Keeping Time in Sag Harbor
Distributed for Center for American Places
312 pages
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133 color plates
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9 x 10
For 300 years, Sag Harbor has been a prism reflecting facets of American history, from its heyday as a whaling port worthy of mention in Moby-Dick, to a factory town shipping out Bulova watches to its latest reincarnation, as an alternative retreat to the exclusive Hamptons. Stephen Longmire explores its many stories in Keeping Time in Sag Harbor.
Sag Harbor’s architecture encompasses buildings from the American Revolution to the present, including the stately eighteenth- and nineteenth-century mansions lining “Captains Row” and public buildings such as the early Custom House. The work to protect this architecture in the face of booming real estate development is at the heart of Longmire’s account. Archival images and Longmire’s own color photographs are interspersed with interviews with new and old residents, and together they reveal the evolving character of the village, as the book charts how Sag Harbor has struggled to retain its identity while learning to sustain itself on tourism. Keeping Time in Sag Harbor is an intimate portrait of a historic American village that stands as an example of the challenge facing American communities from Santa Fe to South Beach.
“Stephen Longmire has an eye for the glories of an historic village—the way its past endures in its doorways, its gravestones, its fences, its finials. This lovely and loving book, attesting to the unorganized acts of preservation that have maintained the truth of a place for 300 years, is itself a scrupulous act of preservation.”—E. L. Doctorow
"A picture on page 97 shows the former Presbyterian manse on Main Street in 2004, yet without the yellow light that warms the image, it could have been shot in any one of the last three centuries. It could, that is, if not for the bold yet defly integrated real estate broker's sign tucked into the right side, demonstrating Mr. Longmire's wit and exemplifying his overall message about the trajectory of the village, as the homes of whalers go into the hands of weekenders."--Southampton Press
Contents
Preface
by Zachary N. Studenroth
Introduction
Whalers, Watchmakers, and Weekenders
Sag Harbor at 300
Where Houses Are Historians
Docements
List of Plates
Credits for the Extracts
Acknowledgments
About the Author
For more information, or to order this book, please visit http://www.press.uchicago.edu
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Art: Photography
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