Sag Harbor Partnership Signs Contract for Steinbeck Property; Public Hearing for CPF Expenditure Is Next

The Sag Harbor Partnership announced this week that it had signed a contract with the trustees of the Elaine Steinbeck Trust to buy the Sag Harbor home of the Nobel Prize-winning author John Steinbeck and transform it into a writer’s retreat that will be run by the University of Texas.

The sale is contingent upon the Town of Southampton shouldering the lion’s share, or $11.2 million, of the $13.5 million sale price. The Town Board will hold a hearing on whether the Community Preservation Fund should be tapped for the purchase when it meets at 1 p.m. on Tuesday, January 24.

“We are within striking distance of saving John Steinbeck’s home,” said the journalist and author John Avlon, who is spokesman for the Partnership for the Steinbeck project. “We are enormously gratified to be at this point. The finish line is in sight.”

Susan Mead, the partnership’s co-president, estimated that an additional $180,000, including closing costs, needed to be raised.

Avlon lauded both the grassroots effort and the town’s commitment to preserving the property. “Everyone chipped in to do what a lot of folks thought wasn’t possible,” he said.

The 1.3-acre parcel at the end of Bluff Point Lane includes Steinbeck’s cottage, writing studio and other structures. It was put on the market by heirs of Elaine Steinbeck, the author’s wife, in early 2021 for $17.9 million.

John and Elaine Steinbeck became part-time residents of Sag Harbor in the mid-1950s until the author’s death in 1968.

Last year, the partnership announced that it had won Town Board support for a project that would enlist the University of Texas, where Elaine Steinbeck went to school and to which she donated some of her husband’s papers, to operate the property as a writer’s retreat with a limited number of public events. The university has agreed to set up a $10 million endowment for the program.

Because money from the CPF would be used for the purchase, there must be a provision for some public use of the property. This week, Southampton Town Supervisor Jay Schneiderman said the Town Board was putting the final touches on an access agreement for public use of the property.

Besides seasonal open houses and programs for students, a limited number of people will be allowed to schedule appointments to visit the site on weekends between Memorial Day and Columbus Day, and the village would be allowed to offer a limited number of visits by boat through the village’s launch service.

Purchasing the property, he said, will ensure that “it will play a vibrant part in the continued literary tradition of the village.”

He added that one of Steinbeck’s best-known works, “Travels With Charley,” opens in Sag Harbor, and “The Winter of Our Discontent,” for which Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize, was set in a village very much like Sag Harbor.