REAL ESTATE

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In a sense, this all adds to the old-fashioned charm that contributes to our real estate market that still sees itself, though decreasingly, as a finite business of carriage trade transactions. You might as well just take a walk on the beach and assess the market yourself.

To be sure, corporate giants have taken over many of our Main Street realtors from Southampton to Montauk, those same offices having strong presences in Manhattan, Florida and tri-state area locales. So it's not unreasonable to expect that some form of multiple listing service will one day cross the Shinnecock Canal.

It's not that MLS services haven't tried to penetrate the area. But our brokers are very protective of their prize listings and feel that a general broadcasting of what's for sale somehow defies privileged information rather than espousing a systematic representation of the area's market and its true thrust of offering and values.

The other day I took up my usual spot at my favorite beach, blissfully staring out to sea, a wilderness of waves, ebb and flow that seemed to caress everything that smacks of paradise. I looked behind me at some of the most expensive real estate in the country and I thought, well, this is one way to track—so unscientifically—our real estate sphere. Looming grandly over the beach at Maidstone is that great, shingled mass owned by a member of the Johnson & Johnson clan and perhaps the largest house on the East End built before 1925. It's like a beacon, a symbol of wealth and prosperity. It's only appropriate that it should be owned by such an illustrious American name and that it sits smack dab at the cortex of wealth. One imagines it's like a museum inside, walls hung with great masters and priceless furnishings. Of course it's not, but the rooms are baronial, slightly sullen, yet so fitting to be where it is.