Hamptons summer rentals: Long Islanders remember share houses

It was the height of the summer of 2008, and Hara Kang, James Keogh and Justin Agnello, all 20-something upstate college graduates with budding Long Island real estate careers, had found the key to living the glamorous life in the golden age of the Hamptons house share.

Kang, then of Whitestone, Queens, along with Keogh, who grew up in East Hampton, and Agnello, relocating from Rochester, had moved into an unpretentious but well-located four-bedroom ranch house in East Hampton, splitting the $3,000 per month rent three ways in one of the Hamptons' most desirable summer communities.

"It was on a creek and had really beautiful views," Kang, 42, of East Hampton, said of the house. They enjoyed days water-skiing with Keogh’s dad’s boat, surfing at Ditch Plains in Montauk and rum and Coke-fueled partying at popular nightclubs like Resort in East Hampton and Star Room in Wainscott. There were also quiet nights at home when Kang and Agnello whipped up spaghetti dinners and played FIFA soccer video games on Keogh’s PlayStation.

"The summers were amazing and we spent a lot of time hanging out and exploring what the Hamptons have to offer," Kang said.

Some may wax nostalgic for un-Hamptons 1960s Sag Harbor, others for 1970s Montauk’s surfer- and celebrity-packed heyday. But for Long Islanders who share memories of Hamptons share houses, the 1980s to the late aughts were a kind of golden age. Taking advantage of comparatively low summer rental rates and eager to party hearty — or elegantly — young professionals raced east at the end of the work week. They relaxed — if their revels can be called that — from Friday to Sunday evening, tanning by the backyard in-ground pool and eating the occasional communal dinner before heading out for club-hopping marathons at legendary hot spots like Neptune Beach Club and Boardy Barn. In the end, friends and memories were made in a time that may not have been more innocent, but certainly was more fun. And all at affordable housing prices in the season stretching from Memorial Day to Labor Day.

"I’m going to say it had to be around a thousand for the whole summer," Denise DiChiara, 58, of Smithtown, a public school librarian, recalled of houses she shared in Hampton Bays and Westhampton Beach in the 1980s with fellow alumni of New Hyde Park Memorial High School.

At the dawn of the house share era, DiChiara said the goal was "to get as many days as you could" out of your share. "Nobody really cared as long as you got a bed to sleep in," DiChiara recalled. When guests asked to stay over, "We’d say, 'Come for the weekend, just bring toilet paper because we always ran out of it.'"

How it all began

Communal living on the South Fork wasn’t necessarily a new idea in the 1980s.

David Patrick Columbia, 85, of Southampton, said he and five friends paid $1,200 in the early 1960s to share a Southampton house he said was "surrounded by actual fields of corn."

Nightlife required walking through woods to a bar "inside an old barn that had a chandelier hanging from the ceiling," Columbia said. With the LIE yet to reach Riverhead, the weekend ended abruptly with a Sunday afternoon drive home "so you wouldn’t run into traffic on Route 27," said Columbia, who recently wrote about the experience for New York Social Diary.

The house sharing movement accelerated during the 1979 energy crisis, when young professionals realized that unlike East Hampton, "you could reach Westhampton on a tank of gas," said Jude Lyons, 80, of Quogue, a real estate salesperson at Island View Properties in Hampton Bays. Adding to the trend, Lyons said that in the early 1980s, the local "real estate market had sort of crashed," resulting in newly built homes being rented out instead of sold in communities such as Remsenburg, where Lyons shared houses for two summers.

In the early 1980s, Lyons, who was in her early 30s and had recently broken up with her boyfriend, paid around $5,000 for a double summer share — the second share for her mixed miniature collie, Betsy.
"Betsy got her own bed," Lyons said.

'Packed in like sardines'

Meredith "Merri" Bell, 51, a childcare professional who lives in Hicksville, said that for some of her friends, the party began in the bar car on the Long Island Rail Road’s 4:07 p.m. Cannonball express train from Penn Station to Westhampton and points east.

But Bell said her group was "too excited" to wait for the train and instead piled into their cars and caravanned east as soon as summer Friday work hours ended at 1 or 2 p.m.

"We wanted to get right out there so we could enjoy our weekend," said Bell, who paid $1,500 for a half share in "the smallest room" in a new, fully furnished Hampton Bays house.

"We were packed in like sardines, but we never complained," Bell said of the house, where the 25 sharers included "Hofstra grads who were Wall Street guys, attorneys and doctors" who had invited her group to stay that summer. When evenings rolled around, the Canoe Place Inn — a popular club also known by its initials, CPI — was right down the block.

When Bradley Corsair, 59, of Southampton, an attorney, shared a house in Southampton Village in 1997, 20 to 30 people were present on a typical weekend, hanging out by the pool and taking trips to nearby beaches, he said.

"The group tended to be hard-working young professionals or the like, age 30 or so, who wanted this share house as a solid base for friendships and socializing," Corsair said.

Corsair relished "the electricity of the nightlife" at Southampton clubs like Conscience Point Inn nightclub  and Jet East — if he could get in the door. Tagging along with a New York Nets basketball player one night got Corsair past the door attendant at a club where he met his future wife.

Marrakesh in Westhampton Beach, where Lyons spent her nights out, also had Studio 54-style door attendants. "You paid 20 bucks to get in, which was a tremendous amount of money then," Lyons said. Marrakesh also had a dress code, Lyons said, so "you were going to wear nice pants or even a skirt."

For younger clubbers like DiChiara, it was also the era of big hair and hairspray. "There was a lot of Aquanet and teasing of the hair," she said of her pre-clubbing rituals. The outfits also reflected the era. "We would wear ripped jeans and we had neon tank tops, and we put on what we called ‘war paint’ under our eyes," she said. Once coiffed and dressed, they hired a "little bus" for the ride to Saturday happy hours at Boardy Barn in Hampton Bays, where they changed in the parking lot into "specific sneakers" reserved only for the club’s muddy, beer-soaked floor.

Happy hour over, they would stop for a burrito at Slo-Jack's Drive-In in Hampton Bays, head home for a nap "and then get dressed to go out again," DiChiara said.

It wasn’t all a nonstop 72-hour club crawl, however. Gary Young, 53, of Woodbury, remembers the August night in 1998 that he, his friend Eric Morrell, of New Jersey, and "about 30 of us in the house boiled lobsters and had a lobster dinner." Then they shared a van to — if Young’s memory serves — Neptune Beach Club in Hampton Bays.

"It was a carefree time," said Mario Lebano, 51, now of Lake Worth, Florida, who shared an East Quogue house for 10 years with a mostly unchanging group of six bouncers, a chef, two waitresses and another bartender. The rent was $3,000 per month, but Lebano said he made "a ton of money" bartending at Oaklands Restaurant on Dune Road in Hampton Bays. Between shifts Lebano played golf with his share buddies at Swan Lake in Riverhead or joined the crowd at the other side of the bar.

"When I got out of work at 11:30 p.m., we’d go out and spend our money at our friends’ bars," Lebano said. "We were always on an adventure."

Last call, lasting memories

Eventually, the adventures wound down, especially after younger, noisier and rowdier house sharers "became trouble for the villages" where they were located, Lyons said. And the affordable house shares are long gone, with this season’s Hamptons summer rentals hitting $15,000 to $18,000 per week, or $45,000 a month, Lyons said.

Many of the nightclubs have also closed but some of the friendships made in those heady days endure.

Sixteen years after Agnello (now 43 and living in East Hampton), Keogh and Kang spent their last house share together, but they’re still friends and business partners in Douglas Elliman real estate’s Atlantic Team.

They look back on their house-sharing years not so much with nostalgia, but with awe.

"There was affordability back then that will never happen again," Kang said. "Today I’m sure that East Hampton house is worth several million."