When I was in college, an introduction always went something like this:
“Where are you from?” a new classmate might ask, innocently enough.
“New York,” I’d answer, wincing.
“The city?”
“No, Long Island.”
“Where in Long Island?”
“Eastern end.”
“Where?”
“Towards Montauk.”
“You live in Montauk?”
“No, East Hampton.”
“You’re from the Hamptons!”
I would eventually acquiesce, shame intensified by failed deception.
The reception to this news was never favorable. After all, I attended Wesleyan University, a sanctuary for socialists studying post-colonial dance and feminist robotics for a yearly $93K tuition. Even mentioning “the Hamptons” was an accusation, a gaffe that forced my comrades to reveal familiarity with the place. But if my peers were lucky enough to summer somewhere less conspicuous — maybe Maine or even the North Fork — they had license to demonstrate with raised eyebrows that they now understood something essential about me.
I couldn’t help but feel this was a misread — my friends and I never said “the Hamptons” growing up. That label refers to the realm of the Maidstone Club, parking lots filled with Teslas, and bleach-blond WASPs wearing Lilly Pulitzer dresses to shop in Southampton. It’s a seasonal term. “The Hamptons” is a resort for summer people and weekend warriors, not a place where you go to high school.
I pointed out to anyone who would listen that I’m not really from the Hamptons; my dad taught at my high school and my mom has a local business. But the more frantic my qualifications, the cringier they sounded even to my own ears. ”My grandpa bought the house!” I’d plead. ”The Audi was a gift from him too! We stayed in a pretty rustic hotel in Virgin Gorda. I only thrift! Please! Please!”
When I moved to the Lower East Side after college, I found a way to circumnavigate the issue: Everyone hip below 14th Street says “out east.”
To go “out east” means to rent a renovated barn in Springs instead of an Airbnb in “South,” to stock pantries with produce from Amber Waves rather than dine at Topping Rose, and to enjoy an after-party at the Watermill Center instead of bottle service at Ultra.
My home friends who’ve moved to New York City adopted this terminology, and so did I. Our childhoods fit more neatly into the earthier aesthetic of “out east” than the stuffy “Hamptons.” And it reflects a fashionable liberal sensibility that champions sustainability and a vague notion of racial reckoning.
But the phrase has never been quite right. “Out east” is an imported label, one that makes more sense from afar than from its own perspective. “Out” signifies distance from a center of gravity, and “east” defines that center of gravity as New York City, which lies two and a half hours to the west by train.
More important, the term always feels a little like a lie whose goal is to obscure what “the Hamptons” represents. The term “out east” allows the .001 percenters who summer in Sagaponack to move away from an image that’s been skewered over the past couple of years in eat-the-rich shows and movies like “The White Lotus,” “Triangle of Sadness,” and “Parasite,” and rendered antisocial during Covid-19. The wealth disparity in our towns remains vast — a woods encampment and a $248 million estate sit a couple miles apart — but the bohemian “out east” set makes it more difficult to identify the players.
Real consequences arise from this rebrand. Because Springs has emerged as the out east epicenter, the previously working-class neighborhood has seen a rapid gentrification. Houses sold the five years before and after 2020 demonstrate an over 200-percent price increase on Zillow. Sotheby’s recently listed ”the Glass House,” an ultramodern “masterpiece” on Neck Path, for $5,999,000. The people who maintain these houses find themselves increasingly priced out.
It’s impossible to strip words of their associations. “The Hamptons” will never refer to a neutral collection of hamlets and villages on the eastern end of Long Island. If I really wanted to guard against all possible misrepresentations, I could be either unintelligibly precise (“My town coordinates are 41.0832 degrees N, 71.9994 degrees W”) or repulsively vague (“I hail from a small town by the sea”). I’ve found it’s best, though, to be specific and honest. I need not subsume my hometown under outsiders’ characterizations, nor conceal what it’s afforded me.
When people ask me where I’m from nowadays, I just say I’m from East Hampton (and then roll my eyes, throw up my hands, and mime a series of convulsive gags).
Frances Sacks is finishing up a master’s degree in journalism at CUNY.