Recent Arrivals Dull Montauk’s Gritty Edge
By WILL JAMES
When the new summer season begins in Montauk this year, the Ronjo, a decades-old motel in the heart of the hamlet, will reopen as the Montauk Beach House, a high-end boutique hotel.
It is one of a dozen or more businesses in Montauk, the remote resort community on the easternmost tip of Long Island, that have changed hands or closed since last summer.
Some see the turnover and influx of well-heeled city dwellers patronizing the chic new bars, nightclubs and hotels as a quickening of the economic pulse in Montauk, whose summer population swells to about five times the roughly 5,000 year-round residents.
Others see the changes as a sign that Hamptons posh has completed its eastward march to Montauk. While a part of East Hampton, the hamlet has always stood apart from the Hamptons, taking pride in its free-spirited fishing and surfing culture and its gritty identity as a small town at the water’s edge.
“They’re taking this surfing culture and making it into a product,” said Jordan Bromley, 30 years old, who has been part of Montauk’s night scene for more than a decade. “They buy an old car and put a surfboard outside.”
High-end nightspots like the Surf Lodge, Ruschmeyer’s and Solé East popped up in residential neighborhoods over the last five years, and were instantly more popular than the businesses that preceded them. Complaints about music volume, traffic, parking, overcrowding, septic use the occasional patron found passed out on a neighbor’s lawn have risen in tandem.
Other new bars, like the Sloppy Tuna, a beachfront nightclub, and the Crow’s Nest Inn, started by hotelier and restaurateur Sean MacPherson, have created less of a stir among locals since they are located downtown.
Tensions with locals have also centered on the changing aesthetic of the hamlet, which its fans have long considered a sort of frontier, and the loss of familiar storefronts. Salivar’s Bar and Restaurant, an eatery beloved by late-night drinkers and early-morning fishermen alike, for example, will be under new ownership come summer. And the Montauket, a local hangout known for its views of the sunset, went on the market in 2010 but hasn’t yet sold.
“Montauk’s always viewed itself as the wild east of the Hamptons, and it’s not as wild as it used to be, not as undiscovered as everybody thought it was,” said Julia Prince, a former East Hampton council member who is opening her own diner, La Bodega, in Montauk this summer.
Chris Jones, an owner of Solé East and a former partner in the international real-estate firm Jones Lang LaSalle, purchased the Ronjo for $4.3 million in February with a partner, Larry Siedlick. They have been transforming it into the Montauk Beach House, renovating 33 rooms and even giving the hotel’s multicolored outdoor tiki statue a new look with a coat of copper paint.
Mr. Jones, who lives in nearby Sag Harbor, said he and his partners with Solé East and the Montauk Beach House feel they are breathing new life into businesses that have grown tired after having the same owners for decades.
“We see it as restoring them to their former glory,” he said. “And I think Montauk in general is receptive to that.”
Randy Stuhm, who has owned the Point, a bar and grill located down the street from the former Ronjo, for 13 years, said he looks forward to business from the guests that he expects the new hotel and others will attract.
“I welcome everybody,” he said. “I learned 12 years ago that there is enough business out here for everybody.”
The Surf Lodge, which replaced a nightclub called Lakeside in 2008, has emerged as a source of frustration for locals. The Surf Lodge is still fighting 687 code violations the town of East Hampton handed down last summer, most of them related to a chicken teriyaki truck parked outside the entrance.
The club’s attorney, Thomas Horn, said he is simultaneously preparing for a trial and working on a settlement with the town. One of the owners, Steven Kamali, declined to comment.
The East Hampton Town Board will consider legislation next week that would place new restrictions on restaurants and bars, including limits on the number of people who can gather outside.
As a new clientele discovers Montauk—and some look to settle there—prices for homes and rentals have reached all-time highs this year, real-estate agents said.
“It is a tightknit community, and everybody did take care of everybody,” said Lisa Grenci, a broker who has led a Montauk citizens group for 15 years. “And that’s what’s changing. Everybody used to know everybody, and now they don’t know who some of these people are.”
A version of this article appeared April 27, 2012, on page A20 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Recent Arrivals Dull Montauk’s Gritty Edge.












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