Esperanza and Irwin welcome Mary Foster Morgan. The Sherrills and Parsons are two of the East End’s oldest families, here for generations. Mary shares her Grandmother Sherrill’s stories of the two Sherrill houses. One, opposite the Dominy workshop on North Main, the second on Main Street, East Hampton Village. Mary grew fascinated by who lived in these historic homes, and tells us of old East Hampton values that resonate to this day.
Jun 30, 2025•40 min
Esperanza and Irwin discuss the trajectory of the Hampton Classic over the years. It's origins started as the annual Horse Show in Southampton in the early 1900's, overlooking Lake Agawam. It flourished to the point of some horse enthusiasts forming the Southampton Riding and Hunt Club in 1922. The depression created a long hiatus for the show until the early 1950's, and its rebirth as a fundraiser for the Parrish Museum. In the 1970's it moved to Dune Alpin Farm in East Hampton for a bit, and h...
Jun 16, 2025•39 min•Season 6Ep. 83
Esperanza and Irwin didn't intend for this podcast to go 59 minutes, our longest episode to date. Jerry Torre's fascinating story, as a teenager in his friend Billy's Lazy Point fishing cottage, to his work on the Geddes estate on Lily Pond Lane is riveting. But his years living and working for the Beales at Grey Gardens, his involvement in the Maysles documentary and his personal recollections is at the the heart of this special podcast.
Jun 02, 2025•59 min•Season 6Ep. 82
Esperanza and Irwin discuss the preservation of Barcelona Neck and The Grace Estate in East Hampton's Northwest Woods. The land was bought for $6.3 million from collector Ben Heller in 1985 after a referendum, the largest and most expensive public land purchase ever undertaken here at the time. The Nature Conservancy contributed $500,000 to the cost. Randall Parsons, who, in his former post as an East Hampton Town councilman, was instrumental in negotiating the purchase described at the time a T...
May 19, 2025•38 min
Esperanza and Irwin welcome Hannah Lasurdo. Hannah is a Miller, one of the oldest East End families, going back generations. Hannah shares her formative years honestly, including her personal struggles. But what Hannah truly explores is the intangible that we never seem to adequately explain. What is it about this place, that continues to draw us, despite the drastic changes evident to all.
May 06, 2025•36 min•Season 6Ep. 80
Esperanza and Irwin reflect on the Lost Montauk, from a terrific article written by Henry Osmers for the Montauk Historical Society. Curiously, Montauk often doesn't get the historical respect, for lack of a better term, than other East End villages or hamlets do. We'll visit First House, the Montauk Island Club, Sandpiper Hill and the Wyandanee Inn and more in this homage to Montauk's rich history.
Apr 21, 2025•39 min•Season 6Ep. 79
Esperanza and Irwin talk about the Shinnecock Summer School of Art, the first outdoors Art School in the US, founded in 1891. Students had the opportunity to learn from the renowned artist William Merritt Chase. Now, Chase was and is a well known Artist. But it was the Art Village cottages, grouped near the studio in the Shinnecock Hills, that is the off-radar part of the story. These properties, in different styles on curving streets created its own sense of wonder. What presented itself was al...
Apr 07, 2025•34 min
Esperanza and Irwin discuss the beginnings of the Southampton Summer Colony, inspired by Dr. David Goddard's "Colonizing Southampton". In September of 1863, a young Manhattan physician of means by the name of Theodore Gaillard Thomas went by horse and wagon out to visit the farms and rural villages of Long Island with his wife. The trip lasted many days. The couple spent their first two nights in Babylon staying at a rooming house, then pressed on to Quogue, Southampton, East Hampton and Montauk...
Mar 24, 2025•34 min
Esperanza and Irwin welcome Ellin and Eliabeth Saltzman. In the early 1960's, Ellin and Renny Saltzman hired a 33 year old architect named Richard Meier to design a modernist family home in East Hampton. Small by today's standards at 4000 square feet, Ellin and her daughter Elizabeth reflect on 5 decades of summers spent in an ever changing East Hampton, as well as the future of their iconic home. A not to be missed Our Hamptons podcast.
Mar 10, 2025•41 min
Esperanza and Irwin discuss the proliferation of dairy farms on the east end in the not too distant past. If you define a dairy as any farm with more than eight cows, there were once 42 operational dairy farms in East Hampton alone, according to the East Hampton Farm Museum. At that time, “most of the milk was for local consumption,” said Robert Hefner, historic preservation consultant for East Hampton Village. By the 1960s, most dairies on the East End had been shuttered, with the last two oper...
Feb 24, 2025•37 min•Season 6Ep. 76
Esperanza and Irwin first met in 2000, when Esperanza was operating her art gallery, Art Solar on North Main Street, East Hampton. Irwin became a client of the gallery (though it took him a year to buy his first painting!). More importantly, it opened up a dialogue between Esperanza and Irwin, conversations that transcended Art, including the type of subjects you hear today on the podcast. I guess the groundwork for Our Hamptons started well before its May 2022 inception. Listen, and go back in ...
Feb 10, 2025•34 min
Esperanza and Irwin talk of a few versions of Bonac Tonic. The first was a nickname used by bonackers when referring to Hampton Dairy brand iced tea beverage that comes in a green and yellow carton, and is real, fresh brewed tea. The second, and our topic for today, is defined by one of its founders, Grant Haffner, as the following: “Bonac Tonic is a collective of painters, sculptors, photographers, and other artists based in the Hamptons who curate local group shows with an emphasis on new and ...
Jan 27, 2025•34 min
Esperanza and Irwin have a story to tell. As scandalous ancestors go, Col. Henry Huddleston Rogers II would have been enough for most families. But then he had a daughter. The colonel’s namesake father, a partner in Standard Oil and noted “robber baron” of the Gilded Age, was one of the wealthiest men of his day. Amassing an estimated $100 million fortune, Rogers senior also acquired the nickname“Hell Hound” for his rapacious ways. It was meant as a compliment. Alas, young Harry was spoiled by h...
Jan 13, 2025•31 min
Esperanza and Irwin talk about the storied (and sordid) history of Ocean Castle, on Meadow Lane, Southampton. In 1929, the stock market crash doomed many, but apparently, not William F. Ladd. Apparently, his alleged bootlegging operation supported an unimaginable lifestyle. He commissioned the prestigious architectural firm of Peabody, Wilson and Brown to design what was described as a multi room fairy tale on over 300 feet of oceanfront. The next owner, Robert Harris rents the house in 1963 to ...
Dec 30, 2024•37 min•Season 5Ep. 71
Esperanza and Irwin welcome Glenn and Stacey, the proprietors of Cedar Cottage Springs. Like many places, Eastern Long Island rentals have dramatically changed. Seasonal rentals, have shifted from the previous Memorial Day to Labor Day season to shorter term rentals; often very short. Airbnb's dominate, and are the source of much displeasure. But for Glenn and Stacey, they are not renting their house, they are sharing their HOME. Two creative types, they've brought a warmth and quirkiness to a b...
Dec 16, 2024•40 min
Esperanza and Irwin reference a 2006 NY Times article by Dorothy Spears. It provides a unique perspective to present day, as it is a 20 year look back, written almost 20 years ago. The themes Ms. Spears writes about will be familiar. The youthful artists and writers who discovered the east end of Long Island in the 1950's and 60's encountered potato fields, endless green marshes, empty beaches and inviolable dunes. They made an artistic haven there, and what they saw and felt informed their play...
Dec 02, 2024•35 min
In 1908, four prominent families from Cincinnati, Ohio purchased 1000 acres in northern Amagansett and founded the Devon Colony. William Cooper Procter (Procter and Gamble) Richmond Levering (Lever Bros) Joseph Rawn and William Rowe discovered the area during a hunting trip. (As an interesting aside, the subject of our episode 35, Frank Wiborg and The Dunes, was also from Cincinnati). 90 feet above sea level, with Gardiners Bay to the north and the ocean to the south, grand stucco houses, along ...
Nov 18, 2024•26 min
Esperanza and Irwin welcome Bess Rattray, who needs no introduction. The Rattray family has owned and published The East Hampton Star for generations, and Bess' own column, the beloved Shipwrecked Rose, shows a quirkier side of the East End, often autobiographical. Bess tells us what growing up in the family business was like, particularly a newspaper, where the story lines often involved your friends and neighbors in a small town. Bess tells us of the Anchor Society, and their mission to bring ...
Nov 04, 2024•41 min
Esperanza and Irwin leave their usual comfort zone and head into more uncharted territory. Calverton has the last, large swath of Long Island grassland, and has been protected to a degree. If you visit the area, there doesn't seem to be much development or planning, although proposals exist. It's home to an enormous FedEx distribution center, a large recycling business, along with tiny farmhouses and farms. We''ll tie in the Calverton Executive Airport, the Grumman Corporation's impact on LI, an...
Oct 21, 2024•39 min•Season 5Ep. 64
Esperanza and Irwin welcome Geoff Gehman, the author of The Kingdom Of The Kid: Growing Up In The Long Lost Hamptons. Geoff spent 1967 through 1972 in Wainscott as a young boy coming of age. The memories we all have in those formative years tends to be indelible, so much so that it inspired the book. Geoff regales us here with many of those stories that serves right into the mission of Our Hamptons; the rich sense of place that never seems to cease pulling at our heartstrings.
Oct 07, 2024•39 min
Esperanza and Irwin were pleasantly surprised by the number of one room Schoolhouses that still exist. Some have been repurposed into community centers, others as private residences, even museums. Join us for this historical and geographical tour. We explore schoolhouses in Quogue, Hampton Bays, Noyac, North Haven, Sag Harbor, East Hampton, Amagansett. We delve a bit deeper within Sagaponack, which still is a schoolhouse, and especially Wainscott, where Esperanza shares her own experience as a p...
Sep 23, 2024•39 min
Esperanza and Irwin welcome Canio's of Sag Harbor proprietors Maryann Calendrille and Kathryn Szoka. Canio's has had a long and storied history in Sag Harbor. In 1980, Canio Pavone fulfilled his dream of owning a bookstore, when riding past the Upper Main Street storefront with a For Rent sign on the door in a very different, and long gone Sag Harbor. It quickly became a source of community, and has stayed that way since Maryann and Kathryn bought it in 1999, putting their unique stamp on the st...
Sep 09, 2024•39 min
Esperanza and Irwin welcome Dr. Susan Van Scoy, Professor at St Joseph's University and author of The Big Duck and eastern Long Island's Duck Farming Industry . Susan describes the rich history and sheer dominance during duck farming's heyday in the 1950's. 75% of all ducks served in restaurants across the country came from Long Island. But as suburbanization pushed eastward, rising land values, along with stricter government regulations made farming ducks untenable. A fascinating look at on oft...
Aug 26, 2024•37 min
Esperanza and Irwin look back at a true game changer on the East End. Before 1974, to get to eastern Long Island, you took the Long Island Rail Road, or drove. But the Jitney's original intent far more humble than shuttling people from NYC. In 1974 during the height of the Gas Crisis, founder Jim Davidson thought a series of small vans shuttling people between Southampton and Montauk was a niche to fill. Organically, as Jim's customers requested being taken back and forth to NY, the original bus...
Aug 12, 2024•31 min
Esperanza and Irwin welcome Susan Horowitz, of Hamptons 20th Century Modern. Susan formulates advocacy efforts to both raise awareness and influence actual preservation efforts by viewing modernism as a continuum of the architectural history of eastern Long Island. While Long Island modern architectural history is documented by writers such as Paul Goldberger, Alastair Gordon + Caroline Rob Zaleski, Long Island continues to face crucial need to focus on the legacy of the modern architects and th...
Jul 29, 2024•40 min
Esperanza and Irwin discuss Freetown, East Hampton. Following the passage of the Gradual Emancipation Act of 1799 in New York State, John Lyon Gardiner and other wealthy local slave-owners settled newly freed slaves in Freetown. Some of these households bore the last names of their former owners in subsequent census records. Rufus Right, Cyrus Hedges, William Gardiner, and Luce Gardiner were early African American residents of Freetown. In 1879, a New York City real estate developer, Arthur W. B...
Jul 15, 2024•36 min
Esperanza and Irwin start Season Five with Mayor Gary Vegliante of Westhampton Dunes. In the late 1980's, a severe coastal storm battered this then unincorporated section of Westhampton practically into oblivion. Homeowners lost access to their houses to the point of police barricades denying entry. Current Mayor Gary Vegliante was a teacher and restaurant owner, and along with other politically unconnected residents, fought not just "city hall", but the County, Town, State and Federal governmen...
Jul 01, 2024•47 min
Esperanza and Irwin discuss the storied history of Montauk's Seven Sisters. In the late 1880's, Arthur Benson, the developer of the Brooklyn neighborhood Bensonhurst, purchased 10,000 Montauk acres, and within it, created a fishing retreat for six friends and himself. The houses were designed by McKim, Mead and White, and sited by landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead. Kitchens were small, as meals were taken at a clubhouse. The 300 degree views of the ocean seemed to defy geography. 140 pl...
Jun 17, 2024•35 min
Esperanza and Irwin welcome Columbia University Professor Alexander Stille, the author of The Sullivanians. The Sullivan Institute was a maverick psychoanalytic practice and cult that flourished on the Upper West Side from 1957 until 1991. Paramount to the Sullivanian doctrine was the rejection of the traditional nuclear family and monogamous relationships. “The Sullivanians told myparents that the worst thing a person can do is raise their own children,” said Lauren Olitski, the daughter of pai...
Jun 03, 2024•39 min•Season 4Ep. 56
In 2008, Larry Rivers 16 foot tall "Legs" was installed outside a private residence in Sag Harbor. The usual questions abounded; was it art, was it a structure, did it have a place as a public art display. An East End version of a centuries old battle over what can be deemed art, what can't, and who can judge the difference? In fact, in 1989 East Hampton Village banned outside displays of art within its historic district where Guild Hall, an arts center and museum, sits on Main Street within the...
May 20, 2024•37 min
