East Hampton Fighting Zero Bond Takeover of Hedges Inn

The tone was downright existential last Friday at a public meeting held by the East Hampton Village board. Zero Bond wants to lease the Hedges Inn, a sleepyish bed-and-breakfast in the historic district on James Lane, and Mayor Jerry Larsen was ready to go to war over it. “If we need to go to court and fight about it, that’s what’s going to happen,” he told the crowd of about 50 people. This wasn’t the Maidstone Club, with its polite old-money set. It wasn’t Devon Yacht Club, either — where things leaned more tennis whites and early dinner. It was Zero Bond, Scott Sartiano’s magnet for celebrities and their hangers-on, where Leonardo DiCaprio and Kim Kardashian do whatever kinds of things they do at 1 a.m. “The entire length of Hook Pond, instead of being inhabited by swans,” warned Ken Lipper, the money manager and Koch-era deputy mayor who live about 30 yards from the inn, “will be inhabited by groups of these people who will make a permanent encampment.”

The core of the village’s planned counteroffensive was a relatively mundane bit of fine print: a covenant from the ’80s barring food and beverage service past 10 p.m. The idea would be to update it, make it enforceable, and then use it as a blunt object to keep Zero Bond — and any other club with 4 a.m. service ambitions and a reputation for idling SUVs — in Manhattan, where, residents say, such things belong. (Zero Bond did not respond to a request for comment, but a source tells me its team is ready to “go nuclear” over the village’s efforts to keep it out.)

The Hedges Inn is a 13-room luxury hotel that opened in 1873. It attracts high-dollar guests (including at least one princess, according to the website) and has a wine bar and restaurant that are popular with locals. Still, it’s a relatively quiet presence. Part of its charm is its location in the village’s historic district, far from the commercial shops on Main Street. This also means it’s surrounded by some of the priciest homes in the Hamptons. (Letters of opposition have been written by Arthur Zeckendorf and Melissa Burch, among others.) Neighbors say they are worried about noise, a treacherous increase in private-jet traffic, and the perils associated with the type of crowd that will be drawn to such a club. “It undermines the historic district — lines of limousines and bodyguards,” Lipper told me in a call after the meeting. “It’s an ugly scene by comparison.”

It all seems a little extreme to Chris Kelley, the attorney representing the owner of the Hedges Inn, who called the village’s efforts to keep Zero Bond out premature, saying at the meeting that the proposed legislation is “a solution in search of a problem.” And enforced as written, Kelley said at the meeting, “St. Luke’s rectors can be jailed for serving communion at Christmas Eve midnight Mass.” He added that New York State law preempts local legislation — the Alcoholic Beverage Control Law, not the municipality, regulates every establishment’s operating hours. The

Martha Reichert, who represents two other venues in the historic district, has also asked the village to go back to the drawing board, as its approach may be a little too scorched-earth. The proposal would hurt most local businesses, she said, and would ostensibly prohibit weddings and New Year’s Eve parties. Room service, if ordered at a certain hour, might also fall on the wrong side of the law. None of this is lost on Larsen. “We have to come back with something that works for everyone,” he told me after the meeting. “Except late-night. That’s not going to work.”

Anxiety about interlopers bringing the city to the Hamptons seems high out here. It’s one thing to jostle with Sarah Jessica Parker to get the last container of cinnamon rolls at Round Swamp Farm; it’s quite another to lose the serenity of a quiet August at the beach to more private-jet traffic overhead. It’s why the sale of the Southampton movie theater to billionaire Aby Rosen stoked a mini-panic at the end of last summer: Would it be a private social club? Does Rosen get it?

Since most village residents are part-timers — owners of second and third homes — the hearing on the matter of East Hampton nightlife will remain open for another month to accommodate various schedules and take all viewpoints into consideration. But the viewpoints seem relatively settled. Mayor Larsen told the East Hampton Star earlier this week that a lawyer for Zero Bond had even offered to connect him to Mayor Eric Adams, who happens to love Zero Bond, as a kind of character witness for Sartiano. It was a bust. “This is about protecting neighbors from late-night noise,” Larsen told the paper. “I texted him back, ‘I don’t think it’s necessary to waste the mayor’s time. It’s not going to change anything.’” Another neighbor was less diplomatic. “We don’t care who you are,” she said. “The Hamptons has a long history of turning people down who think they can get their way.”