Ending two years of concerted effort, the Southampton Town Board voted on Tuesday to approve the use of community preservation fund money to buy the development rights for the John Steinbeck house on Bluff Lane in Sag Harbor Village, to turn it into a writers retreat.
The 1.8-acre parcel, bought by John and Elaine Steinbeck in 1955, includes a pre-World War II main house, a guest cottage, a 60-foot pier, and a circa 1958 writing studio designed by Steinbeck himself and which he called Joyous Garde, for Sir Lancelot’s castle.
Using a combination of C.P.F. money, state money, and money raised by the Sag Harbor Partnership, the deal totals $11.2 million.
The property originally hit the market in February of 2021, and Kathryn Szoka, a co-owner of Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor, sprang into action.
“The first phone call I got about this was from Kathryn,” said Tommy John Schiavoni, a member of the town board.
With a nod to the plot of “The Winter of Our Discontent,” which Steinbeck wrote on the property and based on Sag Harbor, Mr. Schiavoni said, “As the grandson of an Italian grocery store keeper who lived on Main Street in Sag Harbor, I will be voting yes on this.”
Board members described the difficulty in achieving a balance in merging historic preservation with creating a quasi-public place.
Mr. Schiavoni said one of the requirements the town had was that a stewardship be established, to make it into an institution that would celebrate the East End’s literary history. With a writer-in-residence program to be managed by the Michener Center for Writers out of the University of Texas at Austin, mixed with public access, he said the board had made good on that.
In a Feb. 6 press release, Supervisor Jay Schneiderman detailed the public access to the property, adding at the meeting, “I appreciate the concerns brought up about overuse and underuse. . . . That was our balancing act. That’s what we’ve struggled with.”
Holiday open houses would be available by reservation during the Memorial Day, Labor Day, and Columbus Day weekends between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. A maximum of 20 visitors per hour, accompanied by a Steinbeck house representative, should help reduce the impact on the surrounding residential neighborhood. An online reservation system would be available, and visits to the house would be free.
Boat trips are planned to leave from John Steinbeck Park and carry 10 people at a time to the house. Those spots would be available on a first-come-first-served basis.
During June, July, and August, the property would be open for public visits on two Saturdays per month from noon to 4 p.m., also by appointment. From September until May, it would be open every Saturday by appointment. Access would be restricted from Nov. 15 until Jan. 3 because of limited availability of volunteer staff.
In addition, an annual one-day writing class for high school students in Southampton Town would allow students to work directly with the writers in residence. Depending on the writer staying at the house, the Michener Center would also coordinate outreach programs.
Susan Mead, a co-president of the Sag Harbor Partnership, said 10 people had already signed up to be docents. The partnership still needed to raise $199,000 of the $2.3 million it was expected to raise. However, Ms. Mead said, “we would not be here today if we weren’t confident” that the money would soon be raised.
Before the vote, a second part of a public hearing that had been open since January was concluded. As with the earlier hearing, it was mostly positive, although a couple of residents questioned the level of public access.
Ken Schnaper said Steinbeck wrote about the downtrodden and migrants, and was “an Everyman kind of person.” He supported the purchase but wondered why public access had to be limited.
“It is a plan to have a plan at some point in the future,” David Nelson said, but it “doesn’t have the detail necessary to support an $11-million purchase.” He suggested that the town might instead buy the old 7-Eleven building recently put on the market by the Friends of Bay Street Theater and put Steinbeck’s writing studio there, “making it accessible to hundreds of times more people.”
Councilwoman Cyndi McNamara previously had concerns over access, but said she had visited the Steinbeck property with her 17-year-old daughter, and described how the view from the writing gazebo, and seeing it next to Steinbeck’s house and concrete pool, made an impression.
“I’m sorry, but taking that gazebo and sticking it in a park and not having the full experience, it would be a tragedy,” she said.
“Every once in a while, we get to do something that’s historic, and I believe this is historic,” Mr. Schneiderman said.
