As the town’s planning board continues to weigh Project Most’s application for redevelopment at 92 Three Mile Harbor Road, the site of the now-defunct East Hampton Neighborhood House, nearby residents are banding together in opposition.
The plans call for the demolition of the deteriorated building and its replacement by a donated, reconstructed house, a two-story, Francis Fleetwood-designed structure measuring 7,623 square feet, inclusive of an 800-square-foot caretaker’s apartment, with a planned 4,418-square-foot basement.
According to the proposal, the project is a “semi-public facility” that fits size-wise into what the town code allows for the 2.4-acre site, without the need for a zoning variance. There would be classrooms, activity spaces, a dance studio, and offices, and Charlie Marder has designed an outdoor classroom space and a landscape and screening plan.
The town acknowledges the site is “surrounded by residential property,” but that characterization only scratches the surface of what neighbors are objecting to.
That “residential property” overlaps with Freetown, a loosely defined area where freed Black and Indigenous people settled centuries ago when they were unwelcome elsewhere in East Hampton. The name “Freetown” appears on old maps and some modern ones, but the area is not formally designated as a historic district or listed on a state or national register.
Neighbors have brought in Allison McGovern, an archaeologist and historian who has documented the history of Freetown, to endorse their demand for a full archaeological study of the Neighborhood House property. Ms. McGovern has described the area as “associated with emancipation resettlement.”
“I do think it’s critical” to survey the Neighborhood House property, she said this week, “because we’re looking at an area that has been historically marginalized. Those resources should be no less significant than the ones that are in the downtown East Hampton Village area.”
Such a survey “doesn’t necessarily prevent development,” she said, but it is “one step in a larger environmental review process.”
As its application proceeds, the nonprofit Project Most plans to continue serving families with after-school, weekend, and summer camp programs at the Neighborhood House site, as it has since 2001. It now operates after-school programs at the Springs and John M. Marshall Elementary schools as well, with additional activities in a handful of classrooms rented from the Catholic Diocese of Long Island at the former Most Holy Trinity School in East Hampton Village. It has also indicated plans to expand by offering day care services for the youngest children in the community. It is considered a lifeline for working parents and for children from disadvantaged families with financial needs.
Project Most’s proposed expansion has a precariously ticking timeline, however: The donated house is still sitting, dismantled into pieces and somewhat exposed to the elements, on the property of its anonymous East Hampton donor. Project Most said this week that an archaeological study could seriously impact its ability to use the significant donation, which came with a “$5 million starter fund to allow the property to be redeveloped.”
The proposal does have considerable support from the wider community, with more than 450 people signing a recent Change.org petition to urge its approval.
In an interview and follow-up emails, Kevin Scott, an engineer by trade and longtime resident of the adjacent street, Neighborhood House Drive, called the redevelopment plan “racist” and a “land grab,” with needs that were “fabricated to serve an end of appropriation.” He and several neighbors have suggested “a merger of those two histories” — that of the Black and Indigenous peoples — “into a legacy, interactive visitors center,” for scholarly research, educational programs, and exhibitions about Freetown and its importance.
“The only way for [Project Most] to expand is to destroy the peaceful use of our homes [and] drive down the exceptional increase in home values this enclave has experienced, with the end goal of additional appropriation of land and homes for pennies on the dollar,” Mr. Scott wrote in an email to The Star. “This is an intentional targeting/real-time gentrification by a highly funded external community upon an existing highly accomplished, diverse community.”
Project Most has pointed out that Neighborhood House, for more than 100 years, has been the site of programs for children — including day care, prekindergarten, and summer camps — as well as services and space for the community. Many years ago, for example, it served as a quarantine site, and during the pandemic, Project Most used it to supervise children who would otherwise have been at home alone, trying to learn virtually.
“We all agree that the history of Freetown is important,” Project Most said in a statement this week. “What better place to teach that significance than in Project Most’s classrooms, and to memorialize it on the beautifully designed grounds of the community center — which Project Most is committed to do?”
The group says its proposal “will continue the vital functions of this center for year-round East Hampton residents, with a new facility. The existing building is old, seriously in need of repair, and is inadequate to serve present-day needs.”
The conversation during a Jan. 24 East Hampton Town Planning Board meeting mostly centered around logistics of parents dropping off children, trucks making deliveries, enrollment of, at most, 75 children in the summer camp, traffic impacts on Three Mile Harbor Road, and the number and types of parking spaces.
At that meeting, Louis Cortese, the only planning board member to have visited, at the invitation of the opponents, both the site and the adjacent homes, called the project “a substantial expansion of a building with historical significance, which triggers a need for a special permit.” He suggested the proposed use may not be appropriate in a residential neighborhood because it could add to noise, drive down property values, and prevent the neighbors from enjoying their properties, and suggested as an alternative site the former Child Development Center of the Hamptons property in Wainscott or the current Springs-Fireplace Road site of the town senior center, once its replacement is built.
Project Most’s application “. . . goes far beyond determining whether or not they have enough parking or drainage,” he told his planning board colleagues. “The concerns of the neighbors . . . we should take into serious consideration,” he said, describing the proposed new facility as “an expansive, potentially raucous children’s outpost dropped in the middle of a quiet and peaceful residential neighborhood.”
“It’s a needed resource for our town,” Jennifer Fowkes, a planning board member, countered.
“That’s what makes it a tough decision for me. It’s a tough decision because it’s a very needed service,” Mr. Cortese said. “I don’t have anything against creating this service . . . I just want to shine the light on whether this is the right area to do this and how it’s going to impact all those homes nearby.”
The neighbors are also objecting to the commercial “teaching kitchen” proposed within the new building, which they say will produce grease and foul odors. In addition, they have begun to question “conflicts of interest” in the relationships between planning board members and Project Most board members and employees, even sending The Star an analysis of Facebook connections among them.
The critics also question the transfer of land below market value from the now-defunct Neighborhood House to Project Most. Project Most notes, however, that the transfer is not yet formally completed, being contingent upon planning board approval of its proposal.
State law does provide a mechanism for such a shift to occur: The attorney general has discretion to approve transfers of defunct nonprofit assets to new groups serving similar purposes.