New York Magazine Hamptons - June 2025

FOR YEARS, THIS MAGAZINE would devote an issue to exploring the Hamptons. In 1972, Gail Sheehy paid a visit to Edith “Big Edie” Ewing Bouvier Beale and her daughter, Edith “Little Edie,” Jackie O.’s unhinged and downwardly mobile relations who were living in the magnificent, yet borderline unlivable, estate Grey Gardens. (The article inspired the documentary.) By the time we returned for our last stand-alone issue in 2000, the Hamptons had transformed. What was long the relatively buttoned-up summer retreat for descendants of gilded-age robber barons, patricians of old-line Mayflower pedigree, and the occasional Abstract Expressionist had become the destination for Wall Street’s new-money guys to build enormous mega-mansions, for Steven Spielberg & Co. to build their Georgica Pond compounds, for Sean “Diddy” Combs to throw, with his now-infamous annual…

THEY PUT THIS tennis court in the back; it’s just awful,” said Cole Escola, channeling Edith Bouvier Beale. Escola was taking a break from their Tony Award–winning performance as an over-the-top Mary Todd Lincoln in their hit play, Oh, Mary!, to visit Grey Gardens, no longer the crumbling estate of Beale’s day thanks to its new owner, the designer Liz Lange. How about the wisteria in the garden? “I don’t think you can count those as flowers.” It was Escola’s first time in the Hamptons, but they discovered Little Edie long ago, when they first moved to New York. Grey Gardens “was sort of my comfort movie,” they said. “I would watch it over and over again. I became obsessed with her. She just had a sort of sense, in…

Westhampton Beach Those who live here are smug about their proximity to the city (under a 90-minute drive with no traffic) and proud of its being less stuffy than villages to the East. It’s been dismissed as “Dentist Hampton” over the years—Steven Spielberg lands his plane here but then heads home to East Hampton. Ina Garten’s original Barefoot Contessa shop was here but relocated to East Hampton in 1985; some are still burned by the move. The synagogue—run by Marc Schneier and recently renovated—has become a stop on every politician’s Suffolk County tour. NEW IN TOWN Westhampton Beach’s Sunset Theater opened after a renovation, and the chintzy Seabreeze Motel has been reborn as the sleek Three Ducks. TALK OF THE TOWN In March, a brush fire caused by someone making…

IT’S THE FRIDAY night of Memorial Day weekend, and a set of well-bred, well-kept society types has descended on the Hedges Inn. The historic hotel in East Hampton has just reopened under new ownership with a restaurant called Swifty’s, after the former Upper East Side socialites’ haunt. In one corner of the room, Ina Garten sips a martini and giggles with her husband, Jeffrey, and the director Rob Marshall. At the bar, the makeup artist Bobbi Brown chats with New York Fashion Week’s Fern Mallis. Everyone here has an important last name or an important relative (Naomi Watts’s brother, for instance) or a vaguely important job. “She has started some big companies, but I don’t know what they are,” says one Hamptons housewife, sipping a flute of Champagne and gesturing…

STARTING IN LATE JUNE, every day by noon, Joan Tulp, 95, hits the beach. Her caretaker drives her in her mini-SUV with GANSETT plates to the Amagansett Beach Association, where a junior lifeguard helps her into a wheelchair with giant puffy wheels and rolls her down to the water’s edge. There, the “unofficial mayor of Amagansett,” as she’s known, settles into her spot to the right of the lifeguard stand as friends, family, and fellow citizens pull their beach chairs into a semicircle around Tulp to share local intel. Tiara’d mascot of the Polar Bear Plunge, dog-show judge, pretend victim for lifeguard tests: Tulp has played many roles here since she first visited in 1951. She came in on the train from Brooklyn to meet her first husband’s Amagansett aunts:…

“THE BILLIONAIRES spend millions of dollars to beef up their private security! What are they so afraid of?” an organizer cried into her megaphone as she rode in the back of a truck, leading protesters to “shut down Billionaires’ Lane” in Southampton on June 14. But actual Meadow Lane residents, like Ken Griffin and Leon Black, were nowhere to be found; the only ones who appeared to hear the question were a pair of ospreys feathering their nest on top of a mansion chimney. More than 100 protesters—some local, many from elsewhere on Long Island—rallied for two hours against ICE, oligarchy, and U.S. support for Israel. Some Southamptonites splintered off, refusing to march up the lane when they saw FREE PALESTINE! signs. “It’s disappointing that the strong anti-Trump fever that…