Speaker 1: I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to here's the thing.
Speaker 1: Since two thousand, four hundred towns across America have lost
Speaker 1: local newspaper coverage. David Rattray wages a weekly fight against
Speaker 1: that trend. As the tireless editor of his hometown paper,
Speaker 1: The Star. He puts out the fishing report, as his
Speaker 1: predecessors have done for a hundred years. He holds the
Speaker 1: town board accountable. There are little League scores and a
Speaker 1: lively police blotterer. But Rattree has a unique challenge because
Speaker 1: the Star is the East Hampton Star, and it has
Speaker 1: to cover the very different town that forms for three
Speaker 1: months a year when it's coverage area triples in population
Speaker 1: and becomes the center of an elite New York social universe.
Speaker 1: It's an editorial conundrum not faced by Ratrey's grandfather father.
Speaker 1: My family was in a position in the nineteen thirties
Speaker 1: to buy the East Hampton Star. Um it was not
Speaker 1: terribly expensive. It was the Depression. But nonetheless we and
Speaker 1: other quote unquote leading families of East Hampton. Oh, by
Speaker 1: the way, I'm thirteenth generation to serve set the context,
Speaker 1: you know, in looking at the history of the paper.
Speaker 1: The first thing I thought was, what do all of
Speaker 1: this line of rat Trays have in common? Your grandfather,
Speaker 1: your father, and mother and now you what what? What?
Speaker 1: What does that line have in common? What all five
Speaker 1: of us, across three generations have is this very very
Speaker 1: strong attachment to place, a sense of place and a
Speaker 1: sense of wanting to preserved, defend and understand it. Which
Speaker 1: is interesting because my mother was a nice Jewish girl
Speaker 1: from Bayon, New Jersey. My grandfather was a Scottish immigrant
Speaker 1: by way of San Francisco. But we all had that
Speaker 1: sense that we loved East Hampton, loved the South Fork,
Speaker 1: and wanted to keep it that way. When I first
Speaker 1: came out here as a renter eighty two, your mother
Speaker 1: was in charge, I think, and then you had sold
Speaker 1: an equity stake in the company too, in the in
Speaker 1: the paper to somebody else. That's right. It became a
Speaker 1: little bit of a power struggle. Um. This is um.
Speaker 1: About year two thousand, I came back to take over
Speaker 1: the paper and my mother said she was tired and
Speaker 1: would I do it? And she'd throw in a house.
Speaker 1: Basically she threw it. Yeah, And my girlfriend and I
Speaker 1: at the time wanted to get out of New York City.
Speaker 1: We wanted to have a dog, and we didn't want
Speaker 1: to subject a dog to New York and so everything
Speaker 1: lined up. So Arthur Carter was the partner, and he
Speaker 1: was fairly back seat partner for the Star for many years.
Speaker 1: But the moment when I came back and I sought
Speaker 1: to assume the editorship was when he could exert a
Speaker 1: little bit of pressure. Um. You know, it's a very
Speaker 1: strange agreement. And he and my mother were at fifty
Speaker 1: fifty and I mean that's a recipe in a small
Speaker 1: business for write nothing with war and uh, you know.
Speaker 1: So then there's his lawyers involved, and eventually things are
Speaker 1: settled and we are now owners of the Star um
Speaker 1: with the help of local banks. When when you see
Speaker 1: you were in the city, You grew up out here,
Speaker 1: you went to Dartmouth, you were a study, you were
Speaker 1: going to be a museum designer. One could argue you're
Speaker 1: still a museum designer in the newspaper business. But how
Speaker 1: long were you in the city. I was there for
Speaker 1: most of the nineties, moved out here in Did you
Speaker 1: really not want to live in New York and woden
Speaker 1: It didn't I really did hit the wall. I mean
Speaker 1: I realized I was spending all of my week thinking
Speaker 1: about getting out here and looking out of my window,
Speaker 1: you know, sort of pining for this. Yeah, it really was. Yeah,
Speaker 1: what do you remember most about your childhood out here?
Speaker 1: There certainly was a sense of freedom there. There really
Speaker 1: weren't houses much in the woods, so the woods were
Speaker 1: these open places where you know, we would entertain ourselves
Speaker 1: during breaks and high schoo cool by, you know, taking
Speaker 1: my nine seventy dodge dart on the horse trails and
Speaker 1: you know, Cage three children. That was before, of course,
Speaker 1: the tick epidemic, when you actually could go outside, So
Speaker 1: there was a sense of you know, you could sort
Speaker 1: of go anywhere that the Maidstone Club, which is famously
Speaker 1: sort of exclusive, didn't really care that we would fish
Speaker 1: off the golf dock and that sort of thing. You
Speaker 1: try that now and they probably have you taste if
Speaker 1: you're lucky. So childhood here was I think we're bored
Speaker 1: out of our minds, but at least we had some
Speaker 1: open space in which to express that boardom in mostly
Speaker 1: constructive ways. Do you think you've got a good education
Speaker 1: at Eastema High School back then? Yeah? I think I did.
Speaker 1: I wasn't prepared for college level volume of work. But
Speaker 1: you know, it was a good high school then, it's
Speaker 1: a good high school now. It was non diverse. I
Speaker 1: think we had one Latino family, the Sonabrias. Right now,
Speaker 1: it's about Latino. I loved it, and I loved knowing
Speaker 1: the kids from Montauk. It seems like half my graduating
Speaker 1: class ended up being East Hampton Town cops. You know,
Speaker 1: it's it's kind of a you know, despite all of
Speaker 1: the glitz of the Hampton's and all of that, there
Speaker 1: is a small town quality that's kind of endearing. I mean,
Speaker 1: the village chief of police recently really retired. He and
Speaker 1: I had a fist fight in seventh grade and I
Speaker 1: I clocked him in the head and then what I
Speaker 1: all I remember is his head was really hard. Comes
Speaker 1: in and ye lane of work now and your car
Speaker 1: has been getting ticketed ever since? Right, yeah? Yeah? Now,
Speaker 1: the the this area also, I mean, I'll get off
Speaker 1: this invention, but this community. I mean, for you and
Speaker 1: your staff, you must get like whiplash come Labor Day
Speaker 1: weekend in the distinction between what you're doing in those
Speaker 1: three months and the rest of the describe what that's like,
Speaker 1: what you're reporting on for one season, and then what's
Speaker 1: it like the rest of the year for you. What's
Speaker 1: really interesting. One of the weirdest things about the difference
Speaker 1: between the season is you almost can't even put your
Speaker 1: finger on what it is that changes that. Why the
Speaker 1: why the level goes from zero to ten overnight. And
Speaker 1: it's certainly the volume of people, um, you know, the
Speaker 1: the volume of police news and the creativity of the
Speaker 1: perpetrators and that sort of thing. Um everything it's more
Speaker 1: dangerous every think it's more dangerous here. But there's also
Speaker 1: this quality of um friction. I think that local people
Speaker 1: get more heated up in July metaphorically than they do
Speaker 1: in February about whatever the neighborhood conflict is, the thing
Speaker 1: that's bothering them, um, and so so that sense of
Speaker 1: um calamity increases, so that even that's that's it's the
Speaker 1: same people between February and July. The anxiety and the
Speaker 1: feeling like this really really matters and that the community
Speaker 1: is going to hell in a handbasket is very palpable.
Speaker 1: In the summer, everything is turned up. My description of
Speaker 1: it is that people come out here to have a
Speaker 1: particular experience, and if they don't have that experience when
Speaker 1: they're here, they get really angry. They get a house,
Speaker 1: whether they have a really really fancy house on Lily
Speaker 1: Pond Lane and it's private, or they get a share
Speaker 1: with a bunch of friends, and they're gonna find romance
Speaker 1: and they're gonna drink this the perfect cocktail and have
Speaker 1: the perfect steak, and they're gonna be out of that
Speaker 1: pool at four in the morning and pass out and
Speaker 1: sleep till noon and wake up and have bagels at
Speaker 1: Goldberg or whatever. There's like a whole thing they have
Speaker 1: lined up. And if it doesn't happen in those two
Speaker 1: weeks or however many weeks they have their share out here,
Speaker 1: they're very piste off. I think it's right. There's a
Speaker 1: frantic quality to it. You know. One of the things,
Speaker 1: it's so funny. It manifests itself a lot with driving,
Speaker 1: of course, I'm sure you know. You know, there's the
Speaker 1: off season driving, and there's on season driving, and you
Speaker 1: there's that level of driving can actually be relaxing in
Speaker 1: in October um and and you can get a sandwich
Speaker 1: without a mont Talk you haven't forbid. Southampton can forget. Well,
Speaker 1: it's a big deal, you know, like my friends in
Speaker 1: sag Harbor, I don't see I live in m Aganst. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, I don't see him until October, and you know,
Speaker 1: and I'm willing to drive to sag Harbor. The sag
Speaker 1: Harbor people won't drive to Emaganst. There's a whole thing.
Speaker 1: But but this also feels like time expands and contracts,
Speaker 1: like I can't I used to do this. I used
Speaker 1: to come out for the weekend and and pack it
Speaker 1: all into two days. And now I can't even conceive
Speaker 1: of doing that. It seems impossible to operate at that speed.
Speaker 1: But I think you're absolutely right. There's a quality of
Speaker 1: perfection that didn't exist when I was a kid and
Speaker 1: even a young person here. That the quality of having
Speaker 1: the perfect weekend, the perfect margarite, of the perfect lobster
Speaker 1: bake or something like that. Um. So if there's a
Speaker 1: shift too, I think there's one of tone and expectation
Speaker 1: among people here. I mean I worked for as a
Speaker 1: caterer for a while, and you know we're pretty loosey goosey,
Speaker 1: you know, lobsters and things like that. And you know
Speaker 1: I would show up in jeans or whatever. That just
Speaker 1: wouldn't cut it today. You have to sort of look
Speaker 1: a certain way and tell you what to though in
Speaker 1: a weird way, alex is cheaper to get a piece
Speaker 1: of the Hampton's now than it used to be so,
Speaker 1: right because used to rent for a whole season and
Speaker 1: that would be thirty dollars or whatever it was. Well,
Speaker 1: now with Airbnb and and home sharing like that, basically
Speaker 1: anybody with credit card and a few hundred bucks can
Speaker 1: scratch together a tiny little piece of the East Hampton experience.
Speaker 1: So there's this whole other set and one of the
Speaker 1: things they do or is kind of pack it in.
Speaker 1: So if you're an airbnber and you're here for three
Speaker 1: nights with your family and your uncle and your aunt,
Speaker 1: you're gonna play tennis, swim, go to lunch for lunch,
Speaker 1: and you're gonna rip out to Montalk to see the book.
Speaker 1: So there's this this um increased amplitude I think of activity.
Speaker 1: So you know, so there's could hate to say, maybe
Speaker 1: a little bit more of a democratic or egalitarian quality
Speaker 1: to summer in East Hampton. When you asked by your
Speaker 1: mother to come, was there a period of a year
Speaker 1: or two of you sat there and said, what have
Speaker 1: I got myself into? You know, it's interesting my When
Speaker 1: I first got back at the newspaper, I started doing
Speaker 1: sort of menial stuff, and then I was assigned to
Speaker 1: cover the local zoning board. And you know, I remember
Speaker 1: distinctly making a mistake which is not terribly important now,
Speaker 1: but it was about a ferry. There had been a
Speaker 1: giant fight in Montauk whether or not there'd be a
Speaker 1: passenger ferry to block island was at the high speed ferry. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And so there was this critical juncture of how many
Speaker 1: cars were going to be parked in the ferry parking lot,
Speaker 1: which had with the whole thing was based on how
Speaker 1: many cars is, how many people and so on. And
Speaker 1: I had no idea that this had been a tenure
Speaker 1: fight over this parking lot. And I wrote a little
Speaker 1: story about it, and I got it acent wrong because
Speaker 1: it was the final chapter, the anima of of this
Speaker 1: epic struggle over the future of Montauk. And and that
Speaker 1: was a moment of like, Yeah, what the hell is
Speaker 1: going on here, this minutition that I don't understand. I've
Speaker 1: been away for ten years, just coming out as a
Speaker 1: weekend er um but that's kind of the whole community
Speaker 1: journalism thing. It's the coverage of the the incremental steps,
Speaker 1: and you know, eventually I began to amass enough familiarity
Speaker 1: with what was going on to make sense of things
Speaker 1: that might to the outside seem insignificant number of cars
Speaker 1: in the parking lot, which actually was the you know,
Speaker 1: the finish Yeah, and when when when you took the job,
Speaker 1: was there a bit of a chasm between what you
Speaker 1: thought the job was and what you eventually found out
Speaker 1: it was? Yeah, there really was. I don't think I
Speaker 1: appreciated how much the newspaper matter to the community and
Speaker 1: how mad people would get if their item didn't get in.
Speaker 1: That's a big deal, And I think that was a
Speaker 1: lesson to to realize. Give an example, there's a you know,
Speaker 1: a guy had collected some sort of dolls from there's
Speaker 1: this life work collecting these dolls, and he was going
Speaker 1: to have like a one day show at the library.
Speaker 1: This goes back to years, and we didn't get it
Speaker 1: in the paper, and the guy came in and he
Speaker 1: was outraged, And that was a lesson to me. Like,
Speaker 1: this guy he spent twenty years collecting these dolls and
Speaker 1: this is his moment. He's going to talk about the
Speaker 1: dolls at the library. He wanted you to care. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was a big deal. And and that was a
Speaker 1: lesson that I don't think he was working in documentaries
Speaker 1: and museums and all this stuff in New York, sort
Speaker 1: of bouncing from one subject to another, and I don't
Speaker 1: think I understood the the closeness and humanity of people's
Speaker 1: interests and how that's reflected in local media. That was
Speaker 1: a big lesson. Over the arc of the last twenty
Speaker 1: plus years that you've been doing the job, there were
Speaker 1: in the situation where in now with the American political landscape,
Speaker 1: and part of that has been this evolution of news
Speaker 1: and media. What are the tropes, what are the rules
Speaker 1: of journalism that have affected that field over the last
Speaker 1: twenties that affect you as well. UM, I think audiences
Speaker 1: are so fractured into various silos that are not necessarily
Speaker 1: going to cross over. Any sized media organization has to
Speaker 1: figure out how to bring the brand to the consumers
Speaker 1: where they live, whether it's digitally or on print. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, we had this unbelievable monopoly newspapers for two
Speaker 1: or three hundred years I mean the United States, I
Speaker 1: don't know, middle of the eighteenth century starts publishing newspapers.
Speaker 1: We had no competition. Television and radio didn't really do
Speaker 1: what print could do. We don't anymore at the scale
Speaker 1: of these temp and starts, and so we find ourselves
Speaker 1: competing with all of these different channels, basically competing for
Speaker 1: people's time, competing for their news consumption, and trying to
Speaker 1: figure out, you know, how to reach them in what
Speaker 1: they need. And and that's an interesting puzzle. And that's
Speaker 1: i'd say about the last decade or so that's really
Speaker 1: come to the four where where we realized we're not
Speaker 1: the only game in town anymore, that we have to compete.
Speaker 1: It's more didn't even compete. It's like we we could
Speaker 1: sort of do whatever we wanted. When when at a
Speaker 1: certain point now we have to understand the canoes consumer
Speaker 1: more and really hand deliver walk it to them what
Speaker 1: what we our best guess is that they need? And
Speaker 1: are you you're up in the morning and what is
Speaker 1: it for you? Watch? Listen, read what New York Times online,
Speaker 1: Washington Post online. You know, we have home delivery at
Speaker 1: the Times, so it doesn't show up till I leave
Speaker 1: for work, so that so I am reading digitally. Twitter
Speaker 1: is important, I think, you know, you get a feel
Speaker 1: for what's what's going on at the Atlantic or somewhere
Speaker 1: like that. And then you know that there's a lot
Speaker 1: of sort of academics who post things, which is which
Speaker 1: is interesting because it's get back to this this question
Speaker 1: of a fractured me do you need you know, even
Speaker 1: editors need editors and curators now to figure out and
Speaker 1: help who is yours? Maggie Harman at the Times, anything
Speaker 1: she recommends I'm going to read. Uh. There's a wonderful
Speaker 1: historian of contemporary fitness culture, you know, writing about aerobics
Speaker 1: and things like that, Natalie Petrozzella, and she's a as
Speaker 1: the storian. I think she's at City College or somewhere,
Speaker 1: and she will post a link to some wonderful piece
Speaker 1: about contemporary life and history. And you know, that's one
Speaker 1: of the wonderful things about the age we're living in
Speaker 1: is is we are we certainly have the ability to
Speaker 1: come into contact with so much more than we used to.
Speaker 1: And yeah, and you know, I mean, who thought I'd
Speaker 1: be interested in someone who wrote about aerobics culture and
Speaker 1: the rise of you know, fitness culture in the eighties.
Speaker 1: That's kind of interesting, not that I ever did it,
Speaker 1: min't you. No TV news, No TV on a on
Speaker 1: a screen on mute. In the offices of the East
Speaker 1: Hampton Stone. No, we have a television. It's never on.
Speaker 1: Not kidding. In fact, I think it's one of those
Speaker 1: old fashioned ones, the glass you know, CRT tubes, the
Speaker 1: tube however that works. Yeah. Um, we get the Post
Speaker 1: in the daily News and newsday hard copy in the
Speaker 1: office and it's always a pleasure. And we have a
Speaker 1: Jack Graves who is our sports writer who's been with
Speaker 1: us since nineteen. Part of his daily rituals to sit
Speaker 1: in the front office and read the Post. It's you know,
Speaker 1: you can find out a good sports page the Post.
Speaker 1: It does. I feel that as far as I'm going
Speaker 1: to go a sports page that you know headlines. Now,
Speaker 1: do you get a lot of pressure from people politically
Speaker 1: or you must get some Well, it's wonderful. I mean,
Speaker 1: I think the Democrats think that I'm some sort of
Speaker 1: lout and the Republicans think I'm some sort of Democratic stooge.
Speaker 1: It's a cliche in the business if both sides are
Speaker 1: piste off at you you're doing something right. Um, But
Speaker 1: it's interesting what you talk about like outright political hostility
Speaker 1: or blocking it thing. You know, you run into these
Speaker 1: folks in the supermarket here. You know, I know the
Speaker 1: chairman of both political parties fairly will and you know,
Speaker 1: it's it's interesting. I've always found like the the side
Speaker 1: that doesn't agree with you, at least locally is generally
Speaker 1: the more polite, um and and and frankly easier to
Speaker 1: talk to. Um. You know, we're a paper with with
Speaker 1: definite liberal leanings, but not um crazy people might say,
Speaker 1: I'm completely crazy. Editor of the East Hampton Star, David
Speaker 1: rat Trey. Janice Men got her start as a beat
Speaker 1: reporter at a different small town newspaper. She ended up
Speaker 1: running US Weekly and changing celebrity reporting forever. You know.
Speaker 1: The first year that I started US Weekly, I think
Speaker 1: that was the first year American Idol came on air,
Speaker 1: and so it was his whole explosion of reality TV.
Speaker 1: So this intimacy that you know, that's when people started
Speaker 1: to call celebrities on their first name basis, like Brittany
Speaker 1: at Jessica, you know, and the whole thing was like
Speaker 1: some like giant cotton candy machine. The rest of my
Speaker 1: conversation with Janice min is in our archive at Here's
Speaker 1: the Thing dot org. This is Alec Baldwin and you're
Speaker 1: listening to Here's the Thing. David Rattray is the editor
Speaker 1: and with his mother, the owner of the East Hampton Star.
Speaker 1: Most debates playing out on his pages revolve around who
Speaker 1: can build what and where it might take a very
Speaker 1: very strong anti development stance. Basically, I think we just
Speaker 1: need to stop and we're pa I agree with you
Speaker 1: speak about that. Describe what you think happened development was
Speaker 1: because he go other places like the Vineyard and the Cape,
Speaker 1: and you go to Nantucket and it's completed. It's the
Speaker 1: speculative real estate is not going to change that. They
Speaker 1: won't allow that. What happened out here in your lifetime, Well,
Speaker 1: there's been successive waves that I think each time the
Speaker 1: wave hits, we think, well, it just couldn't get any worse,
Speaker 1: It couldn't get more more developed. Um, there was a
Speaker 1: big push in the eighties people coming out here and
Speaker 1: beginning to settle in the woods, driven by people who
Speaker 1: wanted to be here. The speculative money began to roll
Speaker 1: in sort of in the next wave so there's a
Speaker 1: nineties boom, and then there's a two thousand boom which
Speaker 1: got really intense, and and you know, you begin to
Speaker 1: see a lot of um anonymous partnerships coming in. I mean,
Speaker 1: for example, Paul Manafort was spending Ukrainian blood money to
Speaker 1: build himself a palace and watermel Um. There was an
Speaker 1: internationalization of the money flowing into real estate here that
Speaker 1: I think has really caused a break architecturally and socially
Speaker 1: between what came before and kind of where we are now.
Speaker 1: And I know that sounds dark and dire. Um, but
Speaker 1: if you could, if you can kind of like two
Speaker 1: groups as the people who wanted to be here because
Speaker 1: they loved it, people like you, and and then there
Speaker 1: are people for whom it represented something else or wasn't
Speaker 1: it was just part of an investment portfolio or place
Speaker 1: to you know, burn ill gotten gains and launder cash
Speaker 1: into American dollars. So so there is a quality I
Speaker 1: think now of unfamiliarity. Um, what are you suggesting might
Speaker 1: be done? I really think there should be a no
Speaker 1: net growth strategy, so that if the town okay's an
Speaker 1: expansion of our restaurant, for example, that's offset in some
Speaker 1: other way. There's there's a great deal of public money
Speaker 1: or now for property acquisitions, so it's not an impossible
Speaker 1: idea to to think that you could do that. Why
Speaker 1: do you think the why do you why do you
Speaker 1: think the appropriation of that money has been so slow?
Speaker 1: These boards these last few they're not spending arely any
Speaker 1: of that CPF money? Why? That's a good question. I
Speaker 1: think there's certainly been a little bit of pushback, and
Speaker 1: there's a strange myth that um taking land off the
Speaker 1: out of the market, if you will, If an acre
Speaker 1: is taken out of the market and m against it,
Speaker 1: suddenly that means we're not going to have affordable housing,
Speaker 1: name against it, which is of course insane because an
Speaker 1: acre and arm against it would set you back, you know,
Speaker 1: a million dollars or something like that. Um. So there
Speaker 1: is this sort of political local rumbling that land preservation
Speaker 1: is good, but you don't want to go too far.
Speaker 1: It's causing many problems as ald you think about it.
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, other than real estate, probably the
Speaker 1: other big industries really the sort of landscape industrial complex,
Speaker 1: which is building, building and renovating, rendom aiding and planting,
Speaker 1: you know, arbor vite, so you don't see your neighbors. Um.
Speaker 1: So it does kind of make sense that that a
Speaker 1: zero growth there's a threat, is a real threat. But
Speaker 1: you know, there's been an extraordinary effort at land preservation here. Um.
Speaker 1: The east end of Long Island is surrounded by fertile
Speaker 1: marine environments have been protected. Um, so you can still
Speaker 1: get away from Yeah. Yeah, I think I think that's
Speaker 1: still indoors and that's a testament to really there's there
Speaker 1: was really a period when I was growing up here
Speaker 1: when there's folks with a lot of foresight decided we
Speaker 1: are going to save the woodlands, We're gonna save the bays,
Speaker 1: We're going to stop the mega development, um. You know.
Speaker 1: And I mean there's still plenty of pressure. Mont Talking
Speaker 1: particulars is coming under just extraordinary um, both sort of
Speaker 1: corporate and ego driven development. But they're still wonderful places.
Speaker 1: So you can get away, um back roads that are
Speaker 1: essentially back roads. Still. I don't think it should be
Speaker 1: allowed to get much more crowded here um. And it
Speaker 1: could there's plenty of redevelopment that could happen. There's still
Speaker 1: vacant land down zoning. Sure they were like, Wow, you know,
Speaker 1: we'll just put the town water in. Then we can
Speaker 1: down zone from five acres to two acres and build
Speaker 1: a hell of a lot more houses out here and
Speaker 1: don't have to worry about septic I think there was
Speaker 1: a moment where that probably was true, that there was
Speaker 1: a sense that we can run utilities and and get
Speaker 1: greater development from suburbanized. There are still a lot of
Speaker 1: very small lots here. I think that the question of
Speaker 1: suburbanization is interesting because the property values are so high.
Speaker 1: It's really a question of who is building now and
Speaker 1: for what reason? And it's it seems like a lot
Speaker 1: of what goes on here is being built for churn
Speaker 1: and for turnover, and so a density is not quite
Speaker 1: as attractive as it might have been once because you
Speaker 1: want to have houses that look a certain way, so
Speaker 1: they've got that curb appeal for for resale. It's hard
Speaker 1: to know how much of the real estate industry here
Speaker 1: really is speculative still, but I think it's you know,
Speaker 1: sake of argument. You know, does public water fit into that?
Speaker 1: I think so it is interesting you go to a
Speaker 1: place like Bellinus in Marin County, and the way that
Speaker 1: Bellinis has put the clamps on development is by limiting
Speaker 1: the number of water hookups, which you know both makes
Speaker 1: them very valuable. But but it's interesting, yes, suppose well,
Speaker 1: I mean we've hit saturation. I don't know if you
Speaker 1: try to use your cell phone today, but you know,
Speaker 1: essentially you can't make a cell phone call. And when
Speaker 1: more areas than I'm used to write, you know, and
Speaker 1: then the internet's overloaded. I can only not make a
Speaker 1: phone call when I drove past Pearlman's property, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: now I can make a phone call many places. Well,
Speaker 1: that's right, that's right. Of course, there was rumors that
Speaker 1: someone on Newtown Lane in East Hampton had a cell
Speaker 1: phone jammer, but that was never Army lying on new
Speaker 1: for the facts, just the facts. Now in the time
Speaker 1: we have left like a two more questions if you
Speaker 1: want to tell me about the Slaveholder project. You've been
Speaker 1: working on the origins of that and where is it
Speaker 1: at now? So this is really interesting. About two years
Speaker 1: ago we started, really I started asking the question, um,
Speaker 1: you know, what what was slave holding like in East Hampton?
Speaker 1: I knew about two enslaved persons out of all of
Speaker 1: East Hampton history that you know, we're here, and what
Speaker 1: was surprising was the church records essentially listed something on
Speaker 1: the order of three hundred, three hundred thirty people who
Speaker 1: may well have been enslaved. So from that starting point,
Speaker 1: we've been trying to use census records and primary source
Speaker 1: documents of all sorts to make a list of every
Speaker 1: single enslaved person who ever lived in the town of
Speaker 1: East Hampton, and at this point where up to over
Speaker 1: two fifty people. But what's interesting about that is what's
Speaker 1: emerging is a much more complicated picture of the American origin,
Speaker 1: frankly um because the argument has always been that sort
Speaker 1: of America came out of the colonies, that these townships
Speaker 1: became colonies, became sort of unified colonies, became states. You
Speaker 1: have the Revolution, Declaration of Independence, Constitution United States. So
Speaker 1: the concept, really, the way we've learned history is that
Speaker 1: these white settlers built America. But the truth is that
Speaker 1: enslaved Africans worked side by side, and that the records
Speaker 1: are really everywhere where. For example, well, the East Hampton Library,
Speaker 1: for example, has a wonderful collection, as do many communities
Speaker 1: of old Ledger books. So one of our greatest sources
Speaker 1: is uh several generations of shoemaker's account books and they
Speaker 1: would write something in there, like Cato, who belonged to
Speaker 1: Mr Malford, got a pair of shoes on such and
Speaker 1: such a date, and they would identify him as a
Speaker 1: negro um. They were scrupulous about keeping records. There wasn't
Speaker 1: really a lot of cash in those days, so it
Speaker 1: was an economy based on exchange. It wasn't barter per se.
Speaker 1: I gave you a pair of shoes, and so you
Speaker 1: gonna work for me for half a day or something
Speaker 1: like that. So, but that's all written down, and so
Speaker 1: these records begin to get a picture that really anybody
Speaker 1: of means in the colonial period here, and we're talking
Speaker 1: from sixteen fifty onward, had at least one or two
Speaker 1: enslaved persons in their homes. What about you, may do
Speaker 1: I want to engage in this in part it's picking
Speaker 1: up something in the zeitgeist m violence against black men.
Speaker 1: And early on in the project, I was talking to
Speaker 1: a historian in Cambridge, mass and he got choked up
Speaker 1: and he said that he could draw a direct line
Speaker 1: from the omission of enslaved Africans from America's sense of
Speaker 1: self to violence against black men today. You know, if
Speaker 1: you think the Pilgrims made America, the Africans sort of
Speaker 1: don't fit into that myth. And you know, maybe it's
Speaker 1: easier to shoot him in the back because I think
Speaker 1: most Americans still think of slavery's a southern institution. They
Speaker 1: think or maybe they think of roots, or they think
Speaker 1: of cotton. Maybe if they know a little more, they
Speaker 1: think about say Rice and the Carolinas. But the fact
Speaker 1: is that the coastal New England economy was based on slavery,
Speaker 1: not just in the labor here. But what we're beginning
Speaker 1: to understand is places like Shelter Island and East Hampton
Speaker 1: and Gardners Island were deeply involved in provisioning uh Caribbean
Speaker 1: slave plantations where they grew sugar. Sugar was the big Atlantic,
Speaker 1: uh you know, economic driver of the time, and East
Speaker 1: Hampton was playing a big role in that. I'll give
Speaker 1: you one example, not to labor the point seventeen fifteen
Speaker 1: that the East Hampton town fathers get together in commission
Speaker 1: at church. It turns out to be the largest and
Speaker 1: most expensive church on Long Island. You sort of pause
Speaker 1: for a second. He well it a minute, what why
Speaker 1: do these hard scrabble farmer, fishermen. But we've been told
Speaker 1: settled eastern Long Island, what are they doing building this?
Speaker 1: You know, Presbyterian p right, So what's the point, where's
Speaker 1: this money coming from it? And then you have to ask,
Speaker 1: so what they're doing essentially, um, what are hypothesis is
Speaker 1: is provisioning places like Barbados and Antigua and Haiti where
Speaker 1: all land was really given over to sugar production. It
Speaker 1: was not a good place to grow cattle. Given another
Speaker 1: example in I think it's sixteen eighties six their thirty
Speaker 1: two hundred head of cattle in Montauk Montalk was just
Speaker 1: a giant cattle ranch. But there's only about two hundred,
Speaker 1: you know, people living in East Hampton. What a two
Speaker 1: hundred people need thirty two hundred heads of cattle? Right?
Speaker 1: You know, Boston's got its own cattle. New York's got
Speaker 1: its own cattle, Hertford's got its own cattle. So so
Speaker 1: you know, it is likely we haven't found all of
Speaker 1: the records yet to really support the hypothesis, but it's
Speaker 1: very likely that the agricultural production and other household industries
Speaker 1: here were part of provisioning this vast slave driven economy
Speaker 1: in the Caribbean, and that's causing us on the project
Speaker 1: to really begin to rethink what East Hampton and coastal
Speaker 1: New England is all about. And we think by by
Speaker 1: trying to expand this inventory of slavery among other communities
Speaker 1: on Long Island and into southern New England, we may
Speaker 1: be able to move in the American origin myth. I
Speaker 1: figured what the heck we aim high, So that's really
Speaker 1: what we're trying to do. And we use students, which
Speaker 1: is actually interesting, use a lot of high school students
Speaker 1: to to do the research. They've sharp eyes and good
Speaker 1: memories and they will read, you know, if if you
Speaker 1: pitch it to them right, they will read an eighteenth
Speaker 1: century shoemaker's log book and find it fascinating. What do
Speaker 1: you think about the subject of reparations as it's being
Speaker 1: discussed now? Coats and people like that. Boy, I'll tell
Speaker 1: you something, Um, I never really thought much about slave
Speaker 1: owning in my own family, and one day I was
Speaker 1: it sort of dawned on me that I ought to
Speaker 1: trace a couple of my lines and see, and I
Speaker 1: traced my great grandmother's family. The hunting's back to Reverend
Speaker 1: Nathaniel hunting, and he had several enslaved people in his house.
Speaker 1: And it hit me like a ton of bricks. I realized,
Speaker 1: Oh crap, I'm part of this story. To the South
Speaker 1: had its sort of day of reckoning for slavery. It
Speaker 1: lost the Civil War. They burned Atlanta, you know, so
Speaker 1: the South kind of paid the North never did. North
Speaker 1: never really owned up, owned up, and never it was
Speaker 1: never taken away. So to some tiny extent, the social
Speaker 1: position or wealth or relative comfort that my family enjoys
Speaker 1: here today is derived from the labor of enslaved people
Speaker 1: here at the end of the hell. Yeah, and here's
Speaker 1: the other thing about reparations. Reparations, in my mind, are
Speaker 1: at least as much for the giver as the receiver.
Speaker 1: In fact, it's probably more important to have the conversation
Speaker 1: about reparations so that we as a country understand our origins.
Speaker 1: Whatever amount of money is almost irrelevant. But the point
Speaker 1: is is that it's really the conversation about reparations. It
Speaker 1: forces communities like he's tamped Innerstone in Connecticut or Boston
Speaker 1: to to acknowledge and understand its slave owning past, and
Speaker 1: particularly from the Northeast to recognize that the wealth that
Speaker 1: it continues to enjoy today is based in some part
Speaker 1: on enslave labor. My father was someone who watched his
Speaker 1: own father's casual kind of racism. You know, Jesus Christ,
Speaker 1: these colored fellows sitting out there drinking all day on
Speaker 1: that sofa. Jesus Christ. That disrubs me the wrong way.
Speaker 1: And my father would later say to me that my
Speaker 1: grandfather would then go in his apartment and sit on
Speaker 1: a sofa and drink beer all day and smoke cigarettes
Speaker 1: and watch their basis. And he said, the only difference
Speaker 1: between my father and those guys was a rent controlled
Speaker 1: lisa in an apartment. Otherwise they were exactly the same.
Speaker 1: I'm someone who reads the news now as I'm older.
Speaker 1: I'm sixty one years old, and I'll listen to like
Speaker 1: the BBC News Hour. The announcement will come on and say,
Speaker 1: you know, the the body stacked eight high on the
Speaker 1: road d M. And and I think to myself, what
Speaker 1: the hell can I do about this right now? Like?
Speaker 1: What can I do? And therefore the journalistic experience that
Speaker 1: I like, in terms of not only seeking truth but
Speaker 1: understanding my place in a community, that I can have
Speaker 1: some effect on is always Thursdays reading the East Hampton Star.
Speaker 1: I sit with my East Tempting Star on Thursday afternoon.
Speaker 1: I make everybody go away, and I read the Police
Speaker 1: Blotterer and the obituary page, and I read the obituaries
Speaker 1: word for word, and I go through the whole thing,
Speaker 1: the little village columns and Isabelle Carmichael and all this
Speaker 1: and the restaurant reviews, and I read the whole thing,
Speaker 1: and what are land sales? One third of an acre
Speaker 1: off of Springs fireplace? Where I see what are they
Speaker 1: getting for a third of an acre up in Springs
Speaker 1: these days? And I need to know these things, and
Speaker 1: I need to read that as much as I need
Speaker 1: to read the Post or the Wall Street Journal. I
Speaker 1: think it's universal. I think people want to know about
Speaker 1: the communities they live in. Pingo, Pingo. Thank you for coming.
Speaker 1: It's a pleasure. David Ratre of the East Hampton Star,
Speaker 1: which he publishes on a strip of coastline his family
Speaker 1: has fished and farmed and preached to for almost four
Speaker 1: hundred years. This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to
Speaker 1: here's the thing, And I think, o tolp me. I
Speaker 1: mean from Thest me I