Our Kind of People

by Lawrence Otis Graham

  Adrienne Lopez-Dudley agrees that Sag Harbor’s influence is a very New York one. The daughter of New York socialites Dr. George Lopez and Mary Gardner Lopez, Lopez-Dudley is an executive in the New York office of Nickelodeon. Having spent summers in both Sag Harbor and Martha’s Vineyard, she says, “there are more New Yorkers here than you’ll ever find in the Vineyard.”

  Adrienne, who married the son of Edward and Rae Dudley—another old Sag Harbor family—also lives in Scarsdale with her children. Growing up in a house where her father practiced dentistry with many of the Sag Harbor crowd and a mother who wrote the society column for the New York Voice, Lopez knew the inside scoop on who was who in the popular resort community.

  Even though the majority of the Redheads’ social circle are fifty and older, there is a younger thirty- and forty-something crowd that one spots along the streets of Azurest. And for all of them, there’s an interesting story or credential that seems to get whispered about them the moment they’re out of earshot. There’s the architect Garrison McNeil and his wife Cheryl, who live in an unusual two-story cedar house that seems a bit too much like the Hamptons for this very un-Hamptonslike street. (“They’ve got two kids—really smart—one at Swarthmore and one at Hunter High, and you know he was one of the architects who redid the Apollo Theater in the eighties. There’s talk that he may be designing the new Pathmark too.”) And Steve and Barbara Evans Williams. (“Steve’s father was a doctor in Harlem, and you know his sister, Saundra—she was one of the first black women law partners. Saundra’s husband is Don Cornwell, who used to be at Goldman Sachs and now owns Granite Broadcasting, which owns all those TV stations. And you know Barbara’s brother, John Evans, is a dentist in New York—and you remember John’s wedding three years ago to Vanessa, that lawyer with the green eyes. I think she’s a Delta.”) And so forth.

  While I often chuckle to myself when I hear talk like this, it reminds me of why I was never able to relax in Sag Harbor. Even when I visit today as an adult with close friends, I get the feeling that people are watching, talking, and keeping track. Because the neighborhoods are less rustic, more developed, and more densely populated by New Yorkers who know each other, new visitors are recorded immediately and become the subject of daily observations and conversations.

  Each summer, the Azurest neighborhood association and its dues-paying members sponsor a large beach party for its residents and guests. People get particularly excited when a high-profile Azurest resident like Essence editor Susan Taylor and her husband, Khephra Burns, show up. “Now, that’s a glamour couple,” confirms one of the older residents when Taylor and Burns pass by on one of the Azurest roads.

  A second black neighborhood along the water is Sag Harbor Hills, which is just to the east of Azurest. The sought-after street there is Soundview Drive, where there is an uninterrupted view of the beach and bay. Living in the Hills are such people as the restaurateur and TV personality Barbara Smith and her husband Don Gasby, who together run her New York and Washington restaurants, B. Smith’s.

  “Dana, bring them up to the deck,” says the glamorous Barbara Smith as her polite ten-year-old daughter leads three unexpected guests into her gleaming white house—a postmodern structure of glass, steel, and aluminum. “This is where I get away from everything,” says Smith, a former model, as she walks through a kitchen that looks like a California television studio. In fact, at the time of my visit, Smith (who is often called the “black Martha Stewart”) was just launching her nationally syndicated television talk show, which she hosts for viewers interested in household and lifestyle tips. “Our daughter loves it here,” she says. One of the more unusual homes in the Hills section, the house has a roof made of bright steel and aluminum, and a great portion of the outer walls is constructed of tinted glass, thus offering an unbroken view of the Sag Harbor bay.

  Also living in Sag Harbor Hills is the Day family. Dr. Thomas Day, a retired dermatologist who divides his time between Sag Harbor and Manhattan, is a die-hard New Yorker who has owned his home for thirty-six years. “I was born in Harlem Hospital, but this is home,” says Day, whose great-grandfather was a cabinetmaker who became well known in the early 1800s in North Carolina, where he designed the Day bed. A catalog in his living room reveals that many of his ancestor’s furnishings are on display at the North Carolina Museum of History in Raleigh. “There are many people out here who have interesting ties to history,” says Dr. Day, who practiced in Harlem for several decades. “You just have to meet a few people and then the stories just open up.”

  The people that Dr. Day is talking about have been showing up in big numbers for the Hills’ annual dance, which has taken place every July at the Salty Dog or the Waterside.

  “And this is the last of the three black beach neighborhoods,” says Chester Redhead as he steers his large Rolls onto Lincoln Drive in the Ninevah neighborhood. As he drives me down the block, it’s obvious that he knows the people and the houses well. At the mere sight of his car, friendly waves are elicited from sundecks and driveways along the road.

  Unlike Azurest and Sag Harbor Hills, Ninevah is a very small neighborhood. “We are only about thirty families and, as we joke, all our streets are named after Republican presidents,” says Barbara Brannen, who first bought a house in Sag Harbor in 1953. “There’s Lincoln, Wilson, Harding, and Taft. My husband and I persuaded a lot of our friends from New York to move here, and many of them are starting to make this their year-round residence.”

  Although Ninevah is considered more low-key than the other two beachfront neighborhoods, its annual arts festival brings out the neighborhood’s old guard and their friends every August in big numbers. In addition to Brannen, who was president of the Brooklyn Girl Friends in the 1970s, president of the Queens chapter of Jack and Jill in the 1960s, and a columnist for the Amsterdam News, Ninevah has such other well-placed people as Sylvia Hayes, whose family owned Small’s Paradise in Harlem; Gwendolyn Dukette; Dr. Buddy Gibbs; and socialite Hazel Gray.

  Just one block away from the three beachfront neighborhoods, on the opposite side of Route 114, are two other black neighborhoods that I am certain I never visited or heard of as a child. The first is Chatfield’s Hill. Judy Henriques’s family has owned a house on Lighthouse Lane in the Chatfield’s Hill section for more than forty years. “My dad bought this house in 1952 at a time when virtually all the houses in Chatfield’s Hill were owned by whites.” A successful architect, Al Henriques eventually saw other black professionals move onto his street once the lots filled up in the waterfront neighborhoods. Among the active residents in Chatfield’s Hill is neighborhood association president George Burnette, who is also chapter president of the American Association of Retired Persons.

  “Come on in,” says Ernie Hill as he beckons some more unexpected guests up the stairs of his multilevel contemporary home in the fifth neighborhood, Hillcrest Terrace. “Ardeth and Alma are on the deck off the family room.”

  Passing by a foyer, staircase, and living room lined with paintings by Frank Wimberly (“Everybody out here has at least one piece of Wimberly’s art in his house,” says Chester Redhead in a quiet, approving tone), one finds Ernie’s wife, Ardeth, sitting on an elevated shaded deck with Alma Brown, widow of Ron Brown.

  “Did you see Michael on the beach today before he left to golf?” asked Brown, referring to her son. “He and Tammy are over at Ken and Kathy’s.”

  From the deck, you can see the woods in back and the narrow road that continues up a steep hill. As you continue up the road, you pass the lovely homes of people like Gaynelle Spaulding Woods, a big name in the Girl Friends and one of the founders of the Baltimore chapter of Jack and Jill. It is quieter here and you get the distinct impression that this neighborhood is less populated, less pretentious, and less black, compared with the go-go neighborhoods across Route 114.

  “The place to be is in the Hills or Azurest,” says one resident walking a golden retriever. “It’s a real scene over there. Chatfield’s and Hi
llcrest are really not in your face. It’s nice here, but it’s not what most visitors want when they come to sightsee in the Hamptons. You don’t get all the glitz in these two neighborhoods.”

  “That’s because white people have infiltrated it and they’re not keeping their property up,” says a Ninevah resident who points out a white family’s backyard in Hillcrest Terrace, where wet towels and linen are hanging on a rope tied between the house and a pine tree thirty feet away.

  “Would you look at that?” says a New York attorney who once owned a house in Sag Harbor. “This is why I sold and moved to Martha’s Vineyard. You get too many of these uneducated rednecks deciding to move here as year-round residents, and they have their pickup trucks, loud music, and bad habits.”

  The people of Chatfield’s Hill are not the only ones who think about the racial makeup of the homeowners in the historically black neighborhoods of Sag Harbor.

  “When we first came out to Sag Harbor, they didn’t want us living on the other side of town, or in the village’s downtown area, so we came out here,” says a resident of Sag Harbor Hills. “Now, we’re losing some of the houses on our own waterfront when some of these children get married to whites and get divorced. The white spouse keeps the house and that’s that. At least three houses in our neighborhood have turned over to whites who want nothing to do with us or with the support of the neighborhood association that makes this a nice place to live.”

  Because the housing lots in Sag Harbor are relatively small and offer little privacy, the black Sag Harbor crowd are highly visible and accessible to each other. This visibility means that everybody knows everybody, everybody talks about everybody, and everybody remembers everybody and everything. For new visitors, that’s a bad thing, since they never know how to respond. But for residents and longtime vacationers, it’s a good thing, because, for the most part, the people in this tight-knit group think of everyone as part of an extended family. For this reason, the people here have a long collective memory about residents from the past. Reminiscing is a sport for many.

  The Sag Harbor families have favorite names that they like to hear discussed at their parties. So aggressively do you hear these same names mentioned over and over that it becomes obvious that such discussions are meant to shut out new arrivals who have no ties to the old Sag Harbor elite or to the old social scene that was once dominated by people like the Hudnells, Dudleys, Bannisters, Taylors, Harts, and Guiniers. If you can tell a story linking yourself or your family to any of these people, you can at least appear to be second-generation Sag Harbor. And that’s saying a lot.

  Other names that get talked about often are Dr. Stewart and Yvonne Taylor, who started flying in each year from Rochester, Minnesota, two generations ago. The most talked-about individual, however, seems to be Emilie Pickens, who had been president of Jack and Jill in the 1950s and was also founder of the children’s parade that takes place in Sag Harbor Hills each summer. Her son, Bill, married Barbara Brannen’s daughter Audrey—thus uniting two old-guard families. A couple who seem to be mentioned with great frequency are Julius and Hazel Gray. “During the 1950s and 1960s, Hazel Thomas Gray was the consummate socialite and hostess who always knew who should be on which guest list,” says a Sag Harbor regular who always saw the Grays in Sag Harbor and at the extravagant biennial debutante balls that Hazel hosted with her Girl Friends chapter in Brooklyn. “I get a thrill whenever I see her on Ninevah Beach.”

  Homes in Sag Harbor are for dropping in, unlike those in Martha’s Vineyard, where house visits are secondary to the time people spend at the Ink Well or on Circuit Avenue or at the Cottagers’ clubhouse. As Chester Redhead tools me around the five pivotal neighborhoods in his dark-green Rolls Royce Silver Shadow (he and his neighbor Earl Graves both have Silver Shadows), the popularity of informal house visits is evident. The front doors are open for a constant flow of familiar faces.

  Another growing trend in this community is for parents to buy up additional homes near their own so that their guests or adult children will have nearby quarters. Like Earl Graves and others, Redhead recently purchased another home near his own in order to have his grown sons nearby during the summer months.

  As one ventures outside the eastern end of the village, one finds a few black families who have located there in the last fifteen years. Robert and Elizabeth Early have one of the newer homes near Sag Harbor’s marina. Although they live outside the five historically black sections, most of their friends live in those areas. Dividing their time between their summer residence and a home in suburban New York City, they give frequent get-togethers for members of the Girl Friends, the Links, and Bob’s Boulé chapter.

  “A lot of the people who come out here for the summer have ties to the same organizations,” comments Phyllis Stevenson, a former national president of the Girl Friends group, as she stood in the Earlys’ living room during a recent July Fourth cocktail party. “There’s lots of Howard graduates here. And many of us are members of the Girl Friends, like me and my mother. Elizabeth is on the board of Howard with Chester. And there’s Ernesta Procope over there. She’s in the Girl Friends too. And you know my friend Richard Clarke, who used to be in business with Frank. And there’s Al and Rosa Hudgins—I think you know their daughter Kendall—they’re over next to Earl Arrington. They are both in the real estate business.”

  Stevenson, an attractive and outgoing woman who lives in suburban Westchester County, stood next to her mother, Anna Murphy, who had helped found the Girl Friends in the 1930s. They have been coming to Sag Harbor for more than forty years. As new guests entered the room and embraced Phyllis like long-lost family members, she added, “Most of us have known each other for years. Every summer, Sag Harbor brings us back.”

  The credentials of the people in this Sag Harbor living room are inspiring. For example, Donald Stewart and his wife Isabelle are executive directors, respectively, of the College Board and the forty-year-old organization Girls Incorporated. He is the former president of Spelman College, and she sits on the board of the Museum of Modern Art. Ernesta Procope and her husband John were one of the first blacks on Wall Street with their insurance brokerage firm, E. G. Bowman and Company. She’s been on the board of Avon and he’s been the owner of the New York Amsterdam News. In addition to being a real estate investor, Al Hudgins is a former head of Carver Federal Savings, one of the nation’s oldest black banks. Richard Clarke, owner of a personnel firm, sits on the board of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

  “Of course there are many white Sag Harbor people—the media people, for example—who have no idea that we’re out here,” says a resident of the Ninevah Beach area as she drives her German sports car down Redwood Road, which runs along Sag Harbor Cove. “Like these people that live around here. All white. All lily-white,” she says with a wide sweep of her hand. “They think of Sag Harbor as being theirs—all white—because they don’t see us out their window or in big numbers along Main Street, the way you see us in Martha’s Vineyard.”

  E. T. Williams says that although the black and white neighborhoods have always been separate, these two groups have always interacted harmoniously. “I remember that even in the 1950s, the white store owners were always respectful of the black children who went in and out of the shops,” Williams says as he recalls his early years, as well as the experiences of his daughters. “John Harrington, the chief of police,” says Williams, “knew everybody’s parents, whether they were black or white.”

  If there is any discussion of race relations, it has more to do with the fact that the Sag Harbor black elite want very much to preserve their five neighborhoods for their next generation. “We need to keep Sag Harbor for our children,” explains Earl Arrington, who lives in a large modern home with a swimming pool. He thinks of his daughter, who is about to receive her doctorate from New York University. “There are important social and business contacts for our kids in this community. They have been here for whites for many generations, and we should try to pres
erve the same opportunities for generations of blacks.”

  To continue the legacy, several members of the black elite have taken a leadership role in the resort community’s civic affairs. Barbara Brannen of Ninevah has served as president of the village’s John Jermain Library, and her husband, James, served as president of the local Knights of Columbus and for eight years as a village trustee. “We are more than just a few black families in this village,” says Barbara Brannen proudly. “We have been here for several generations and we have a stake in its future.”

  Beyond the larger resorts of Oak Bluffs and Sag Harbor, there are smaller, more regional resorts like Highland Beach on the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland, Idlewild in Northern Michigan, and Hillside Inn, a black resort hotel in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania. These more intimate communities do not have the same national reputation as the other two northeastern villages, but they nevertheless deserve mention.

  “Oak Bluffs may have the numbers, but we have the history and the lineage,” says a retired Howard professor whose family has vacationed at Highland Beach for three generations.

  Unlike Sag Harbor and Oak Bluffs, Highland Beach was established specifically for and by blacks who were not allowed to visit the racially segregated communities in the area. The land was first purchased by Frederick Douglass’s son, Major Charles Douglass, in the 1890s as a forty-four-acre parcel along the Chesapeake Bay. Douglass built a home on Wayma Avenue known as Twin Oaks.