The Mast-Head: Really Restrictive

You hear from time to time how tight East Hampton Town is when it comes to handing out construction permits. “You can’t get anything approved around here,” the complaint goes. Well, that is not really the case. Although the paperwork may mound up and the review process be painfully slow, you can generally get what you want.

During a late-August getaway, I visited a California community that was really restrictive and puts East Hampton’s supposedly hard-nosed preservationism into sharp perspective.

Bolinas, a town of about 1,500 residents on the Pacific Coast in Marin County, decided about 40 years ago to simply stop time. No, they said, to the California suburban sprawl creeping over Mount Tam from Interstate Highway 101. And it worked. There are no chain-type convenience stores, no obvious mansions belonging to the new San Francisco tech elite, and nothing to tell you that it’s not, say, 1971, other than the Honda Priuses parked along the road to the beach.

Chief among the tools that Bolinas pushed to limit growth was an absolute cap on the number of water meters. It is today, as it was when Johnson was in the White House, a hippie-surfer paradise, and it is likely to stay that way.

That the place could have remained unchanged is all the more astounding when you consider that it is but a one-hour drive from the new-money capital of the United States. Like Montauk, for example, Bolinas is flanked by preserved land and the sea. It, too, was once envisioned as the home of a massive resort project, including, in its case, a four-lane highway and marina for luxury yachts.

Beginning in the 1960s, however, activists began to build a metaphorical wall between themselves and the ravages of the time.

Visitors will find no sign on the main road indicating the Bolinas turnoff. Residents supposedly stole it so many times the authorities just decided to forget about another replacement. Montauk, on the other hand, and the rest of the Hamptons — well, we know all too well what has happened here.

Several times during my weekend there with an old friend, we passed a person dancing in the street in full shaman regalia — a cape, staff, beads, and, dangling from his decorated hat, a talisman that reached between his eyes to the end of his nose.

Okay, so Bolinas is definitely not East Hampton Village, where a shaman might be urged to go along. But it is interesting to consider what we might have looked like had we really held back East Coast excess and powerful real estate interests to make sure our policies lived up to their perception.

In East Hampton, officials and most residents just shrug, believing there is nothing they can do in the face of all that New York money. But it is illustrative to see just how far one community managed to go to keep its identity, and it is sad to realize the extent to which we’ve blown it here