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Literary Hub
There’s No Place Like Home—Except the Beach: Visual Stories of Montauk, New York
Rufus Wainwright and Jörn Weisbrodt: “The beach is the divide between one world, the dry, and another, the wet. It is a mythical place of transformation.” Via Powerhouse Books By Rufus Wainwright and Jörn Weisbrodt May 22, 2025
Montauk calls itself “The End,” but it never seems to reach an endpoint. Quite the opposite. It is in a continuous state of beginning, starting over and over again but never really coming to a conclusion of what it actually is. All the dreams humankind has put on it seem to end before they are realized. Constantly in flux, like its shoreline that gets shaped by storms and the tide, Montauk seems never to fully realize itself. It is on a different path than East Hampton or other Hampton villages. Those locales solidify their status as fortresses of wealth as they suck up ever more upper-class families with growing appetites for local produce and wine, flying jets and helicopters out to $5,000-per-square-foot homes. East Hampton and Southampton are ends in themselves. The Maidstone Club, Further Lane, and Gin Lane are endpoints of a luxurious dream in those towns. Montauk is different. It is more fluid, literally.
Montauk is a hamlet on the easternmost tip of the south shore of Long Island. 4,000 people call it their home year-round, and 40,000 people visit in the summer, in large part attracted by its natural beauty and beaches. Ditch Plains is Montauk’s most famous beach, although most likely not its most beautiful. The way the rocky shore slopes gently into the ocean creates long rolling waves ideal for surfers.
Montauk’s history is paved with unrealized dreams and reinvention. The name comes from the Montaukett tribe, who lived in the area before white settlers arrived in the 17th century. After a war with another tribe in 1653, the Montauketts were severely weakened and ravaged by smallpox. They sold the areas of today’s Napeague and Montauk to white settlers in return for food and were allowed to remain on parts of the sold land. At the end of the 19th century, Arthur Benson bought 10,000 acres of the East End and Big Reed Pond where, after the 1653 war, the remaining Montauketts lived, and he asked Stanford White to design the first homes at Montauk Point. The legitimacy of Benson’s transaction is still contested in court by the tribe today.
A railway connecting Montauk to New York City was built, as was a dock for ocean liners, to cut the travel time from London to New York City by a day. The idea was that passengers disembarking at Montauk and heading to New York City could travel the rest of the way by train. Unfortunately, the plan did not work out, and the military took over the land to quarantine soldiers returning from the Spanish-American war. After the First World War, Robert Moses began condemning the Benson land to establish two major state parks on either end of Montauk. This decision set Montauk radically apart from the rest of the South Fork, which was primarily used as agricultural land with no state parks.
