From the Archives: Village Hall Hits Centennial

It is one of Southampton's most familiar and beloved landmarks. Completed in 1911, , known then as the municipal building, was hailed as a fitting reflection of a proud and prosperous community. Today, as it approaches its 100th birthday, it is impossible to imagine Main Street without it.

Yet, like most public projects, it was not embraced overnight or without a fight. Its gestation was long and arduous.

You might start the story in 1883 when the Methodists built a new church and sold the old one — purchased from the Presbyterians 40 years earlier — to the Southampton Company to be converted into a village hall. Built in 1707 and located on Main Street opposite the present village hall, the sturdy old building hosted everything from town meetings and traveling shows to the merrymakings of the until 1890 when Agawam Hall at the foot of Jobs Lane (later demolished) assumed that role.

Serviceable as it proved to be, the recycled church was apparently never considered a worthy architectural expression of Southampton's newfound prominence. Talk of building a new village hall had already begun at the time of the church conversion, and it was already contentious. We know this because Captain George G. White, a former whaleman of strong views and deep local roots who was president of Southampton's board of trustees, addressed the subject in an open letter to the Sea-Side Times published in June 1885. Generally unimpressed with the efforts of city visitors to mold Southampton in ways he suspected would benefit only them, Captain White focused his scorn on one of their number, C. Wyllis Betts, and his town hall campaign. (The village was not incorporated until 1894.) 

"Mr. Betts speaks of his interest in the town hall. I admire a first-class humbug. For four years meetings were held and plans were drawn and altered by Mr. Betts. On the fourth year he had a beautiful, ornamental building on paper, to cost about $7,000. He being elected as one of the trustees said that they (the city people) would subscribe as much as the villagers. He said he had a thousand dollars subscribed but wanted to hold it as a lever to get more with. Three months after he tells us he has withdrawn his subscription and we must go ahead and build our hall, which was a relief to the stockholders and a gratification to the village people, Finis."

Build they did, though not without further trials. When a special election was held to determine if a new, fireproof building would be approved, the vote was 221 in favor, 127 opposed. The village went ahead and negotiated a lease for the land on the west side of Main Street, necessitating the removal from the site of a two-story frame building housing the post office and a Chinese laundry with offices and the village court room upstairs. That building was delivered to the corner of Elm Street and Powell Avenue and is now Savanna's restaurant.

Eight architects were invited to submit plans for the new building, a competition won by F. Burrall Hoffman, a rising star among architects who would go on to gain fame as the designer of industrialist James Deering's palatial Villa Vizcaya in Miami, now a National Historic Landmark and a museum. A bond issue of $25,000 was voted on and approved and construction began in 1910.

Over the years Village Hall has housed not only village offices but the post office, the telephone company switchboard and the village police.  Today the police and the post office are in new buildings of their own and the operators who once chirped "number please" into their headphones are history.

Sources from the Archives: "History of the Town of Southampton" by James Truslow Adams; The Brooklyn Eagle (online); The Sea-Side Times (facsimile pages); Society for the Preservation of Long Island Antiquities survey of Southampton's significant buildings; "Southampton, Long Island, 300th Anniversary, 1640-1940," Southampton Association, 1940.