Express Sessions Explores Sag Harbor's Unique Appeal

The six panelists who gathered at the American Hotel in Sag Harbor on Thursday, November 17, for “The Sag Harbor Template and What We Can Learn From It,” The Express News Group’s final Express Sessions panel discussion of the year, tended to agree that the appeal of the village, with its mix of locally owned businesses, restaurant options, and cultural offerings, is the result of both rigorous community planning and fortuitous happenstance.

Panelist Greg Ferraris, who served as mayor in 2008 when the village undertook a major planning study to prepare for the decades to come, said officials recognized what they already had.

“We embraced the fact that the Village of Sag Harbor had the benefit of a lot of good fortune early on, the fact that geographically you can’t locate a village in a better place than you can centrally located among residential neighborhoods and on the water,” he said.

The village also benefited from a healthy mix of owner-operated anchor stores on Main Street and the foresight of the village officials who approved the construction of a sewer treatment plant in the 1970s, which serves restaurants and other downtown businesses, he added.

Ferraris was joined on the panel by Lisa Field, an owner of the Sag Harbor Variety Store; Jesse Matsuoka, the owner of Sen restaurant; Patricia Assui Reed, the owner of Matriark, a women’s clothing boutique; April Gornik, an owner of The Church gallery and events space; and Jim Morgo, the president of Morgo Private Public Strategies and former commissioner of Suffolk County Economic Development and Workforce Housing.

The discussion was moderated by Express News Group Executive Editor Joseph P. Shaw.

After Shaw pointed out that Patchogue, whose downtown used be known for pawn shops and little else, had become a poster child for successful redevelopment, Morgo said having a sewage system in place was an important first step for any redevelopment effort

“You’re not going to expand businesses and restaurants in Suffolk County without having a sewer system,” he said, “because we walk on our water, and we have to protect that water.”

Plus, he said Patchogue Mayor Paul Pontieri focused on developing housing in the downtown area to encourage retailers to open new stores.

“High-density housing, both market rate and affordable, has been the key to the revitalization of downtown Patchogue,” he said. “You need feet on the street. You need people — and you have them here — people to go to the restaurants and patronize the retailers.”

As a boutique owner, Assui Reed said, “What we want is to have a diverse mix of businesses. I think this is what Sag Harbor has done best.” She added that before she moved to the village, she enjoyed visiting it because she could find everything she needed right in Sag Harbor.

“There needs to be a symbiotic relationship between the stores that allows for people to have more than just one thing to do,” said Matsuoka, who pointed out that people can find things to occupy their time while waiting for a table at their favorite restaurant to become available.

When Shaw suggested that the Sag Harbor Variety Store is “really crucial to Sag Harbor’s identity,” Field quipped, “I’d like to think so.” But she added that dime stores were once a fixture of American downtowns and having a place where they can pick up everyday necessities is both a convenience and a comfort for shoppers.

“We’re not putting on a show,” she said. “It’s real life. We are real people running a business.”

Shaw suggested that the large number of cultural institutions that make Sag Harbor home may be its “secret weapon.” Speaking to the role the arts play in the village, Gornik said she and her husband, Eric Fischl, didn’t want The Church to be just an art museum.

“That was absolutely not interesting to us,” she said.

Instead, she added, they “wanted to do things that were out of the box. We really wanted The Church to in many ways reflect what Sag Harbor means to us, which is diversity.”

Speaking from the audience, Fischl noted that Sag Harbor was unique in many ways in that it had always produced goods for a broader, outside market, from its days as a whaling port to its days as a factory town. He suggested the village’s future lay with the arts. “What our next opportunity is, is for the arts to be its product,” he said.

Gornik said that Sag Harbor’s organic development may have come about partially because as a working class town, it did not attack the wealthy who flocked to other communities, such as East Hampton and Southampton, so its residents were left to their own devices. But, she pointed out that times have changed. “Now that we are blessed with sudden interest from everybody who’s heard how cool it is and wants to be here, we’re under threat from people who want to come in and develop it without a sense of that history, without a sense of the critical aspect of what has made this place so wonderful,” she said.

Panelists said that outside pressure could force changes. Field said that if someone were to buy her building, “I guarantee you nobody would reopen as a variety store,” and Assui Reed, who does not own her building, said as outside investors buy village property, small businesses such as hers could be squeezed out. “There has been a movement of properties purchased by investors,” she said. “They don’t live here. They want to make a return on their investments, so they’re really increasing their rents.”

Matsuoka said it didn’t matter how good the zoning code was if landlords continually raised rents, saying that many businesses that have been barely holding on since the pandemic could be in danger of failing if a recession occurs.

He turned the conversation to a discussion of the elephant in the room: the desperate need for affordable housing on the East End. Without a workforce that could live nearby, he suggested a business could close for as simple a reason as being unable to find someone to fill a basic job, such as cashier.

Mayor Jim Larocca, who was in the audience, lamented that members of Save Sag Harbor had sued the village over its effort to revise the code to make it easier for developers to build affordable housing. He said their real beef was with the proposal of Adam Potter and Conifer Realty to develop 70 affordable apartments and 33,000 square feet of commercial space on a 1.4-acre parcel off Bridge and Rose streets.

“Attacking the legislation has dried up any other potential project” because developers are unwilling to commit until the legal action is resolved, he said.

Although he did not weigh in on Potter’s proposal, Larocca said he believed first-floor stores with apartments upstairs was the best way to develop the center of the village.

Larocca also spoke about the village’s efforts over the years to plan out its future. He noted that the village’s Local Waterfront Revitalization Plan was one of the best in the state, and added that it had helped frame the creation of a waterfront overlay district that began under the administration of former Mayor Kathleen Mulcahy. He added the Village Planning Board’s responsibilities were being tweaked so that not only would it handle site-plan and subdivision applications, but would also handle long-term planning matters.