Places and populations have personalities, too, and one of the deep-seated quirks of East Hampton is a predilection for pranks. We have a long history of (mostly) harmless mischief.
It’s likely that in 1648, the year East Hampton was settled, Early Modern mischief was conducted by South Fork rapscallions but, unfortunately, the East Hampton Star archives only go back to its own founding, in 1885. The first mention of a prank in the newspaper of record came in 1887, when the writer of a letter to The Star’s editor reminisced about a hilarious and “rather rough prank” of his youth — decades before — in which a goose was hurled through the open and uncurtained window on Main Street.
There were more geese in the village in those days than people, and the goose, “fluttering and squalling,” landed amid a group of adults gathered for a tea party. The ladies screamed and the men laughed “heartily.”
In 1943, The Star wrote of children smashing streetlights. “What may have started as a harmless prank before the war has now become a major problem to the electric company,” the paper reported, “if not an actual act of sabotage against our war effort.” The editor was miffed: Surely, those naughty children wouldn’t want an M4 Sherman at Monte Cassino to run out of gasoline because resources were routed to Bonac to fix some streetlights.
A less-destructive and rather more creative prank caught residents’ attention on Easter morning 1976, when a three-foot shark fin surfaced in the “green soup” of Town Pond, indicating the presence of a 3,000-pound great white shark stalking the three-foot-deep waters. The movie Jaws had premiered the previous summer.
The Star’s longtime sports editor, Jack Graves, was on his way to an Easter service when he got roped into the drama. “I got a call just before being dragged to church on Sunday,” Mr. Graves said, “from a fellow who said there was a young shark swimming in Town Pond and that it was attracting quite the crowd.”
“The result was near panic in the peaceful village of East Hampton,” The Star reported jocularly. Some said it was “the work of depraved minds,” while others “laughed their garboards off.” Someone tried to get a yellow Labrador to swim out and retrieve the fin but, seemingly scared, the dog refused.
On Monday, New York State Highway Department crews noted two young men fiddling with a string attached to the fin and demanded they remove the shark fin from the pond. The boys complied but, reportedly, were overheard murmuring their intention for a second shark attack in the ditch water near the East Hampton Town dump.
But perhaps the most famous prank animal in town annals was an exotic: the life-size plastic giraffe that popped his head up in Napeague State Park, near Cranberry Hole Road in Promised Land, 36 years later, in June of 2012.
“Who should I call? I have a giraffe in my backyard,” asked Rich Silver, who lived in the house closest to the sub-Saharan giant. While it lurked in the neighborhood, the 15-foot-tall giraffe was knocked down a few times by wind and weather. When a man working on Silver’s house found the giraffe lying on its side on the ground, he pulled it back up, placing it in such a way that it looked to be eating a snack of pine needles.
Tom Dess, a New York State Parks manager, told The Star that the giraffe would be removed. “You can’t just put things in the park.” The giraffe disappeared from Napeague before it could be captured, however, and would come and go, startling passers-by in new locations here and there for the next four or five years, becoming quite the celebrity. In 2016, it turned up in the Nature Trail on David’s Lane in East Hampton. It was impounded by the town and auctioned off in 2017.
Another memorable prank set off a dispute about law-enforcement jurisdiction.
There’s an episode in the HBO show The Wire where an ever-scheming city detective, Jimmy McNulty, attempts to pin 14 homicide cases on city police, so his detested bosses would have to deal with the fallout. His bosses argue, though, that the bodies had been discovered just beyond the city border and thus should be the county’s responsibility, not theirs.
Got that? Now, instead of 14 homicide victims, imagine a faux submarine; and instead of Baltimore city versus county, imagine East Hampton Town versus Suffolk. A radio antenna, periscope, and lights — the above-water portion of a submarine — sprouted from a sump off the Sag Harbor Turnpike in July, 2014.
The sump, at that point, was already at the center of a jurisdictional conflict between town and county. In 1987, The Star reported, Suffolk County bought the development rights to a stretch of farmland adjacent to Route 114 from East Hampton Town to keep it agricultural. By 2014, the town was using the land as a sump to help remediate drainage issues near Stephen Hand’s Path. When the submarine was discovered, town board members had been attempting to mend fences with the county.
Then-Councilman Peter Van Scoyoc said he had no idea who might have built the mock submarine, but he viewed it as a “statement that there’s clearly a huge flooding problem.” As for the identity of the submarine prankster, Randy Parsons of the Nature Conservancy, which has its Center for Conservation office near the sump, said, “It looks like somebody who has the saws to cut shapes. I mean, if we were like police, I’d be looking at cabinetmakers.”
The alleged cabinetmaker-turned-sump-submarine-activist was never caught.