Beach Time: What's the Best Beach in the Hamptons?

Last week, after reading the news on my cellphone — Iran, tariffs, immigration — I came upon an item about Southampton. A man named Dr. Stephen P. Leatherman (Dr. Beach), a professor at Florida International University in Miami who travels the world looking at beaches, announced his selection for this year’s Best Beach in the U.S. In 2025, it is Coopers Beach in Southampton. Wailea Beach in Maui, Hawaii, finished second.

It’s a great honor to be selected. But East Hampton Main Beach is better, in my opinion. Trouble is, everybody fights about who gets to use it.

For example, a man named David Ganz recently filed a lawsuit against East Hampton Village for revoking his beach-parking permit.

The authorities argued that Ganz drove recklessly around in the parking lot on several occasions. Got warned. Then got warned again. Barely avoided getting into accidents.

People wait for years to get one of these precious parking permits. He’d gotten one, finally. Now they’d revoked it. Last week the judge ruled in his favor, on a technicality. The authorities had given themselves the right to issue beach permits. But they’d never given themselves the right to revoke them.

The village is appealing. “There are children endangered,” an ordinance inspector said.

And if they lose the appeal? I have some advice for them. Offer Ganz valet parking. He comes down Ocean Road and a valet hails him as he enters the parking lot. He gets out of the car. They park it for him. It’s a service given only to him.

He might go for it.

Twenty years ago, I almost got run over by a man backing up there. I had to leap out of the  way. I tapped on his window. He was a very old man.

“Hey,” I said. “You almost ran me over.”

He would have none of it. It was my fault.

“I can’t look everywhere,” he said.

There have been fistfights. There is such a demand for parking permits that an online sale goes live on February 1, when the locals, not the summer people, can get a few set-aside beach-parking stickers. The night before, people camp out in front of Village Hall and if others try to cut the line, fights break out and the police are called. These battles are probably why Main Beach in East Hampton did not beat Coopers Beach in Southampton.

There’s also this huge fight East Hampton Town had with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Waves had swept away all the sand in front of the motels in Montauk, a hamlet in the Town of East Hampton. Eleven million dollars was set aside to put the sand back. But for 10 years the Army Corps wouldn’t spend it. People demonstrated. Finally, one year ago, the Army Corps came. It took them four days. Four days to spend $11 million. And the beach is back.

A day after the sand came in, I talked to a Montauk tourist who said he’d been in Montauk the prior weekend.

“Now look at it. The town spruced the place up. They knew we were coming.”

Battles to secure a spot at the beach here go back more than 100 years. And not just in East Hampton. In the 1880s, after the first summer people brought their bathing suit changing wagons out to the beach in Southampton, they had employees tear down the TeePees, which is what the summer people called the local beach changing wagons. I read about this in the Seaside Times, a summer newspaper published back then. Nobody stopped them.

A whole new village was created here in 2005 because of a battle over the beach. Two years earlier, the oceanfront summer people announced that they would create an official new village between East Hampton and Southampton, a narrow strip just 300 yards inland, running eight miles along the ocean. This pencil-thin village would block all the residents in the unincorporated hamlets of Mecox, Bridgehampton, and Sagaponack from going to the beach.

This could not be allowed to happen. The people in one of these three hamlets would have to quickly form a separate incorporated village. So Sagaponack beat them to villagehood, putting a dagger through the heart of what might have been the Village of Beach Hampton.

In 2001, I joined a group determined to take over the beach in front of Maidstone Club in East Hampton. All oceanfront people have ownership of the beach to the high-water mark. But that year, the exclusive Maidstone Club (founded in 1891) put a rope along the side of their property line all the way into the water. Nobody could get by.

The marchers were drum bangers, flute players, cymbal crashers, American flag carriers, and rebels carrying Revolutionary War muskets.

I was stationed right at the rope. I saw the marchers coming. But the Maidstone Club beachgoers couldn’t care less. They lay on the lounges.  The beach boys would arrive soon with their drinks. I pulled the rope down, everybody stepped over it, then walked to the center of the Maidstoners and planted the American flag. Ten minutes later, the police came, a lusty discussion ensued, and the beach boys then pulled the chaise lounges back from the surf so the marchers could get by unimpeded. Mission accomplished.

In recent years, the East Hampton Town Board — all locals — has tried mightily to help the locals by changing the rules. The locals remember that before beach permits they could go to whatever beach they wanted for free.

The first beach permits, in the 1970s, were good for only a year. So every spring you needed to trek to town hall. So they changed the law. The new law said permits were good for as long as you owned your car. Then they revised it again, so a permit was a permit forever yours and when you got a new car you could scrape the permit sticker off the old and put it on the new. This caused bad people to make counterfeit beach permit stickers. Arrests ensued. And that did put a stop to it. Today, an East Hampton Town beach permit sticker is good for five years, even if the expiration date is earlier. But a call to the police department yesterday resulted in them telling me beach stickers expire on the date shown. What do I think? I think Main Beach is better than Coopers. But we’ll never be voted first until we stop fighting over it like it’s beachfront Normandy.