It’s a gigantic cliché around here to name-drop businesses and boîtes that used to be here but that have vanished into history and oblivion like a Fourth of July parade marching past into the fog, but we all do it. When I was a teenager, we rolled our eyes lavishly at the way our elders at any opportunity found reasons to mention the Marmador and Jungle Pete’s — the trombonist and the big bass drum of the social-history parade, banging past conversationally. The Marmador was a luncheonette long gone by, which apparently had tall sundaes and a hot jukebox in the 1950s, and Jungle Pete’s was the bar at the old Wolfie’s before Wolfie’s became the Springs Tavern, in case you didn’t know, although probably everyone reading this would know that, not necessarily from personal experience but because they linger in the communal memory, a bit like the way New Yorkers speak of Schrafft’s or Trader Vic’s.
It is a rather foolish game to persist in playing in 2025 but it is an ingrained part of our local culture, this hyper-nostalgia. The main purpose of “Do you remember. . . ?” of course, is to signal your bona fides as a local. It’s like a secret handshake that’s supposed to be known only to members of the club. (And it is indeed annoying that we all do this, and we all should stop, although I will say that it’s not as annoying a signifier as overtly working into random conversations remarks such as, “We have been coming here since 1990!” or “I grew up in Sag Harbor — in the summers.” I’m still more than capable of rolling my eyes, and when I hear people brag along those lines, as almost everyone does, even people who “have been coming here since before the pandemic,” I have a hard time restraining myself from saying “Put a cork in it.” I say “Put a cork in it” a lot, silently, actually, and then laugh silently to myself without changing my facial expression. You should try it. Silently saying “Put a cork in it” to yourself can be psychologically helpful in times like these.)
Anyway, all this is preamble to another round of reciting the stations of the cross: mom-and-pop shops of the 20th century that have oom-pah-pahed into the mist. Writing last week about vintage clothing and a boutique called Fifth Avenue Fashions, which was on Newtown Lane in my childhood, reminded me that I will be giving a presentation at the East Hampton Library this summer with Hugh King, the village historian, on the subject of the business district and what businesses used to be there. It’s on July 18 at 6 p.m. and will be a collaboration among Hugh, the Anchor Society, and the library’s Long Island Collection. You should come. The bait is nostalgia, and old photos of Main Street, but the hook is mutual strategizing to come up with ways to return some of this lost color and zest to Main Street. More Banana Royale sundaes, more jukeboxes, more knee socks.
Who remembers when Tesla had a showroom on Newtown Lane? Remember that? Way back in 2017? They did. Elon did.
But I kid, I poke fun. It’s literally impossible that anyone will ever feel nostalgic for the Tesla showroom.
But how about the Carousel Shop? The News Co.? Rocking Wells? Eddie’s Luncheonette, to which I strolled alone as a middle school student on lunch break to eat a hot dog — sliced open longitudinally and grilled — and a Coke on ice, and where the counterman in a white apron knew I was a Rattray because I looked like my father? Mark, Fore, and Strike, where the Maidstone Club bought its whale-tail neckties and Shetland sweaters? Oscar Brill’s, where we bought our stiff, rust-colored corduroys? The Hampton Five and Ten, where we got our Mexican jumping beans and Slinkies? The Tillinghasts’ hardware store on Newtown Lane, with the skate-blade sharpening station downstairs at the back and the toy shop up on the second floor, redolent of lemon-oil wood polish, where they kept the sleds? Diamond’s Furniture? Whimseys? Victoria’s Mother? Parsons Electric? The Cheese Shop? The Lighthouse camera shop? Lyons Chinese Restaurant, where I learned to tie a cherry stem into a knot with my tongue?
The very name of the Old Barn Bookshop still gives off the sweetest, most gentle perfume in my deep memory, like a sweater emerging from deep storage still retaining the aroma of a lavender sachet — even though all I can remember ever buying at the Old Barn Bookshop was the boxed set of stationery adorned with strawberries and strawberry blossoms I took with me that summer when I went to sleepaway camp in the Catskills. Were the shingles of the Old Barn Bookshop actually smothered in climbing roses, or is that a false memory? I know there were roses on the split-rail fence outside.
At Whitman Galleries (“For Something Different”) I bought myself a mood ring from a black velvet tray with my allowance at the age of 9 and lingered in the silence of the quiet sales floor, creaking floorboards, at 12 examining the long glass cases of women’s wristwatches and silverplate infant spoons, as if they might offer some clue as to what adulthood might be like.
There was Marley’s Stationery Store, of course, where The Star maintained a charge account and where I stopped every single day after Mr. Peavy’s ballet class in fourth and fifth grade to pick up a Chunky chocolate bar or Charms Blow Pop, raising my large gray eyes to observe the gray-haired shopkeeper as I shyly announced, “Charge it.” (I was young enough to hope that one day one of the Charm Blow Pops I bought in cherry or grape, never lemon, might eventually — as it was licked — produce, as it did in the animated television commercial, a spray of floating tutti-frutti bubbles, like soap bubbles, and old enough to understand that it never would.)
I always expected the shopkeepers, the Marleys, to question me about my right to charge candy and Archie comics on the business account, but they never batted an eyelash, just silently added it to the ledger. The bookkeeper at The Star may or may not have ever mentioned my daily candy purchases to my parents, but if the silent adding of Chunky and Charms to the weekly newspaper’s charge account isn’t the perfect distillation of the small-town Main Street community we’ve lost, I don’t know what is.