Message to People in the Hamptons: You Do Realize You’re Spending Thousands of Dollars for a Weekend in the Suburbs, Right?

The Hamptons are the worst.

I mean, seriously.  What an amazing marketing job they’ve done out there to convince Manhattanites to spend thousands of dollars and a five-hour schlep in traffic to visit what is essentially — and I hate to break this to you — JUST ANOTHER SUBURB.

Because that’s all it is.  The Hamptons are just the east end of Long Island, the original Manhattan suburb.  Think about it:

• Five bedroom colonials and high-ranches?  Check.
• One acre lots?  Check.
• You have to drive everywhere?  Check.

That, my friends, is a suburb.  S-U-B-U-R-B.  The Hamptons are a beautiful place to live, probably one of the nicest suburbs in the region, but they are still a suburb.

And it amazes me that the same people who will sneer at me for my suburban exile in Nyack will happily spend half my yearly mortgage payment for a half-share so they can spend a few weekends in a five-bedroom high-ranch in Water Mill. Yes, okay, there’s a beach.  You claim that you pay all that money so you can be “at the beach.”  But are you really?  I did Hamptons shares a few times when I was living in the city, and I can remember going to the beach maybe three times. So don’t tell me about the beach.

Now, I’m not talking about the Hamptons experience that the uber-rich have, the Billy Joels and Alec Baldwins and Howard Sterns and David Kochs or whoever.  That’s a whole different world of ridiculous houses and star-studded parties and caviar and champagne and feasting on the flesh of sacrificial virgins in secret underground temples to Mammon. But you’re probably not having that kind of Hamptons experience.

No, here’s the experience you’re having.  You have a friend-of-a-friend, some sort of hyper-organized Tracy Flick type, who sent you an email blast six months ago inviting you to grab a summer share of some amazing “beach house” she found in Sag Harbor or wherever. So in the middle of some dreary January day, you plunked down a few thousand dollars for a quarter-share.

And now it’s one of your weekends, so you pack a bag and start on the great Hamptons Weekend Forced Death March. Maybe you took the train, fervently hoping that you get one of those three-seat benches and that you don’t have to sit next to someone else.  Or maybe you hop on the Jitney, so you’re stuffed into a bus — because who doesn’t love the luxury of riding in a BUS — for what would be a three hour trip if you’re in some glorious parallel universe in which there isn’t any traffic, but in your universe will end up taking like five hours.  Or maybe you splurge and rent a car for the weekend, because nothing says “relaxing” like sitting behind the wheel in traffic on a Friday night for a couple of hours.

But now you’ve arrived, and you find out that you’re sharing five bedrooms with about a dozen people, none of whom are your friends because you all screwed up and took different weekends for your share.  Hopefully, there’s at least a pool, because you now find out that the “beach house,” isn’t actually on the beach. Or near the beach.  It’s maybe in the same zip code as the beach — a fifteen minute drive, which would be manageable except that there’s no place to park your car without a permit, and although Tracy Flick got hers three months ago, you didn’t.

But the fun doesn’t end there. Not only have you shelled out thousands of dollars for your share, but now you arrive to find that you owe another hundred bucks or so for your contribution to the food and drink that Tracy picked up for the weekend. Except that you got there too late for Friday night’s dinner, and half the beer is already gone, so you’re basically paying for everyone else to eat and drink.

It gets better the next morning, which is spent in a three-hour group conversation about whether you should all try to go to the beach.  Chances are, of course, that if it’s not raining, it’s really, really hot, so everyone agrees it’s not a good idea to pile ten people into the one parking-permitted car to go to the beach where you’re not legally allowed to drink anyway.  So you all end up by the pool, which would be fine, except that the whole day is spent with people texting their “real friends” in a desperate search for the “good house parties” to go to that night.  And the women that you thought might be good hook-up possibilities back when you scanned Tracy’s “signed up!” list in January are totally not interested, instead passing back-and-forth their dog-eared copy of the Hamptons Magazine’s Annual 50 Hottest Bachelors list, a list that you’re almost certainly not on.

Even if you actually do find something to do that night, it’s probably a schlep from one part of the Hamptons to the other, so someone has to stay sober to drive. That would be you.  Then you get there, and it’s a sausage fest, so you all pile back into the car to go to some crappy bar that  — I hate to break it to you — is basically a suburban hangout for nine months of the year.

You wake up Sunday morning, and there’s nothing left to eat, because the people who stayed behind when your group went bar- and party- hopping ended up inviting some friends over and they ate all your food.  So you hang out for about a few hours, listlessly watching some Wimbledon on the teevee machine, before heading back for the five-hour trip home.

That, my friend, is your weekend in the Hamptons suburbs!  You spent it in a nice big suburban house with a suburban yard and a suburban pool where you needed a suburban car to get around, and the only thing that differentiated your “Hamptons Beach House” from those stultifying high-ranches you would never live in over in Westbury or Pleasantville or Park Ridge is that you were a fifteen minute drive from a beach that you never visited. And it only cost you a month’s pay so you can spend four more weekends there. Well-done!

And not only that, it’s a BAD suburb, an unholy alchemy of suburb and city that perfectly synthesizes:

1. all the inconveniences of living in the city (expensive and crowded living space, annoying strivers, $15 sandwiches) with
2. all the irritations of living in the suburbs (the need for a car, sprawl, lousy bars), and then adds
3. the final secret ingredient of a glorious five-hour trip to get there.

That emperor?  He’s naked, my friends. He’s buck naked!

Maybe you disagree. Maybe that’s not been your experience. Maybe I’m just a bitter middle-aged man with hazy recollections of uniquely awful Hamptons weekends.  Fine.  But if you’re having a good time out there, and not because you’re some total desperate striver who likes to send his weekends trying to find the perfect party where THERE MIGHT BE MODELS, it’s probably because you’ve actually managed to put together a group of people you actually like, and you’re just basically hanging out with them. But if that’s the case, then it’s not the Hamptons you like, but your friends.  And you could be having a good time with them ANYWHERE, and save yourself a lot of trouble and money.

That’s really the bottom line.  The more I think about the differences between living in the city and living in the suburbs, the more I realize that the only real distinction is the people, the fact that urban environments uniquely attract interesting, bright, and challenging people who choose to live there primarily during the most sociable and vibrant time of their lives — when they’re young, single, and childless, looking for other young, single, and childless  people to hook up with and befriend.  The city doesn’t make them that way.  Theres nothing inherently interesting or special about the city, other than the people who live there.

The Hamptons are the proof of that.  There’s nothing inherently “hip” or trendy or even distinctive about the Hamptons, other than the people who choose to relocate there for part of their summers. Take away the people, and you have just another suburb, one that’s as close to Manhattan as Albany, and just about as interesting.

So, as the self-appointed driver of the Suburban Welcome Wagon, I have a message for all of you Hamptons-goers that you might not want to hear, but I think it’s for your own good — “Welcome to the Suburbs!”