Douglas Feiden, Former Sag Harbor Express Reporter, Dies at 70

In late 2001, Douglas Feiden and Lucette Lagnado dramatically swept into Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor and immediately made a first impression.

They were distinctively dressed and completely absorbed as they scoured the shelves, pointing out what they loved to each other. They laughed easily and, quite simply, looked interesting — and, by the following year, they had become fast friends with Sag Harbor bookshop co-owners and partners Kathryn Szoka and Maryann Calendrille.

“You just knew right away that these people had many stories to tell,” Szoka said. “We knew they were special people and, indeed, as we got to know them better, we discovered how very special they were. Doug’s ability to perceive his surroundings was quite unique, quite rare, and that was noticeable from the very first time they walked in.”

Feiden, the couple came to learn, was many people. In his professional life, he was the quintessential investigative journalist, whose career moved from the New York Post to the New York Daily News to The Sag Harbor Express and beyond. He was an attentive listener, a naturally gifted reporter and an exceptional writer, his colleagues said. But more than that, he was endlessly curious about the world around him.

To his friends and family, he was quirky and engaging, loyal and caring, a skeptic at heart, and a dynamic storyteller. And to Lagnado, who died in 2019, he was her true partner — in every sense of the word — according to his younger sister, Karyn Feiden.

“We would like to think that the one consolation is that they’ll be together again,” she said.

On Sunday, July 23, Feiden died of colon cancer at his sister’s apartment in New York City. He was 70.

“I feel so eternally lucky that I got to have my time with him — because I feel like I learned so much from him as a journalist,” said Kathryn Menu, co-publisher of The Express News Group. “He was just great. We’ll all miss him.”

A Journalist Is Born

While Sag Harbor was a respite for Feiden and Lagnado, New York was their true home, his family said. Born on July 31, 1952, Feiden grew up in White Plains and landed in the city after taking a leave of absence from Bard College to work as a copy boy at the New York Post. After he took a six-month sabbatical to travel the South Pacific — from Papua New Guinea to New Zealand, the newspaper took him back when he returned.

And it wasn’t long before he rose through the ranks.

“He didn’t write for the high school or college papers, as I recall, but he got that job as a copy boy and he just absolutely fell into it instantly,” Karyn Feiden said. “It matched his curiosity, it matched his love for detail. He would see things that nobody else would see, just an incredible eye for the angle on a story. I do think it was a match made in heaven.”

Feiden fed off the clatter of the newsroom and thrived in the vibrant atmosphere. It was the days of hot type, his sister said, and he would take her on tours of the New York Post, excitedly showing her the equipment and the printing press. Soon, he worked his way up from the copy desk to become the City Hall bureau chief and, later, the city editor.

His younger brother, Wayne, remembers visiting him at his apartment in New York, inside an old building with a communal bathroom down the hall. It had no windows and a bathtub in the middle of his kitchen. But the neighborhood was a filming location for “The Godfather Part II,” and Feiden was proud of that.

“He loved that neighborhood, I think in part because of the stories that came with it,” he said. “I think that discovery of how you view a city — I became a city planner — I learned those lessons from him, initially, of what makes cities really work. It’s not just museums and restaurants. It’s the stories.”

In his reporting, Feiden covered City Hall, Albany and countless political campaigns, as well as business, crime, culture and real estate, and repeatedly broke front-page investigative stories. He sought out local stories and blue-collar voices, and developed a fascination with the mafia, which led him to write the book “The Ten Million Dollar Getaway.”

He eventually moved to the New York Daily News as its City Hall bureau chief and his byline appeared in other publications, including The Wall Street Journal, Crain’s New York Business, the Jewish Forward, the West Side Spirit and Our Town.

And for a year, starting in late 2015, The Sag Harbor Express.

A New Beat

When Feiden’s email landed in Menu’s inbox — a note asking to connect, with his clips attached — she thought it was a joke. But it turned out to be a delightful surprise, which was a theme that dominated their relationship.

Menu, who was the co-publisher and editor of The Sag Harbor Express at the time, and her “ragtag band of crazy journalists” were severely short staffed, she said, and so she placed an ad in the paper. After a couple of interviews, she felt dejected, wanting someone with at least a bit of experience.

In Feiden, she most certainly found it.

“I remember sitting at my desk at The Sag Harbor Express reading these clips and being like, ‘Am I, like, getting tricked by somebody? Did somebody send me this email as like a joke?’ Because it was such excellent journalism that I was reading,” she recalled. “The idea that he would be applying for, basically, what was an entry-level reporter position — that’s what I had available — it just seemed like this can’t actually be real, because the talent just leapt off the page.”

Feiden wanted to explore being a small-town community journalist, Menu said, and he agreed to give the job at least a year — meaning a geographic separation from his wife, who would split her time between working at The Wall Street Journal in New York and visits to Sag Harbor.

Here, he poured himself into his work, covering stories big and small, from deep dives into traffic, parking, government and religion to investigating the sudden deluge of coffee shops in the village.

Nick Gazzolo was board president of the John Jermain Memorial Library during its expansion and renovation, and grew to know Feiden as he reported on the project.

“When he was following up on different points, in my mind, he was asking very specific, detailed questions,” he recalled. “The concern I had at the time was like, ‘Oh, is he missing the big picture, the heart of the story?’ I remember thinking this more than once.”

But, sure enough, when he read each story, Feiden had not only gotten it right, but he had added the kinds of details that gave it heart, he said.

“He was also such a beautiful writer and a kind soul,” he said. “I find his writing was very compassionate and soulful. There’s just a lot of humanity in it. You would just see that when you saw him walking down the street.”

“He was just a great Sag Harbor personality,” he added. “When people talk about the characters of Sag Harbor, the writers, the interesting people, he was always on that list for me.”

In his 40-plus years of reading community journalists at all different levels, Bryan Boyhan, publisher emeritus of The Sag Harbor Express, said that Doug Feiden was “superior.” After work, they occasionally spent an evening together at The American Hotel bar or sitting on the porch, chatting over their drink of choice.

“One of the things that I always found about Doug was that he was a buoying personality, both as a friend and as a journalist,” he said. “He really enlivened a discussion about a topic as a journalist, elevated the conversation and brought those along with him.”

He was a master at guiding readers into a scene. He was thorough and appreciated old-school journalism, often turning to the bound volumes of The Sag Harbor Express for research.

“He was really enthusiastic about all of his work. I never saw that cynic journalist come out of Doug,” Menu said. “It didn’t really exist in him, which is super refreshing in our business and very rare.”

During his last week with the Sag Harbor weekly, on December 16, 2016, an early-morning blaze ripped through the Sag Harbor Cinema, and it was all hands on deck. Feiden compiled an extensive timeline of the theater’s saga — “When I tell you that I think almost every newspaper that’s not The Sag Harbor Express cribbed from that history in the next weeks to follow, I am not lying,” Menu said — a task that spoke to his skills as a journalist.

“He was surprising — surprising in that he wanted to work with us, and then his talent was just unbelievable,” she said. “And then his character was so refreshing and surprising. He was such a pleasure, and it was definitely a little bit of a blow when he eventually told me he needed to go back to the city to be with his wife more.

“But I understood, because as much as he loved his work, Doug loved his wife more than anything.”

Back to the City, and Lucette

As the story goes, Feiden and Lagnado met in the lion’s den — or the tiger’s den, his sister can’t be sure.

They were both reporters at The New York Post, she said, covering a story about inadequate security at the Central Park Zoo. To demonstrate, Lagnado jumped the fence that separated the public from the big cats.

“Doug was incredibly impressed,” Karyn Feiden said. “They were together really nonstop after that. It was a true love story.”

They married on New Year’s Eve in 1995 and, together, they were a classic couple, Szoka said — simultaneously individualistic and a cohesive unit.

“They really had a style all their own,” she said, “and they had a rhythm that was unique among people that we have met out east over the many years that we’ve been at the bookstore.”

With his wife, Feiden was warm and gracious, an “old-world gentleman,” Szoka said — “even courtly,” Calendrille agreed. He was devoted to her for 23 years, she said, and even after Lagnado died, the Canio’s owners stayed in touch with him over wonderfully long dinners and visits at the store.

“I remember him sitting in the chair at the bookshop, the chair that Lucette sat in, and then after she left us, he took over residence of that particular chair,” Calendrille said, taking a deep breath. “It’s a little hard for me to talk about it right now, it’s still very fresh. I was hoping against hope that we would see him again, but not on this plane of existence.”

Other than his siblings, Feiden is survived by his mother, Barbara Feiden; his brothers-in-law, David Elsasser, Ezra Lagnado and Isaac Lagnado; his sisters-in-law, Suzette Lagnado and Denise Green; and his nieces and nephews, Lisa Hai Feiden, Alex Diaz de Villalvilla, Caroline Miller Lagnado, Monica Lagnadao and Evelyn Lagnado. In addition to his late wife, he was predeceased by his father, Barry Feiden.

Within a few months after Lagnado died, Feiden became ill, his sister said.

“Doug’s last four years were really a gift to me,” Karyn Feiden said. “My husband and I sort of adopted him, but he adopted us back in turn. We really spent some very important time together that I’ll always be grateful for.”

In her New York City apartment, Feiden introduced his sister and her husband — who were more partial to somber documentaries — to French comedies and John Wayne westerns. Occasionally, she would look over at her brother and see that he was crying.

“Initially, I thought, ‘Yeah, this must have been a movie that Lucette watched and it has all these memories,’” she said. “And no, he was just really sentimental about whatever the love scene was, or when good triumphs over evil. It would bring tears to his eyes.”

Feiden also loved French and Italian food, and would take his family to his favorite eateries on the Upper East Side — quiet, classy establishments that reflected his taste.

“He had an old-fashioned character to him and that manifested, certainly, in the restaurants,” his sister said. “He loved The American Hotel — that was far and away his favorite restaurant in Sag Harbor.”

It was there that Boyhan saw Feiden for the last time, this past spring over a late afternoon drink and a bite to eat, he recalled. They talked about their plans to travel to Paris together — one of his favorite places to visit with Lagnado that he wanted to show his friend for the first time.

That trip was supposed to be this fall.

“I’m very sad that we’ll never have a drink in Paris together,” Boyhan said.

When he makes the trip abroad in October, he plans to find one of Feiden’s local haunts and have a drink for him.

There, he will toast his memory.