My Beach! The Fight Over Sagg Main Beach

It all came about because of a clerical error that happened when an employee in the Southampton Town’s beach parking ordinance division entered new rules involving beach parking stickers in 2021. It also occurred because the Village of Sag Harbor, which was created as an overlay over parts of East Hampton and Southampton in 1846, should have overlaid only one of those towns, not both.

Also part of the problem was that in 1950, the private owners of Long Beach, a curving one-mile beach on Peconic Bay in Southampton, now known as Foster Memorial Beach, donated that beach to the town with the proviso that people who lived in the East Hampton part of Sag Harbor be permitted to go to Long Beach with the same rights as those in Southampton.

The clerical error? When in 2021 a clerk entered this in the ordinance book, she wrote that the red East Hampton Beach sticker could be used to park at all Southampton beaches on the Atlantic Ocean, not just at Long Beach on Noyac Bay.

The following year, in 2022, when the error was discovered, it was decided to allow the East Hampton people to use, in addition to Long Beach, just one Southampton ocean beach: Sagg Main. That was the closest ocean beach to Sag Harbor.

And now? Southampton says it will no longer accept those dreaded 245 Sag Harborites from East Hampton who got the green East Hampton stickers and want to go to Sagg Main. No Southampton ocean beach for you, East Hampton. Why? Because the Sagg Main parking lot often fills up by noon and this angers those with the blue Southampton stickers who can’t get in.

“We pay taxes for the upkeep, boardwalks, lifeguards and bathrooms in our taxes, and these interlopers get it for free. And if they get there early, they get in and we can’t. Not fair!” one Southamptonite said.

Those Sag Harborites from East Hampton at this hearing spoke softly about family, children, their friends who go there, tradition, and safety — and it will break our hearts to now be left out.

Well, maybe there’s a compromise here, Southampton officials suggested at the meeting. How about we let you use the Mecox Ocean Beach down the way instead of  Sagg Main? We’re standing firm about Sagg Main.  So there’s no compromise there.

“No!” came the reply from almost everybody from East Hampton. Mecox is two miles further from Sag Harbor. And there’s no lifeguards or boardwalks or lockers there. Nothing. Our little kids can’t go there. So families can’t go there. No!

And so, at least one thing was accomplished at this meeting. Southampton officials took the Mecox offer off the table.

The truth is that there are some people today, I am one of them, who remember when, a long time ago, there were no beach parking stickers. You just went to any beach in the Hamptons and then parked and nobody bothered you.

And indeed, we all knew there was this charming bundle of all these little towns and villages, some of them one inside another and two others that bore the same name – East Hampton and East Hampton and Southampton and Southampton Town and Village. It was part of the charm.

Officials decided there needed to be beach parking stickers in 1970. And suddenly, stickers had to be attached to your car. All cost money. Pink for Westhampton Beach, yellow for Southampton, blue for Sag Harbor, orange for East Hampton Village and brown for East Hampton Township. A jumble of trouble. Some stickers, expensive ones, were for nonresidents. But at other beaches no nonresident stickers were offered. With this jumble of jurisdictions there had to be stumbling blocks.  Something bad was sure to happen.

And so there it was, in 2021, this clerical error. Perfectly understandable.

And indeed, in 2022, Southampton Town officials asked East Hampton Town officials if they would simply pay a bit for the maintenance of the beach at Sagg Main if some residents of East Hampton were allowed to use it. And East Hampton Town agreed. They paid $15,000 in 2022 but haven’t paid anything since — thinking, I suppose, this is ridiculous. And petty.

While researching for this article, I noticed that the town line which divides Sag Harbor into two parts did so unequally. The part of Sag Harbor in Southampton Town is much bigger than the part in East Hampton. Why?

Southampton was settled in 1640. East Hampton in 1648. Long Wharf, the centerpiece of Sag Harbor, was built around 1761 and it sort of looks like it was meant to divide the place in equal parts, but then it doesn’t. Sag Harbor was officially incorporated in 1846, and when the State of New York accepted the division in 1879 they said it would be where “it is currently agreed by the early settlers as such to be” and that was that. Nevertheless, the town line zigs and zags, though it looks like they tried to get it down the middle. But didn’t.

We’ve come a long way from a time when you could go to any beach and meet a surfcaster from Speonk or a farmer from Calverton trying out one or another of the Hampton beaches. Now it’s so local. Oh, so you’re from Abrahams Path? We’re right around the corner.

It makes me wonder if we couldn’t just add a time of day when people from other places can use the beaches. Four to 5 for the folks from Port Jefferson. Two to 4 from some folks from Shelter Island. Or maybe a little swapping. Ten free tickets to the Big Duck in Flanders for an East Hampton beach from 3 to 5 on Thursdays.

Would that work?