Why Pop Up Shops Rule Madison Avenue East

As the Big Weekend looms, for there are only three, we witness a rush to rouse the sun gods into casting a congenial mood of loosened purses nudging spending goblins to have a little fun in the sun. Fair game in resort towns where the assumption is you are here to be taken in by the shiny objects d'art and all the entitlement they suggest. It's swim at your own risk and for the majority dipping into boutiques to browse the eye candy suffices the urge to splurge, escaping unscathed by purchasing an accessory or two.

The dance is a familiar one and the maestro knows his mark far better than most, erecting six foot tall sand castles in his display windows, making commercial icons of our most idle summer memories. After decades of steady space consumption, the Ralph Lauren empire is so comfortably ensconced on East Hampton's Main Street that one could easily wonder if they've entered East Lauren instead of the Promised Land. This, in a village where rents have soared ever so close to the sun that it takes the deep pockets and immense wingspan of such a retail empire to not fall from the sky come Labor Day.

Enter the Pop Up Shop -- a perky moniker for the most cynical of merchant trading -- where the trend-fa-la tenant convinces the more greedy landlord to hand over the keys to the kingdom for two short months when the commerce is swift. This short-term payoff leaves Main Street bare the remaining 10 months of the year, but that's okay 'cuz the locals won't mind, they don't shop here anyway. Of course these savvy mega merchants don't see it quite like that because they hightail it out of town just as the blush of August begins to wane. This 'you might as well rent it to us at an ungodly fee for two months' come-on has worked on more than a few landlords who are more keen on holding onto past glories than securing conventional tenants at fairer fair-market rates. For this is East Hampton, where retail footage rates topped out at $200 per.

This is also the very same East Hampton which has sold it's birthright. Gone are the local merchants who peppered Main Street with their news store and cheese shop. Gone are the shoe repair, Five and Dime, and record shop. Here on Madison Avenue East the international retailer rules the roost in a Village where its year-round residents would rather drive 28 miles to shop Home Depot, Best Buy and the outlets. For those of us who remember a less-cynical Main Street in the days when East Hampton was voted the "Most Beautiful Village in America" the transformation has been disturbingly complete.

Makes you wonder if back in the firebrand days of open space rezoning (for those of you who weren't there, that would be the mid-Seventies), in all our zealousness to preserve a way of life and the natural environs, three and five acre zoning traded a generation's birthright to the monopoly playing retail mammoths that now occupy a Main Street that once hosted the great cattle runs from Montauk.