Valuable Artwork, Thousands of Pairs of Sneakers Drowned in East Hampton Flood That Also Knocked Out Power for a Day

Thousands of pairs of sneakers and dozens of rare and valuable paintings by artists like Marc Chagall, Zhang Xiaxong and Markey Robinson, valued at up to $20,000 each, were ruined when a broken water supply line on Main Street in East Hampton Village flooded the basements of several buildings on Sunday, February 26.

Much of the west side of Main Street was left without power from Sunday morning until about 2 p.m. on Monday for safety reasons while the water was pumped out of the affected buildings.

The flood burst forth from a broken fire suppression system supply line to a Main Street building and poured water into adjacent buildings to the south and west, including the buildings that house Bonne Nuit lingerie shop, Gubbins East Hampton sporting goods and Colm Rowan Fine Art.

“It’s a wakeup call that everything you have can disappear in an instant,” said Colm Rowan, who opened his small gallery on the alley that runs between Main Street and the Reutershan parking lot in 2019. “I got here about 11 a.m., when I would usually open on a Sunday, and everybody was milling about outside. I come inside and go down to the basement, and there was about 6 feet of water.”

The works of art that were on display in the gallery were undamaged, and Rowan said he had the artists come and retrieve them. But in the basement were dozens of works that he has collected over the past 40 years: from intricately detailed Burmese privacy screens to sculptures, to dozens or hundreds of paintings by renowned artists from his native Ireland, China and the United States.

“The beautiful piece here by Chagall, it’s smashed and destroyed,” Rowan said, holding up the gold-framed lithograph, moisture clouding the glass that covered it and the frame separated in several spots.

Even after spending much of the day lugging water-logged paintings and sculptures up from the basement, Rowan said he still could not find the stack of 300 gouaches by the Irish impressionist T.C. Murphy.

A stream of friends came to Rowan’s shop, offering encouragement that some of the artwork could be restored, but the veteran gallerist said he could never sell most, even if they were not a complete loss.

“It breaks your heart,” said Peter Kairas, a friend and artist who brought Rowan lunch on Monday — consumed on a small stool and crate, a headlamp still stretched over his knit cap. “Some things they can restore — they do a good job. It will just be a matter of which pieces and how well they survived.”

Rowan leaned a few that he hoped would be salvageable against one wall — a paucity compared to the many others leaned against another wall, small trickles of water forming on the floor as the moisture oozed out of the frames.

“At a glance, some of them don’t look too bad,” he said. “But when you look closely — and all art is sold under scrutiny, great scrutiny, they are sold for the intimate details. As they dry, I know from experience, they will not be the same.”

Rowan said he had been drawn to the art industry by a friend whose family dealt in works that they rescued from estates in Europe, and the idea that works of art represent a sort of immortal soul of the artists who created them — an ironic juxtaposition to the art that still sat in his gallery but whose existence had fundamentally changed.

The images in a series of five oil paintings by Markey Robinson, the late Irish painter, still shined with their thick black outlines and bold colors, but the canvases they had been painted on had already begun warping and buckling and the paint cracking beneath the glass.

Around the corner from the gallery, a thick rubber hose still spat a weakening stream of water as Geary Gubbins picked his way in pitch black over a sodden mountain of brightly colored shoe boxes that completely covered the basement floor of his family’s eponymous sporting goods store.

The labyrinth of wooden shelves that wended through the basement, holding the store’s entire inventory beyond the floor displays, had mostly tipped over or collapsed in the flood, spilling several thousand pairs of trendy sneakers from New Balance, OnCloud and Hoka onto the floor.

“We lost the whole basement, everything basically,” Gubbins said. “Thank God for James Amaden — he’s been a very calming voice in all this. We’ll be back, and we’ve got the store in Southampton.”

Salvage crews rolled POD storage containers into the Reutershan parking lot on Monday, where the contents of the flooded basements could be stored until insurance adjusters can catalog them. The unsalvageable was lugged in garbage bags full of soaked ceiling insulation, crumbling plasterboard and sheets of plywood to dumpsters.

“Anything that is organic, we have to get out, because mold will set in,” said Kodi Austin, whose company, Newhouse Restoration, was emptying the basement of Bonne Nuit before turning to Rowan’s. “We’ll demo everything, the walls, flooring everything. They will have to dry it out for a few days, then sanitize it. Then the reconstruction can start. It will be a couple months probably before everything is rebuilt.”

Robert Rattenni, who owns two of the buildings that were flooded and others whose tenants had been forced to close because the power was shut off while the flooded areas were pumped out, said that he had just finished a two-year renovation on one of the buildings, where the new Tutto Cafe had just opened.

“Can you believe this? We just finished this renovation in the back,” he said incredulously. “Between that and COVID, I had just started to relax. And now this.”

It is the second time in less than a year that a water line has burst on the same side of the street. On Sunday of Memorial Day weekend last year, a burst connection sent water gushing up through the sidewalk just a few hundred feet east of where this week’s break occurred.

Village Administrator Marcos Baladron said that last year’s accident had been discovered quickly and the water was shut off before any major damage was caused, but that the weekend break, which must have happened in the overnight hours, had left no visible clues that it was gradually filling the foundations nearby.

A Suffolk County Water Authority spokesman said that this past weekend’s flood did not emanate from one of the authority’s mains, but from a “4-inch fire line” inside one of the buildings.

“We’re still trying to figure out exactly what the source of the problem was,” Baladron said. “And everything was made worse because we couldn’t get the power off for several hours. PSEG couldn’t figure out how to only shut down that portion of the downtown, so it took them a while to cut it off.”

Power and water service were restored to most of the buildings by about 2 p.m. on Monday, though several business, like Restoration Hardware, had already shuttered for the day because of the uncertainty.

The recovery from the disaster will linger in the back parking lot, and on the minds of the affected business owners, for some time longer.

“It’s going to take a little time, it’s gonna be some work,” Gubbins said. “But it’s part of life, and we’re still here.”