Arrive - Summer/Fall 2016

a certain sense of pride when noting that he had
just caught a cellphone offender. “I stood at her
table and kept screaming,” he says. “And the rest
of the patrons cheered me on.”
Watson started visiting Montauk to go camp-
ing in Hither Hills in the 1950s, and his father
built a house here in ’ 57. Watson left the New York
City fire department when the opportunity arose
to buy the bar in Montauk Harbor. As Watson tells
it, he met with the previous owner at 8 a.m., and
their meeting involved blackberry brandy and
ended with a handshake deal.

“I had the bar by that night,” he says. The
cinder block building décor can best be de-
scribed as “stuffed animal head chic,” and the
four rotating draft beers are always fresh and
ice cold. For all the things that irk him, though,
Watson is rather welcoming of a new breed of
Montauk bar patron. “A lot of people complain
about the hipsters,” says Watson. “As far as I am
concerned, the hipsters are a lot better than the
The hard-partying hipsters have, in recent
years, been at the root of tension between the
local community, second-home owners and the
summer visitors. Montauk has always considered
itself the “un-Hamptons,” but now the nightlife
and parties have turned its summer into a three-
month bacchanal.

And yet, it’s an inevitable growing pain for a village that dates to the 1700s and is close to numerous metropolises. A seaside community will always attract people who want to breathe in the salty air and blow off workweek steam in the summer.

“In the 1970s, we partied as hard as the kids do now, except we were high school kids then, and now they’re stockbrokers,” says longtime Montauk Life publisher Kirby Marcantonio, who has lived in the area since the 1960s.

However, partiers get older too. Along the way to realizing they’ve outgrown skinny jeans, Marcantonio says, they might begin to think, “Maybe I want Montauk to be calmer and cooler than when I first saw it.” Then they slow down and begin to appreciate the surroundings for their historical significance.