Party at Charles Addams House Will Benefit Oyster Hatchery
To benefit the Conscience Point Shellfish Hatchery, a nonprofit facility for raising oysters on the grounds of a Southampton Historical Museum site in North Sea, a party is planned Friday the 13th at the home of the late Charles Addams, creator of The Addams Family.
The fundraiser includes a tour of The Tee and Charles Addams Foundation house and studio in Sagaponack, where Addams created his iconic characters. Original artwork and unusual collections will be on display, and guests will enjoy music by Sag Harbor’s The Realm, plus local wines and the local bounty of the sea at the Addams’ wildlife sanctuary. Southampton Publick House is donating beer for the event, and Ed Warner Jr., of the Southampton Town Trustees, is contributing shellfish.
Volunteers dressed as Addams Family characters will help serve guests drinks and food.
But the event is designed to be more than just a fun way to raise money, according to Josh Belury, the executive director of the Conscience Point Shellfish Hatchery. “It’s an awareness event of our bays and estuaries.”
“Algal blooms are just running rampant,” Belury says. Algae has many negative effects on water bodies, such as preventing sunlight from reaching the bottom of bays and robbing waters of oxygen. No sunlight means no eelgrass beds—where clams grow—and no oxygen means mobile aquatic life flees and stationary animals die.
Conscience Point Shellfish Hatchery’s goal is to seed oyster reefs in North Sea Harbor. Oysters are filter feeders, and they will remove algae from the water. Oysters also turn nitrates, that cause algal to grow, into nitrogen gas—”which is the air we breathe,” Belury says.
Three reefs of 1 million oysters each will filter the entire volume of water in North Sea Harbor every 24 hours, according to Belury. And they only need to be 100 feet by 10 feet each, approximately.
The oyster reefs will also have the effect of absorbing the shock of waves, before they hits land and causes erosion, especially during storms, Belury says.
Admission is $100 per person, will proceeds supporting the hatchery.
To purchase tickets, visit consciencepointshellfishhatchery.org/addamshousebenefit or mail a check for $100 per person to Conscience Point Shellfish Hatchery, P.O. Box 940, Southampton, NY 11969. The party is from 5:13 to 8:13 p.m. on Friday, June 13.