Remember 1998? Liquid water was discovered on Jupiter, Google was founded, and, according to an August 1998 issue of New York Magazine we just stumbled upon, New York's rich and powerful regularly annoyed fellow Jitney passengers by chatting on their StarTac® phones and could be spotted at the Sagg General Store in their Rollerblades®. Some things never change! Here are a few other fun glimpses of what the East End was like 13 years ago:
Steven Gaines on the history of Hamptons power:
"So who's who in the latest incarnation of the Hamptons? It's difficult to measure status in a place where everybody is rich and/or famous and has a garage full of expensive cars and a sprawl of a house. It's just as easy to buy a $12,000 watch in East Hampton as it is to pick up a carton of milk, and new homeowners are so impatient that they landscape their front lawns with "mature gardens" of full-grown trees. An mini-forest can cost $500,000 to install. Cherries at the local gourmet market are $10 a pound, and at the Life's a Beach disco in Southampton, you will be charged a 'bottle fee' of $1,000 for the use of a table in the VIP room. Stoli never had it so good." Nikki Finke considers Hollywood's influence:
"Still, every summer, rumors fan out that La Streisand has finally bought a choice spread -- a surefire tactic for boosting real-estate prices. Now the nattering is, again, that Barbra has finally found her dream house. The location is supposedly so secret that even her unlisted phone is billed to an alias. Or maybe it's all just as much of a mirage as the ongoing belief that the Hamptons really still are Malibu East." And then there's the "definitive list of the centers of power," including:
The Golden Pear Cafe (Where Wall Streeters pay $2.50 for iced coffee at what's been tagged the 'Golden Parachute' chain...Go to the Southampton branch for takeout -- and Cindy Crawford sightings), The Swamp (You'll find Diane Von Furstenberg, Barry Diller, and Calvin Klein), and the ultimate status symbol (the Southampton telephone exchange 283 means you've lived there forever; East Hampton's most desirable exchange is 324). In a decade from now, will today's Hamptons seem just as quaint?
· Hamptons Heat Wave [New York Magazine]
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