The Mast-Head: Baffling Borders
If real estate outfits were likely to make new year’s resolutions, I would want them to try to hew more closely to the traditional, if fuzzy, lines of delineation among place names. It is a pipe dream, of course, but it would be nice.
Around The Star, we spend countless hours trying to figure out where things are. Questions like which side of Abraham’s Path is East Hampton and which is Amagansett, or whether Maidstone Park is in Springs rather than East Hampton, occupy more minutes than I can estimate. When does Bridgehampton turn into Water Mill, we ask. And does Sag Harbor extend all the way to the Morton Wildlife Refuge? No, but you get the point.
Fault lies with the United States Postal Service, which handed out ZIP codes, and with real estate people, for whom payoffs can depend on perceived locations. Thrown into the mix are school districts, which have their own, sometimes baffling borders, and fire districts, which appear to have been drawn based on who knows what.
Wainscott is perhaps foremost among those places that just get bigger and bigger. Time was, the hamlet was a stretch of farmhouses and fields south of the Montauk Highway and west of Georgica Pond. Today, it has absorbed the East Hampton Airport, pushed all the way east to the Sag Harbor Road and northwest to gobble up the Ross School as it toodles all the way to the Sag Harbor Village line. That Forbes had Wainscott among its top 50 most expensive ZIP codes last year is not missed by those who write descriptions for real estate listings.
Lost in all this are many of the old place names, some going back to the 18th century or earlier, in which can be heard the echoes and stories of long-ago times. Hayground, Hardscrabble, Cedar Bush, Freetown, Pots and Kettles, Miller’s Ground, and Indian Field are among the names of places here that are all but forgotten.
Regular readers might recall that I have been on a mission to correct online maps concerning Gardiner’s Bay. From what I can tell, victory is near; the U.S. Board on Geographic Names is waiting for a final word on where to put the dividing line between Gardiner’s and encroaching Napeague Bay, relegating it to the east of Lazy Point and Hicks Island, where it belongs.
Just the other day I was looking at Google Maps online and noticed that it has the Peconic River, which by all rights terminates at Riverhead, coursing east past Sag Harbor and out toward the Cedar Point Lighthouse. Expect to see that in the real estate vernacular soon.