Vanishing Beauty
If you look at a photograph from 100 years ago, you might be startled by how far the eye could travel over town, once upon a time. Standing near Hook Mill, you could see the Maidstone Club; stand in the windmill’s upper reaches, and you could see clear to Amagansett. From the second story of a house on Main Street, you could see the waves breaking on the ocean beach.
This observation about diminishing vistas came to mind recently, when discussion at an East Hampton Village Planning Board meeting turned to a relatively routine application regarding Lasata, a historic estate on Further Lane that once belonged to the Bouvier family. It seems the planning board would be pleased if lane-side plantings in front of Lasata were lowered, so that the landmark house could once again be seen by people passing by on the road.
People of a certain age are well aware of the way our once-pastoral views have gradually been shrouded: Houses have been surrounded by hedges, trees, gates, and fences, and these hedges, trees, gates, and fences have grown taller and taller; many a pretty streetscape — many a lovely old edifice — has disappeared behind evergreen plantings and magnificently groomed privets. Our once-common vistas have been privatized.
Preservation is an issue almost universally spoken of as a tip-top priority on the East End, of course, but many of us don’t often remember that the view and sight lines are as much worthy of preservation as any rare antique structure. Certainly, the general public is more likely to support the creation of historic districts and the continued use of tax dollars for the preservation of picturesque old buildings when it can actually see them.
We applaud the planning board for remembering this issue, and are happy to have heard through the grapevine that the Ladies Village Improvement Society has been talking about obstructive plantings lately, too.
Village officials with yardsticks taking the measure of shrubbery might paint a rather comic picture, but this isn’t as trivial a matter as it might sound at first. Streetscapes deserve to be saved — or, along some byways, returned to an earlier state of openness — and we recommend that any resident who is proud of East Hampton’s tradition of civic-mindedness (not to mention anyone who likes to wax nostalgic for the way town looked in the olden days) pause to consider for a moment the height of their own cypress, privet, arborvitae, or stockade.