Customers at the Sagaponack General Store, which reopened this year after a complete renovation.
Photo: Mark Peterson/Redux for New York Magazine
In 1847, the Springs General Store — a two-story Greek-revival farmhouse sitting near the East Hampton wetlands known as Pussy’s Pond — opened its doors. Just about 100 years later, Jackson Pollock moved into a barn down the road and began to trade paintings for his groceries. In 2003, Kristi Hood, a chef from California, moved into the apartment upstairs with her family and started to run the store downstairs. Under Hood’s stewardship, Springs General Store became the kind of place where real-estate brokers and carpenters rubbed elbows with summer visitors over breakfast sandwiches, and a launch point where residents could take kayaks out on a sliver of semi-public waterfront. “It was a part of everyone’s everyday life,” Hood says, “but it was not a moneymaker.” Hood managed for almost 17 years in a town where the cost of goods is inflated, year-round staff retention can be difficult, and would-be customers all but vanish in the winter months. In June 2019, the store was listed for sale, asking $2.9 million. In the fall of 2021, two brothers, Daniel and Evan Bennett, bought it. Now, nearly four years later, they’re still struggling to open its doors.
The Bennetts grew up in Springs, in a farmhouse less than a mile away from the Pollock barn. The brothers come from a long line of Bennetts on the South Fork of Long Island: Their great, great grandfather, Myron Bennett, was a contractor who lived on Abraham’s Path. They’re veteran restaurateurs, but unlike their other pursuits — they’re the owners of Bar Oliver in the city (and previously ran the hotspots Mimi and Babs), along with Amagansett’s Doubles and its new location in Sag Harbor — the Springs General Store, which they purchased with a silent investor, felt like a more personal endeavor, something that they’d dreamed of pursuing since childhood. “We thought the town would think, Wow, we couldn’t have picked or have hoped for anyone better to come in and redo it, right?” Daniel says. “Wrong.”
A year before the Bennetts bought Springs General Store, another historic general store went up for sale. Mindy Gray, a part-time resident, philanthropist, and wife of Blackstone president and COO Jonathan Gray, bought the Sagaponack General Store for $3.75 million. While the Sagaponack General Store is only about a dozen miles away from Springs, the community it serves is remarkably different: Sagaponack’s full-time population is around 350 people, making it a sleepy village in one of the most expensive Zip Codes in America. In Springs, the full-time population is about 9,500. The two areas also belong to different townships and respond to different boards systems. The East Hampton Board, which serves 28,385 constituents and covers Springs, is colloquially known as “the Town of No.” The Sagaponack Village Board has a reputation for being less discerning.
By late 2021, Gray was in the early stages of assembly, gathering period-specific antiques and hiring the architect Frank Greenwald to oversee renovations. Around the same time, Daniel was preparing for a preliminary site review with the East Hampton Planning Department. In a meeting he told the board he wanted to keep the store structure as it is and convert the kayak shed on the property into a retail wine shop. “We set out to give the store a facelift,” says Evan, who was wary of alienating a community that had resisted change in recent years.
The preliminary meeting went well, and Daniel had separately received approval from the State Liquor Authority for his licenses. One is an off-premises license, which allows the store to sell wine and beer, and the other is an on-premises license, which allows customers to drink that wine and beer on the property. They cost around $15,000 each. Daniel also asked for a live-music allowance, seeking to legitimize a tradition of locals gathering on the porch on Sundays to play acoustic music, which started during Hood’s ownership of the store. (“They just started one Sunday and never stopped,” Hood says.)
But the mood around the project quickly started to change after the Bennetts posted their permits, and the East Hampton Star published the story “Goodbye to Kayaks, Hello to Wine?” The article included the Bennetts’ plans for the kayak shed, as well as allegations that Daniel and Evan were gifted the store by their father, John Bennett, a land-use lawyer who was acting as legal counsel to his sons and had an at-times confrontational reputation with the South Fork board systems. “It was a smear campaign,” Daniel says. “The thrust of the article being that these rich kids from the city were going to get rid of your kayaks in exchange for liquor so that they can throw parties.”
Daniel, determined to mitigate souring public opinion, immediately contacted the Star’s editor-in-chief asking for a correction. But by then it was already too late: “It’s like everyone picked up their pitchforks and torches and said ‘Hell no,’” Daniel recalls. “It’s a small town and everyone pays attention,” Hood says. Rumors of a nightclub began to circulate, and the general feeling in town toward the Bennett boys shifted.
The store is an old lady … To sit empty is to invite collapse.
Meanwhile in Sagaponack, Gray approached the historic-review board with her own plans for renovation. “It was pretty much smooth sailing,” she recalls. “You know people say things like, ‘The village can be so tough,’ but the village has been my biggest champion. They have been so supportive, so incredibly understanding.” While Gray began work on her store, Daniel stepped back and set out on a charm offensive — heading to the local library, to the blacksmith shop, to the architectural historical center, shaking hands and reintroducing himself as the good guy, the local. It didn’t work.
That summer, a few months after the Star article, Daniel attended his second meeting with the planning department. He says it was immediately clear that the tenor of the conversation had shifted. “It’s one thing if it’s a wine shop where people go in, buy a bottle, and go off on their way,” said Samuel Kramer, then-chairman of the planning board, at the meeting. “It’s another thing if the business is being structured around the idea of buy a bottle and sit down and drink it.”
After the meeting, the board laid out a new stipulation that the store must meet Americans With Disabilities Act compliance, an important but often steep expense. To meet the standards, the Springs General Store would need a ramp, a new bathroom, and rewiring. They also needed to resize the front door and offered to replace the septic system — an undertaking that has led to the closure of many restaurants that can’t afford the expense. The approximate cost for the changes was around $280,000, money that the Bennetts didn’t have.
In Sagaponack, Gray also had to meet ADA compliance and add a ramp. Additionally, for historic accuracy, her store was lifted with hydraulic jacks onto soap-slicked beams and slid slowly backward by 15 feet. (Gray also had to temporarily relocate the post office, which for almost 150 years shared a building with the Sagaponack General Store, to a trailer on the corner of Hedges Lane.) Given the scale of the work, it’s surprising just how little fanfare accompanied its completion.
In Springs, Daniel complied with the planning department’s stipulations, which required a new meeting with the Disabilities Advisory Board, which wouldn’t happen for four more months, during which time the Bennetts’ expenses — property tax, electric, the water bill — continued to mount as the store remained unoccupied. “The store is an old lady,” Hood points out. “To sit empty is to invite collapse.”
It was February 2023 — after Daniel was able to present his ADA changes to the board, after the Architectural Review Board rejected those same plans, and after the fire marshal rejected the changes requested by the ARB — when a pipe in the Springs General Store burst and flooded the entire first floor and basement. Suddenly, the Bennetts were facing a full gut renovation, likely millions of dollars’ worth of work, “and God forbid anything happens to the wetlands,” adds Evan.
Because of the store’s proximity to the wetlands, any plant, tree, or bush that’s cut down or replanted needs what’s called a Natural Resources Special Permit. And any new vegetation must be Indigenous. Daniel researched all permissible plant life to create a map with all new (but also old-in-the-right-ways) flora. He then learned that an NRSP can take up to a year and a half to arrive.
Over in Sagaponack, after Gray’s team successfully moved the store back from the street, they started building their new foundation and restoring the historic porch out front. They used refurbished wood and repurposed post-office boxes to house candy and create shelves for artisanal goods. “I want this store to be about nostalgia,” says Gray, who also began hiring her team for the store: Daniel Eddy, of Brooklyn’s Winner, joined on to lead the food program; Gabby Green (who, coincidentally, once worked for the Bennetts at Doubles) as general manager; and Chris Kelly, who was appointed resident bee keeper to look after ten hives on the property. When Gray opened the store this April, it became an instant destination. The Star ran its opening story with the headline: “The Sweet Smell of Nostalgia at Sagaponack General.”
In Springs, the town has at last approved of the Bennetts’ renovation plans and the ADA-compliant ramp. They like the new vegetation, as well as the new septic system. As far as the kayak shed is concerned, the brothers gave up their on-premises license, and the town approved the change to a wine store. After absorbing close to $1 million in expenses and after eight planning meetings, with visits to five different boards over three years, Daniel was finally able to apply for a building permit. He’s still awaiting approval.
