe that "Redwood Point," for instance (second from the right in the photo), was created from a stack of rotated squares.

The Washburn show seems to have acted as a catharsis for Mr. Youngerman, who now feels that he might return to painting.

"I see painting again - its possibilities - that I lost sight of there for a while."

Trip To India

The artist and his companion, Hilary Helfant, also an artist, were about to leave last week for Ahmedabad in India, where he will work with local materials, such as brick or stone, and local craftsmen.

His maquettes were packed and ready to go and he seemed stimulated by the prospect - they would stay for a month, he said, but longer if the work takes off.

Gazing out the window of the small red barn that is his studio, across flat fields where horses were running, he looked more youthful than his 71 years.

"Rilke said, 'Work as if you had all eternity ahead of you.' "

Mr. Youngerman obviously follows that advice.

Southampton Hospital's board of directors has seen the institution's financial results for 2004, but the hospital will not show them to the public until Monday.

Donna Sutton, Southampton's director of community relations, confirmed this week that the hospital had suffered losses, but would say only that it lost less than it had the year before. In 2003, the hospital lost $2.5 million. In 2002, it lost $3.6 million. That change indicated "a positive trend," Ms. Sutton said.

The hospital has $40 million in outstanding loans.

Due to the terms of its 1999 bond issue, the hospital had until June 15 - 165 days from the end of its fiscal year - to show its audit to bond holders. Ms. Sutton said that the hospital was in compliance with those terms in that it had shared its audit with the bond holders' trustee, the Bank of New York.

In November, Gov. George E. Pataki created the Health Care Reform Working Group, which examined the role of Medicaid and health care in the state and recommended closing "unneeded" and financially strapped medical institutions and restructuring those that remained.

As part of the 2005-6 state budget, the governor then created the 18-member Commission on Health Care Facilities in the 21st Century, which will examine which hospitals in the state are underutilized. The members of the commission were announced on June 2.

The state also wants to reconfigure Medicaid payments for "public good services" such as emergency room, trauma, burns, and obstetrics, which are reimbursed at a lower level than high-end services such as cardiac surgery. According to the group, health care providers have embarked on a race to buy expensive technology for high-end services to offset the low reimbursement rate for more common services.

Southampton is participating in such a race, competing with Central Suffolk Hospital for a cardiac catheterization unit. The state often limits the number of facilities allowed to have such a unit in a given region. The investment in the new technology would be high - upgrading the hospital from film to digital records alone will cost $900,000.

The Health Care Reform Working Group used data collected by the federal Office of the Inspector General to conclude that community concerns about hospital closures were "unfounded." It cited statistics that 50 percent of the country's rural hospitals were within three miles of another inpatient facility. An additional 18 percent were within four to 10 miles of another facility.

Geographically, at least, the East End hospitals may not be at risk. The driving distance between Central Suffolk and Southampton is about 18 miles, and Montauk is about 40 miles from Southampton. It would be difficult to say that the region is overserved. It might be easier to conclude that the hospital is a drain on state resources.

In an effort to make all of their bottom lines look more attractive, the three members of the Peconic Health Corporation - Southampton, Central Suffolk, and Eastern Long Island hospitals - hope to gain income from a new property tax on the area's homeowners. The prospects for the passage of such an initiative are poor, however.

Although Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele, Jr. has introduced state legislation that must be passed to allow a referendum on the new tax, State Senator Kenneth P. LaValle said he was less inclined to do the same in the senate. While he has asked the hospitals to further explain their proposal, he does not believe special taxing districts are necessary or even possible. "It's not something that has a lot of appeal with the voting public," he said.

Mr. LaValle would prefer to see Southampton enter into a more substantial relationship with Stony Brook University Hospital than the one it already has with the New York-Presbyterian Healthcare System. What he is proposing is "not quite a full sponsorship" on Stony Brook's part, but it would go further in providing financial benefits to the hospital, he said. Under such a relationship, Southampton could continue its affiliation with New York-Presbyterian. He added that Eastern Long Island Hospital had already voted to join Stony Brook.

The East End Supervisors and Mayors Association has been speaking to the chief executive officers of the three hospitals over the past year. Southampton Supervisor Patrick A. Heaney will organize a public meeting of the five town boards sometime in the next few months, probably at Suffolk Community College or some other neutral territory, but he is "skeptical" that such a measure would succeed with voters.

If the towns and hospitals were to go forward with a tax, the towns would certainly require more accountability and demand greater specialization and cooperation between the hospitals so that non-urgent services were better parceled out among them.

Jerome Solomon, a hospital bond analyst with Bear Stearns, a New York brokerage firm, said it would only be natural for the community to make the hospital organization accountable for tax dollars.

"If the community is asked to subsidize health care via a tax, the community has a right to ask if this is the most efficient way to provide regional health care," Mr. Solomon said. "The hospitals involved will have to make a case that this money is needed. Likewise, the community will want a better understanding of the organization's financial wherewithal."

Mr. Heaney is particularly worried about the long-term exposure the tax would put on the community to potential continued losses. "It's a high burden on people who pay for health insurance to then have to pay for health care for those who do not pay their bills," he said.

Brian O'Doherty gave the lecture that follows at a Dec. 1 awards ceremony for scholarly achievement at Long Island University's C.W. Post campus.

Let us return for a moment to that beach near Viareggio, Italy, in 1822 where Shelley's body and that of the friend who drowned with him, Edward Williams, are being burned on two pyres.

As Shelley's body was being finally consumed, the heart resisted the flames, so Shelley's friend, Trelawny, who made a career out of knowing Shelley, reached in and plucked out the heart.

Shelley's ashes were gathered and, I believe, accompanied by the heart were brought to Rome and buried in the happiest of graveyards, the Protestant cemetery where John Keats had been buried the previous year.

Important Metaphor

What on earth was in Trelawny's mind? Did he see Shelley's heart as a collectible? A target of opportunity? Why didn't he stoke up the fire a little and reduce the obstinate heart to ashes?

Because he was responding to a powerful rhetoric attached to the body and its parts. He was acquiring the organ associated with the deepest sentiments of its possessor. If you took the heart away from the body of poetry, you would lay waste a whole cathedral of poetic conceits.

What we have is the exact superimposition of a metaphor on anatomy. The heart as the repository of courage, generosity, openness, when after all it's merely a sophisticated pump.

Heart Extractors

Thus, when Christian Barnard removed the heart of his first patient in December 1967 and substituted another from an artificially alive corpse, he was manhandling a metaphor, a bundle of traditionally sanctioned feelings associated with the heart.

I was fascinated with this, partly because I had been trained as a doctor, and partly because of the politics of that operation and of what I'll call the aesthetics of body parts, which will lead us to such fashionable matters as the self, identity, and their relations to the mobile lump that gets us from here to there: the body.

I was also interested because the year before Barnard's operation I had already, working as an artist, captured and extracted someone's heart, Marcel Duchamp's heart.

Pioneers

Why Duchamp's heart? It's been said that, speaking of art, the first half of the century belongs to Picasso and the second half, for better or as some believe for worse, belongs to Marcel Duchamp. But before that, a couple of points about Barnard's radical procedure, which at the time seemed as absurd as transplanting a head.

The technology to perform this "miracle" had been available for some time. A number of pioneering surgeons were waiting in the wings, names that may still have an echo for some of you: Shumway, the careful; Kantrowitz, the eager; Cooley from Texas, who briskly wanted to turn the whole thing into a routine; De Bakey, the man haunted by morality and conscience, who most recently surfaced with a pre-operative examination of Yeltsin in Moscow.

The reward for going first and succeeding was immortality. The punishment for failure was irresponsibility. A difficult situation for ambitious men.

Posthumous Gift

"I want to be the first but I don't want to wipe myself out. Better someone else goes first. But I don't want it to be him." Each was watching the other. Remember that, when William Harvey discovered the circulation of the blood, what he feared most was the criticism of his colleagues.

So far from the traditional centers of medicine, where each surgeon was watching the other, poised for action, but afraid to take it, from South Africa, came the news that released a storm of heart transplants.

Now it is possible to receive a posthumous gift that enables you to survive yourself. The hands that first performed this miracle, by the way, then became, as if in a Greek myth, arthritic and immobile.

The transplant era received an enormous impetus. Kidneys had been routinely transplanted, but there's not much poetry you can locate in a kidney. The heart was something else. A recipient has literally a foreign body inside the chest, working away like a donkey.

Then the notion of the heart as the seat of feelings which runs from Pierre Bontemp's "Monument for the Heart of Francis I" to Valentine's Day greeting cards began to kick in.

Does this foreign heart bear with it traces of its former owner's feelings? What is this foreign heart thinking? Can a body part, even one so regnant as the heart, think?

Mad Scientists

The newest of miracles aroused the oldest of superstitions. The operation raised the old specter of transgressive experiment that haunted 19th-century medicine. The body-snatching of artificially alive corpses raised the impolite ghosts of Burke and Hare, the most notorious of body-snatchers for the great 19th-century school of medicine in Edinburgh.

So the transplant, under the guise of progressive medicine and its habitual miracles, stimulated the gothic diabolisms of the scientist as evil genius. It leads us to a theme that recurs in modernist art and literature - the separate lives of body-parts.

Their insurrection against the whole cannibalizes the single identity and thus the part focuses a deep anxiety. The operation revived the monster created by the wife of the young poet with whom we began, Mary Shelley and her durable creation.

Unsolved Questions

So the heart transplanted from another person raised the Frankenstein myth, and the artificial heart, still an unproven technological tour-de-force, anticipates a kind of science-fiction future.

It points to two kinds of immortality: one in terms of a charnel house of ransacked bodies, the other in terms of transgressive technology. These visions are closely connected to matters of identity and consciousness - consciousness being one of the most attractive - and now researched - of mysteries.

Heart transplants are now routine, and questions initially raised by the operation, like questions in philosophy, don't get solved, they tend instead to go out of date. One point to add: The public was called in to adjudicate the ethics of the procedure, as it is currently with matters of genetic engineering, in vitro pregnancy, cloning, all of which tend to undermine the notion of my body, the possession of which is my ultimate capital.

Why Duchamp?

The year before Barnard's first operation, however, I had taken Marcel Duchamp's heart. Why? If we think of young men in history who were beautiful, charismatic, and extraordinarily brilliant, who do you think of?

Goethe, certainly. And Duchamp, who had an almost demonic influence over others as a young man. When I knew him, he was more benign. We'd talk about Long John Nebel and night radio, anything but art.

Duchamp, who was great company, was of course an iconoclast who defused many of the myths about the artist while vigorously substituting his own. In the Paris of his youth, one of the sayings he deeply resented was, "Oh, he's dumb as a painter!" Duchamp was pure intelligence.

Dead Art

If the cliche went that art is forever, existing in a timeless, idealized dimension, Duchamp felt that art, once it was institutionalized, dimished rapidly by half-lives. Once inside the museum it became a dead artifact in a mausoleum - out of context, deprived of its social interaction, gaped at by unknowing multitudes, its language as inscrutable as the Rosetta stone once was.

There at last was Du champ's heart, or its signature, refuting the dictum of its owner that art on the museum wall was quickly inert and dead.

It's not a new idea - the hostility of the advanced artist and the institution where his work finds its final resting place. As mild an Impressionist as Camille Pissarro had said, "Let's burn down the Louvre!"

If you've been making what you think is art all your life, it wasn't too thrilling to have Duchamp say, tough luck, it'll be dead almost as soon as you finish it. So the problem I set myself was to refute the supreme intelligence among modern artists. Presumptuous, cheeky, and appropriate to the young man I then was.

Dinner Surprise

I asked Duchamp if I could take his portrait. He said yes. My wife invited the Duchamps and some others to dinner. She looked up her Julia Child and cooked an escalope de veau a la creme, and followed up with a trifle which was immersed in more cream.

For Barbara this may have been the apogee of her culinary skills. It was all too rich for poor Duchamp, to whom this caloric plenitude must have seemed close to an assassination attempt.

After dinner I asked him to come into the bedroom, which he did unquestioningly. I asked him to take off some of his clothes, and since he was in a very French way never surprised, he did so. I asked him to partially disrobe. He did so.

Single Jagged Line

I took his electrocardiogram on a hired machine by the bed. Again not a question. When he stood up he said, "How am I?" As far as I could tell it looked okay to me.

Now I possessed the single jagged line produced by the unique electrical potentials of Duchamp's heart and body. What was I going to do with it? Some of you may remember those bouncing spots of light in whiskey ads in saloon windows - a series of bouncing dots describing a perfect arc as a cylinder rotated within.

So I went down to the living museum of spare parts for artists in the '60s, the teeming bazaar of Canal Street, and took back some rotisserie motors. Out of all this came a homemade oscilloscope, a box with a circular green window on which Duchamp's animated heartbeat traced its inevitable, repetitive course.'

Ironic Beat

The next step was to exhibit Duchamp's beating heart on the walls of museums and galleries. There at last it was, or its signature, refuting the dictum of its owner that art on the museum wall was quickly inert and dead. His heart had been manipulated to refute his head. The project was almost complete.

Did he understand this? Of course he did. Delacroix is supposed to have said he didn't understand Turner's paintings until he saw Ruskin looking at them.

I understood the final implications of the work when I saw Duchamp standing there in the gallery looking at his heart, or its electronic signature, beating. With proper etiquette, we never talked about it.

Heart Survived Him

But he used to meet my wife in the street and say, how is it? Is it still working? Something of the shamanistic, primitive power of artworks, submerged in our culture, began to attach itself to Duchamp's heartbeat.

When I saw Duchamp looking at his own heartbeat, I knew that it would be completed as a work of art when Duchamp died. Appropriately for the man whose "Nude Descending a Staircase" is one of the icons of Modernism, he died after climbing several flights of steps of his apartment in Paris.

His regnant faculty, his heart, had survived him in perpetuity, in a version of immortality. The work was complete. A somewhat humorous artwork at the start. Ruthless at the end, fully employing the scathing irony of which Duchamp was capable. Duchamp, who was no sentimentalist, would have fully understood.

A Shrine

When a German collector bought a version of this work, I'm told that he turned it into a kind of shrine. This superstitious perversion of the work told me that he saw the work as a relic, like a preserved fragment of a saint's body.

The idea of a relic is, I suppose, that the identity of the missing person descends into the preserved part. And in the case of a saint, some of his or her powers.

I'm reminded of how one of our great Long Island residents, Willem de Kooning, approached the body. We all know his flayed and monstrous "Women" series, which to me seemed made up piecemeal.

In the context of his moment, recovering the body was an act of courage. At that time, the whole body was, for many artists, unpaintable. To paint it whole would subscribe to a comforting, flaccid humanism.

De Kooning's bodies were responding to major stresses. As if the head were in next week, the arm detained in yesterday, the trunk mislaid in a past month. We have a vision of parts but they may not belong to the same person and may not even be of the same size. What is assembled in a defective cinematographic picture, trembling, appearing and disappearing, only parts visible at any one time.

This is de Kooning's version of Abstract Expressionist man, spread out in time as Leonardo's version of Vitruvian man is spread out in space.

What Is Human?

All this circles around a single issue: the matter of identity, of selfhood, of self-recognition, of a definition of self in terms of what space the body occupies and in what time we place it.

How is the self represented? What mythologies attach to parts of the body? In the past decade there has been a rage of artworks attempting a definition of selfhood, expressed through body parts, fragments, processes, reminding us of the body's vulnerability as it is driven through time.

Is this evidence of a displacement, an uncertainty, which in turn responds to the basic question of what is human, since we are all aware of the appalling range of definitions this departing century has provided us?

See-Through People

And that definition also responds to what has happened to what science has performed on the body on the table, which has been patiently awaiting the conclusion of this talk.

We find something that gives us pause, and that has contributed to the definition that the art has been attempting. For, through a series of subtractions and additions, the body has been utterly changed. Shuttling out and in are kidneys, lungs, hips, livers, hearts, knees. In the vicinity are models that mimic the brain's processes through artificial intelligence.

The body as we approach it has become transparent through forms of visualization, magnetic resonance, CAT scans - all blessedly nonintrusive. That body can be grown from a test tube, transplanted to a hostess; its genes can be isolated and corrected; it can possibly be cloned to produce spare parts, even doppelgangers.

Old Antagonists

Always, I'm pretty sure, our imagination instinctively applies such researches to ourselves. They tend to dispossess us of our corpus.

As we are progressively dispossessed, what is left? The definition of what is human? Which always has an unpleasant twin: What is inhuman?

Do some answers reside uneasily in the intersection of the old antagonists, partners, competitors, and sibling rivals, art and science? Each has a habit of looking at itself in the mirror of the other. Each is radically different than it was before.

Indispensable

And just as Barnard's heart transplant raised troubling questions, around that body on the table is another storm of ethical and moral questions, early stages of legislation, revived myths of nature transgressed, a sharpened awareness of identity compromised, and an intense curiosity about what a friend of mine described as that background buzz called consciousness.

To contemplate the last brings us to another horizon, which I am not competent to approach.

I'll finish with three thoughts. One, the concern with the body, an object that is simply indispensable. Maybe Descartes could have said I have a body, therefore I am. Or, I think, most of this is my body, so maybe I am.

Whirling Atoms

Two, the opposite of this, the dissolving power of media, spilling out of the TV screen, which puts all of us, mind and body, into a solution in which we are daily bathed: I don't have a mind, and it doesn't matter.

The third thought: How does all this relate to having your bacon and eggs in the morning as you read your paper? Does our awareness of the body, frequently dismembered, reconstituted, transparent, often with rented parts, affect the way we think about eating our bacon and eggs?

Maybe the answer lies in the kind of split-level awareness that is now part of everyone's equipment. We all know that the table under the breakfast is transparent, composed of whirling atoms. Just don't bump into it.

No matter what the miracle, things tend to go on as they are. We shuffle through the day, every day, as we have, and will continue to do, aware of distant rumors from art and medicine skirting the latest quasi-utopia which is always immortality.

Brian O'Doherty is University Professor of Fine Arts at Southampton College. He uses the name Patrick Ireland as an artist.

As if it weren't bad enough that the East Hampton Town Board has been studiously avoiding any mention of the town's two dormant landfills, the public is now being fed misleading information.

A Dec. 7 article in The New York Times's Long Island section dished out inaccurate details about what could be the most important decision the board will have to make in this decade - whether to permanently seal the landfills, mine them, or undertake some combination of the two.

As The Star has reported, consulting engineers have advised the Town Board of the projected cost of the three options - $50 million to mine both, $36 million to cap both, or $38.4 million to mine the Montauk landfill and cap the East Hampton one.

The consultants also have pointed out that other factors need to be considered, such as whether a stench will permeate surrounding neighborhoods, how much money may be recouped by selling mined recyclables and reclaiming the land they are removed from, whether toxic trash will be uncovered, and how much it will cost to monitor and maintain a landfill if it is capped.

The flow of information from Town Hall, unfortunately, stopped last spring at that point. Anticipating that the 1998 Town Board would make the final decision, The Star and the East Hampton Business Alliance tried to coax the candidates in this year's election to speak out on the subject, but to no avail. Offering vague observations about the importance and inevitability of a decision, instead they fretted over the widening-that-isn't of the airport's main runway.

In six months, the board must begin making a series of preliminary decisions, as the State Department of Environmental Conservation's required clock starts ticking, a task the town has managed to avoid for seven years. Now the incoming board members will have to bone up on the complicated financial and scientific data on which to base their opinions by June, which is not as far away as it seems.

Someone will have to step forward on Jan. 2, when the Town Board convenes for the new year, to purposefully take the reins on this issue. And who, we wonder, will be able lead the town's perpetually foundering recycling program toward some meaningful efficiency?

AMAGANSETT

Clarke to Heinz and Rosemarie Binggeli, Old Stone Highway, $200,000.

BRIDGEHAMPTON

Wood to Greg and Karin Yapalater, Pheasant Lane, $395,000.

Whiskey Hill Inc. to Donna and Jill Paitchel, Bridge Hill Lane, $155,000.

Schoenbach to Helmuth Jarchow, Butter Lane, $700,000.

EAST HAMPTON

Geller to Timothy Kelly, Georgica Close Road, $635,000.

Hedgerow Assoc. L.P. to Jonathan and Penny Bernstein, Sarah's Way, $1,175,000.

Murac to Mark Schryver, Sherrill Road, $300,000.

Hollow Oak Estates to David and Carol Schnittlich, Holly Place, $415,000.

Dick to Nicholas Kuzon and Kim Hovey, Jones Road, $1,850,000.

Clark to Esther Rubin, Wooded Oak Lane, $265,000.

Lane to Steven and Lisa Strober, Oyster Shores Road, $660,000.

MONTAUK

Booher to Diane Weiser and Laine Wilder, Seaside Avenue, $285,000.

Piazza to Marc Daniels Bldg Corp., Kettle Road, $180,000.

NORTHWEST

Cedar Woods Ltd. to Edward Godwin, Owls Nest Lane, $160,000.

Cedar Woods Ltd. to Egan East Dev. Co. Inc., Owls Nest Lane, $202,500. NORTH HAVEN

DC Partners to Joseph and Amy Failla, Barclay Drive, $160,000.

SAG HARBOR

Jones to Richard and Karen Venezky, Bridge Street, $236,000.

Thaler to Craig and Veronica Stewart, Hillside Drive West, $172,500.

Federal National Mtg. Assoc. to Louis and Kerri Dollinger, Cove Drive, $165,000.

Thompson (trustees) to Nancy Richardson, Main Street, $1,100,000.

Ford Trust to Ronald Castillo, Hamilton Street, $212,500.

SAGAPONACK

Spiegel to Frank Valentini, Northwest Path, $416,500.

Morrisey to Elizabeth Woessner, Forest Crossing, $275,000.

Jaffe estate to David and Jane Gerstein, Sagaponack Road, $630,000.

SPRINGS

Tilton to Atsuro Imanura, Homestead Lane, $216,000.

Burns to Asa Gosman, Dogwood Drive, $155,000.

WAINSCOTT

Frame to Joanne Bertolot and Paula Dagen, Sayre's Path, $530,000.

Szczepankowski to Ronald Lauder, Wainscott Hollow Road (40 acres with life estate), $5,500,000.

WATER MILL

Modzelewski to Serge and Alexandra Ourusoff and Anna Holder, Narrow Lane South, $225,000.