Club Swamp, iconic Wainscott gay bar, to be honored with East Hampton Town park

Tom House started bartending at the Swamp in 1988, serving up drinks while crowds danced to disco hits of the era.

The popular Wainscott spot, also known as Club Swamp, was a gay bar and discotheque that offered refuge for gay people to be themselves in an era when their identities were stigmatized and the AIDS crisis was ravaging their community.

“It was a pretty safe space at a time when there weren't a lot of them,” House recalled in an interview recently. “Gay bars were second homes — or sometimes they were the only safe space that they had to be as much themselves as they were comfortable with.”

Nearly 25 years after the Swamp closed, giving way to successor bars and restaurants, the land where it stood for decades is now an East Hampton Town park. House, a Springs resident, is spearheading an effort to memorialize the area’s LGBTQ history by creating an outdoor gathering space on the 1.12-acre property that carries the spirit of the Swamp.

“People used to come there to dance and have fun, and to be with friends and to be in a safe space,” House said. “And we want to re-create that for people.”

'What kind of bench?'

The Swamp opened in 1977 and operated for nearly a quarter century before closing in 2001. Several other nightclubs later operated on the property before the building fell into disrepair.

In 2017, East Hampton Town bought the property for open space preservation — and to prevent it from being redeveloped as a car wash. The public park was called Wainscott Green and later dedicated to civic leader Rick Del Maestro.

A citizens advisory group recommended dedicating a bench to the LGBTQ community to recognize the property’s history.

Upon hearing that proposal: “My heart just dropped,” House said.

“What kind of bench?” he recalled thinking. “What kind of bench could do all the history justice?” The Swamp was the longest-running nightclub in the Hamptons, and people “lived and died there” during the AIDS epidemic, including the club’s founder, Bill Higgins, a former college football player who died from AIDS in 1990, House said. 

In July 2020, House wrote a guest column titled “What Kind of Bench?” in the East Hampton Star to spotlight the site’s history and call on the community to think up a more thoughtful and substantial tribute.

“It needed to be memorialized before the history just faded away,” he said.

A 'mini-Studio 54'

The Swamp was akin to a “mini-Studio 54,” House said. The Annex, a restaurant with the same owners that catered to the same audience, was attached to the club.

Ken Lustbader, an East Hampton resident consulting on the memorial project, said the Swamp helped him feel less isolated as a gay man.

“You were able to see others and your lives were reflected in these other people who connected with you and created this sort of celebratory space,” Lustbader said.

According to House, the place welcomed many celebrities during its time, including the musician Grace Jones, fashion designer Calvin Klein and author Truman Capote. Whitney Houston also performed there as a teenager, alongside her mother, Cissy Houston, before she rose to fame.

House's call for a better tribute quickly gained traction.

The memorial is not just for the Swamp, House said, but to all the other gay-friendly and gay-owned business that once called Wainscott home. That area of Montauk Highway was affectionately known within the gay community as the “miracle mile,” House said.

“The memorial is really celebrating the community that thrived there and connected there and enriched the East End as a stronger, more diverse community and allowed people to come out in a certain way in a post-Stonewall period,” said Lustbader, the co-founder of the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project.

House founded Hamptons Pride in 2021, originally as a vehicle to raise money for the memorial. The nonprofit has since expanded its mission, organizing the first East Hampton Pride Parade in 2022 and every parade since.

A 'second home'

The proposal calls for a pink, pyramidlike sculpture referencing the inverted pink triangle. During the Holocaust, the Nazis made gay men wear uniforms with pink triangles sewn onto them in concentration camps, according to the National Center for LGBTQ Rights. The symbol was later reclaimed by the Gay Activist Alliance in 1974 as a symbol of liberation and activism, Lustbader said.

The design also includes a raised deck built within the footprint of the Swamp’s former dance floor, where people can meet and throw a small party, House said.

“Dance has always been a place for the LGBTQ community to express themselves. In a pre-Stonewall period, it was illegal to have same-sex dancing. ... So dance became a [way] to express your gender and sexuality,” Lustbader said.

Plans also call for a pathway of engraved bricks memorializing LGBTQ individuals and a website that will connect park visitors to the site’s history, House said.

LGBTQ history is not confined to New York City or the gay communities of Fire Island, Lustbader said. A marker in East Hampton is “really helpful for people to understand that they have a connection to a history, which then helps them have a sense of pride, continuity, and reduces shame and isolation,” he said.

House hopes the memorial becomes a meeting spot for LGBTQ people — so they can both learn about its history and create new memories. “Maybe this is a place where they'll feel like that same sort of second home, safe space that people used to feel in the past.”