Word went around the newsroom on Monday that Joan Tulp, Amagansett’s “unofficial mayor,” had died. She was 96 and, according to those who were there, had paid her last visit to her beloved Amagansett Beach Association dune-side clubhouse as recently as Saturday — sharing hugs, smiles, and, by all accounts, kind words of what everyone present understood to be a goodbye. What a remarkable closing scene for a remarkable woman: Joan in the sunshine, sharing the warmth of community to the very end.
It’s a cliché to mourn the passing of a prominent citizen by saying that they are the last of their kind, and, in Ms. Tulp’s case, we sincerely hope that isn’t true: We need more Joan Tulps.
She was the embodiment of civic participation of the sort that is becoming less and less common. She gave her all not with megabucks checkbook contributions — as is more the style in 2026 — but through sustained and unflagging volunteer work.
Her full obituary will further illuminate her impact here, but suffice it to say that — after gigs variously as a model in Paris, a journalist for the Brooklyn Heights Press as a young mother, and as a real estate agent — she dived in, most notably as a leading light of the Amagansett Village Improvement Society, spending more than 55 years on its board.
According to reporting in this newspaper over the years, she also rolled up her sleeves and pitched in at the East Hampton Food Pantry and at the front desk of the East Hampton Healthcare Foundation; she participated in preparing fund-raiser meals with the Amagansett Fire Department Ladies Auxiliary; she served on the Art Barge board, as a trustee of the Amagansett Historical Association, as host of an LTV program that drew attention to other volunteers’ good works, and as treasurer of the East Hampton Village Preservation Society. She also joined in the Polar Bear Plunge, judged the East Hampton Lions Club’s Hamptons Dog in Amagansett, was the chairwoman of various committees of the Ladies Village Improvement Society, and put a gray wig over her signature blond pixie cut to play Mrs. Claus at both the L.V.I.S. annual holiday open house and the Amagansett Firehouse, where, one Christmas, she handed out 100 stockings. She did all this with a beaming smile, and that smile always felt genuine.
It is notable also that Ms. Tulp wasn’t born here but was, indeed, a “come from away,” raised in Rockville Centre, who first clapped eyes on Amagansett when she was in her 20s. She gave the lie to the prevailing falsehood that it is only born-and-bred locals who care deeply about this place.
We will think of Ms. Tulp when the sun sparkles on the waves at Indian Wells Beach. Let her memory be an inspiration to us all.