The Mast-Head: The Inevitable, Ignored
Standing on the ocean beach in Montauk with East Hampton Town Supervisor Larry Cantwell on Tuesday, the question was why the downtown waterfront strip is the way it is. High waves from Hermine, a post-tropical cyclone by the time it passed Long Island last week, had eaten away almost all the fill that a United States Army Corps of Engineers contractor had placed there in the spring. As we looked over the damage, Larry pointed out that the sand level was more or less back where it had been when the corps project began.
The idea behind the $9.8 million undertaking was to bolster the shoreline for a time in the hope that the Army Corps would return some day with a more permanent solution. Now, it seems that is not going to happen. The corps has said it will commit only to putting more sand on the beach every four years. This is, of course, demonstrably idiotic — the work its contractor finished just in June is already beginning to fail.
But the failures go back much further than the Army Corps, in fact, to the earliest days of Montauk’s development. In the 1920s, Carl Fisher had grand plans for a “distinguished summer colony on the slender tip of Long Island.” Plans called for a boardwalk the length of the downtown, but even Fisher and his big dreams showed a bit of sense where the shore was concerned.
An artist’s rendering of what was to come had little in the way of buildings along the ocean beach itself and most of the substantial structures well inland. This restraint may have stemmed from personal experience. Fisher’s properties in Florida took heavy damage from a hurricane in 1926, a storm that was credited with ending a real estate boom that had been running for several years. On the other hand, since it was believed at the time that devastating hurricanes did not reach Long Island, Fisher might have thought Montauk development was a safer bet.
Financial troubles ended Fisher’s plans here, and the stock market crash and Great Depression more or less froze Montauk in time. Then the 1938 Hurricane rolled across Long Island on Sept. 21 of that year, as if to emphasize that development on the shore made no sense. The lesson was forgotten a generation later.
By the early 1960s, building returned to the oceanfront in Montauk and along the length of Long Island. People forgot the obvious: that erosion was inevitable. Local and state government stood by as scores of houses, motels, and other buildings were placed exactly where they should not have been. This is evident when you stand on the Montauk beach today.
The question, going forward, is whether anyone from Washington to Town Hall has the ability to guide us to a sensible step back. Managed retreat, they call it, but so far, those are just words.