Hamptons Subway Newsletter: Week of June 17–23, 2016

DOWN IN THE TUBE
Bobby Flay, who hosted the 2013 Dan’s Taste of Two Forks event, was seen on the subway heading from Sag Harbor to Bridgehampton last Monday morning talking to Alex Guarnaschelli who will be hosting Dan’s Taste of Two Forks on July 23 at Fairview Farm in Mecox. Sitting across from them were chef Adam Richman, who is hosting this year’s GrillHampton on July 22 at Fairview Farm, Geoffrey Zakarian, who will host Dan’s Harvest East End on August 20 at McCall Vineyard in Cutchogue, and Eden Grinshpan and Marc Murphy, who host Dan’s ClambakeMTK at Gurney’s Montauk on July 30. All were talking about the Game of Thrones episode they’d seen the night before.

FLOOD PREVENTION
Hamptons Subway has now completed its $10 million work on a series of drains in our tunnels that will keep the subway free of rising water for the next hundred years. These drains are on the floor between the tracks midway between the stations, and if flooding comes down the tunnel, a switch is pulled at our Hampton Bays office and the plugs in all these drains are opened automatically to let the waters drain out into the ground deep under the tunnel. The plugs are five feet in diameter, and the chains that pull them open weigh nearly 50 pounds.

TRUMP SHENANIGANS
As you know if you’ve been reading this newsletter for the last few weeks, we’ve had Donald Trump attempting a hostile takeover of Hamptons Subway. It was fended off in the end, but for the two days he was in control it turns out he knew his corporation was going to lose and so Trump sold his shares at a profit early, got out, and his investors got stuck holding a bag of millions. It was a dazzling display of hocus pocus that only a man with Trump’s ability could have pulled off. Our hat is off to him even though he lost.

REENACTMENT
July 4th weekend is the 85th anniversary of the day when Ivan Kratz, in 1931, brought the first load of his subway construction material to begin construction underground of what would become Hamptons Subway. We are reenacting the arrival of the first freight container of this material, which will be brought in by barge to Cooper’s Beach in Southampton on Saturday of 4th of July weekend. The subway material had been stolen from the work Kratz was doing on the Lexington Avenue Subway, and it would take 14 more months to complete the Hamptons Subway job and get it operational, except that Kratz was arrested and put in jail, so it didn’t open at that time. As you know, it was rediscovered in 2009 at a Superfund dig in Sag Harbor and the rest, as they say, is history.

Alec Baldwin will play the role of Ivan Kratz, the scheming building contractor, in the reenactment. It will take place, for real, as a big surprise for beachgoers at noon that day, the building material will be buried at the beach, and all of this will be filmed to become a special shown on HBO in October as part of the Hamptons International Film Festival, at which we hope it wins a Golden Starfish.

COMMISSIONER ASPINALL’S MESSAGE
Be sure not to miss the reenactment at Cooper’s Beach if you can. Tickets are available at 0ur Hampton Bays headquarters beginning Monday. It will be better than Hamilton!

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