In the Hamptons, Going Against the TideBy FERNANDA SANTOS
SOUTHAMPTON, N.Y. — In the exclusive world of the Hamptons, the playground of the rich and famous like the billionaire George Soros and the fashion designer Calvin Klein, Evelyn Konrad is far from being a boldface name.
But in some circles in this opulent seaside retreat, Ms. Konrad has achieved a level of notoriety for her relentless and unapologetic campaign against a sacred cow in these parts: luxury real estate.
She has been called irritating, meddlesome, even crazy. To Ms. Konrad, though, the houses built by Wall Street’s titans are destroying life as she has known it for the half century she has been coming here.
She is perfectly at ease in her role.
“I seem like a very good target, a little old lady in white tennis sneakers, but they’re making a very grim mistake if that’s who they think I am,” Ms. Konrad, who is 81, said on a recent afternoon, savoring an ice cream cone and wearing a miniskirt over a brown bathing suit. “I’m contentious. I’m obstinate. I’m not going to give this up.”
Wagging her sharp tongue and applying the law degree she earned just five years ago, Ms. Konrad has accused village officials, builders and home buyers of corruption, profiteering and bad taste in court papers and in letters to The Southampton Press.
(A sample of her acerbic style: She has described some homes here as “multimillion-dollar penis extensions” that will make a buyer feel as if “he has never left northern New Jersey.”)
Her opponents are equally uninhibited about attacking her.
The mayor of Southampton, Mark Epley, said Ms. Konrad was “throwing stuff on the wall to see what sticks.” A village trustee, Paul L. Robinson, said he had wondered whether Ms. Konrad was just “an obnoxious, mean-spirited individual wasting taxpayer funds with her frivolous lawsuits.”
So far, the village has had the upper hand. Ms. Konrad’s legal challenges, arguing that the size of many of the new homes violated Southampton’s laws, have been dismissed. Not surprisingly, she is filing appeals.
Despite her setbacks, Ms. Konrad has stirred a provocative conversation. Now that Wall Street’s newest multimillionaires have pushed their way into parts of the village that had remained largely untouched by development, some people wonder what will become of the slice of Southampton that is removed from the oceanfront estates, a place where nobility of pedigree or size of investment portfolio has never really mattered.
“A lot of us are starting to realize that it’s not about greed and real estate and development and profit,” said Sally Spanburgh, 42, an architect who writes a local blog on preservation and lives in a turn-of-the-20th-century home near the village center. “It’s about community and connectedness, and I think Evelyn has shown us that we could lose all that.”
To Ms. Konrad, Southampton has been a refuge from a busy life in Manhattan. She raised four children who went to private schools (Chapin, Spence and St. Bernard’s); she was vice president of the Parents League of New York, an organization of private school parents; and she was a regular at black-tie affairs (her first husband was a real estate developer). She had her own career, too — business reporter for NBC, public relations consultant and chief executive of two Internet-based companies that fizzled.
After visiting Southampton regularly for nearly 50 years, she bought a home in the village’s oldest subdivision, Rosko Place, a collection of unassuming ranch and colonial-style houses built on half-acre lots in a former potato farm. She spends the rest of her time in Manhattan, where she owns a condominium on East 84th Street. For years, her house was among the largest — 2,100 square feet of living space and a pool out back, as well as a 1988 Mercedes-Benz in the garage.
The subdivision’s residents have included a retired milkman, a school guidance counselor and the village’s sole optometrist. Its roads offer no access to the beach, and the neighborhood became a highly desirable location only in recent years, as waterfront properties become too expensive and too hard to come by.
Homes that had been bought for $30,000 in the 1960s suddenly were selling for $1 million or more, a fortune for families for whom the properties were at once savings, investment and retirement account. Developers bought them, demolished them and replaced them with houses that dwarfed the ones around them.
“My daughters look at this house and say, ‘How come ours is not like that?’ ” said Dr. Elaine Fox, 59, an internist who has lived in Rosko Place for 25 years and whose modest ranch house now abuts a newly built home almost three times its size. “This is not what life used to be about around here.”
Ms. Konrad was 73 when she heeded a suggestion from one of her sons, Robert Jereski, that she go to law school. (“What am I going to do if I retire?” she said recently. “Play bridge all day with the girls?”) Law, Mr. Jereski said, seemed like “a natural fit” for his mother, who is “supersmart, and loves to fight if there’s a fight to be had.”
Peter Lushing, a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, still remembers the day he saw Ms. Konrad sitting in the front row of his class on criminal procedure among a group of students in their 20s.
She had an opinion about everything, and “I thought she was going to drive me nuts,” Mr. Lushing said. “Then I realized I really liked having her there.” She had, he noted, “the litigator’s attitude,” accepting nothing at face value, criticizing everything and leaving it to her opponents to prove their point. “Litigators don’t make nice,” he said.
She graduated in 2005 and was admitted to the bar on Oct. 22, 2007. A month later, she filed a motion in State Supreme Court in Riverhead against Southampton and the builder of a big house near her home, accusing them of failing to notify neighbors of a public hearing on the construction plans. As it turned out, a notice had been published in the local newspaper; she said the case was pending.
Then she challenged the approval of the house next to Ms. Fox’s, saying it violated the village’s restrictions over the size of houses in old and new developments. Again, a judge dismissed the complaint, finding that the house did comply with village law.
Still, Ms. Konrad is persisting. She asked the court to allow her to reargue her first case, focusing this time on a zoning law change approved by Mayor Epley and two of the four village trustees. One of them was Mr. Robinson, who owns several investment properties in Southampton, which Ms. Konrad argued posed a conflict of interest that should have barred him from voting.
Ms. Konrad argues that the passage of the zoning law, relaxing restrictions on the size of houses on certain lots, would benefit Mr. Robinson because he would be able to split the properties he owns and build more homes.
Mr. Robinson has two subdivision requests pending before the Planning Board.
“Last I looked, this is America and nothing forbids no one from subdividing their property if it’s within the law,” Mr. Robinson’s lawyer, Gilbert G. Flanagan, said in an interview. “If you have a beef with the law, change it. I haven’t seen her file a lawsuit that seeks to do that.”
As she awaits a decision on her latest appeal, Ms. Konrad, who has been personally financing her legal battles, has started asking some of her wealthy friends to help pay for a federal lawsuit against the village.
While she would love nothing more than to see the new houses torn down, she knows that is far-fetched. She says she just wants a fair shot to prove that she has been right all along, that the new zoning law is illegal, that the trustees’ vote was illegal and that all the homes built under the law are illegal, too.
And that in a place where money rules, Ms. Konrad said, “there might be a limit to money’s influence after all.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: July 9, 2010
An earlier version of this article erroneously stated that Ms. Konrad earned a law degree four years ago.
