The Mast-Head: Plus Ca Change
Ever wonder why there are no carnivals in East Hampton Town other than the one each summer at Havens Beach in Sag Harbor? Well, the answer is that they were banned long ago over concerns that have echoes today.
From time to time lately, I have been turning to the East Hampton Library’s remarkable online collection of old issues of The Star. These are searchable by word or phrase and can be browsed by date. It was in the July 18, 1968, issue that I noticed a lead headline, “Town Will Enforce No-Carnivals Rule,” and became intrigued.
According to the story, that summer, the town board granted one final permit for a three-day affair on the Amagansett American Legion grounds, but went on to agree that all groups would thereafter be informed by letter that there would be no more carnivals.
Subsequently, Supervisor Bruce Collins explained that the board would enforce a 1936 law that had been reaffirmed in 1951 banning them, according to the wording of Section One of Ordinance Number Ten, “to preserve public peace and good order and to prevent tumultuous assemblages.”
By coincidence, the trouble then, as it is today, was in Montauk. The earlier case concerned a chamber of commerce event there. The board had decided that the carnival would cost the town more money in traffic control and law enforcement than the chamber would make.
“When you have a carnival on an arterial highway there is a problem of traffic control. Special policemen have to be hired and paid extra to do this, and it becomes a considerable cost item that the board is not happy with,” Mr. Collins told The Star’s Jack Graves, who was then in his first year or so here.
“Then there’s the spinoff on the town Highway Department, which has to do a large amount of policing and cleaning up after the carnivals. The carnival operator may clean up his area, but there are still people who take hot dogs and wrappings and containers into their cars and throw things all over the road,” he said.
Times haven’t changed all that much. Only today it is not carnivals that are the problem.