Tapping Into Hamptons Kids’ Heritage

Lucy Muhlfeld remembers exactly when she began plotting with her friend Jorie Latham to create a new cultural facility in the Hamptons. It was back in 1995, at a bike-a-thon fundraiser for a recreation center.

Muhlfeld had just returned from Connecticut, where she’d taken her 2-year-old triplets to a small children’s museum that had occupied all three for a full 90 minutes. So when Muhlfeld spotted Latham and her 6-year-old son at the bike-a-thon, she began gushing about the place and how “the next thing we do should be a children’s museum.”

A decade and $8 million later, the Children’s Museum of the East End is poised for its grand opening next weekend on land donated by actor Alan Alda and his wife.

One thing that won’t be featured in the exhibit is the eastern tiger salamander, which museum organizers say delayed the project by two years and increased the project’s cost by $1 million. But there are hands-on exhibits about potatoes, which used to be grown most everywhere on the far end of Long Island before golf courses and vineyards became more popular uses of the land.

And there is a child-sized farm stand, like the ones that abound along the narrow roads that become crowded each weekend, especially in the summer, when the area draws its wealthy visitors and part-time residents from Manhattan and other points west.

Muhlfeld, Latham and the other parents who campaigned for the museum are year-round residents who worried that there was not enough for younger children to do outside of the Hamptons’ broad beaches and movie theaters.

“I think the perception is that there’s nobody out here year-round, that it’s just a summer community,” said Adrienne Kitaeff, executive director of the Children’s Museum of the East End, better known as CMEE, as in See Me. “People just don’t know that there are families who have been here for generations and want to stay here.”

Although some of the year-rounders are affluent too, and may rub tanned elbows in the summer with Steven Spielberg, Jimmy Buffett and Sean “P. Diddy” Combs, the schools and day-care centers also serve a large general population.

One goal of the museum is to get local kids playing alongside the offspring of the weekenders and the summer homeowners and renters, Muhlfeld said.

Despite her friends’ initial enthusiasm and two years of “pulling our act together,” as Muhlfeld put it, they were not convinced that such a facility was feasible until 1997, when they were offered space in East Hampton’s historic Guild Hall for a three-month pilot project. Then more than 5,000 parents and kids showed up to sample the temporary exhibits, including the miniature farm stand and a simulated fishing pond.

Plans for a permanent facility were given a huge boost when the parents of museum board member Bea Alda stepped up: Alan and Arlene Alda -- the latter a photographer and an author of children’s books -- bought 12 acres for the museum in Bridgehampton.

Besides its central location -- Bridgehampton is between Southampton and East Hampton -- the site seemed promising because a second group was trying to develop another cultural facility across the road. The South Fork Natural History Museum and Nature Center was planned on three acres just across the Bridgehampton/Sag Bridge Turnpike. That project also had impressive backing, with a $500,000 state grant and the personal support of New York Gov. George E. Pataki.

The chief local donor to that effort had long campaigned for protection of the eastern tiger salamander, and soon the New York Department of Environmental Conservation was scrutinizing the proposed children’s museum site.

Half a mile of drift fencing had to be constructed on the site, along with aluminum flashing dug into the earth -- and salamander-friendly buckets.

“We had to put [130] buckets in the ground on both sides of the fence, with a special lid and a wet sponge, in case any salamanders fell in, so they wouldn’t get suffocated,” Muhlfeld said. “Then we had to hire a licensed biologist to come in every two days to check the buckets.”

“They found no salamanders -- not one,” said Kitaeff, who saw fundraising stall and construction costs rise until the state agency gave its go-ahead in April 2003. Today, there’s debate whether the final cost of the 13,000-square-foot museum was a bargain.

“Depends who you talk to,” said Muhlfeld, whose husband helped found one of the real estate firms that has sold some of the imposing homes for which the Hamptons are famous.

“Some people go, ‘$8 million!’ but around here you buy a [property] for $8 million and then you tear the house down.”

Some of the construction was still being completed at the site last week, even as a group of Bridgehampton schoolchildren was to give the museum a pre-opening tryout Thursday.

“The idea is three concentric circles: the children in relationship to themselves, their community and the world,” Kitaeff said as they entered the first room, a child’s bedroom, but with the bed on the ceiling and with objects such as a giant crayon, piggybank and a soccer ball hanging from the bedsprings. Children’s museums have become popular all over the country, and this one follows the basic formula of most -- hands-on and interactive.

But it has a distinct Hamptons theme, from the potato area -- with a contraption that turns fake potatoes into bags of potato chips -- to the child-sized model of a Hamptons general store of a century ago, not unlike the one where Jackson Pollock used to trade his paintings for groceries.

Nearby, a touch-screen computer terminal lets children design their own house in several architectural styles.

They can walk inside a firetruck with push buttons to activate the lights and sirens, try out the steering wheel on the deck of an old wooden ship, or step inside a lighthouse.

Then there’s the art barn in the tradition of the art colony that spawned Pollock, Willem de Kooning and others.

Behind the museum is an amphitheater for movies, concerts or shows that the kids may put on themselves. Pulitzer Prize winner Wendy Wasserstein is one of the playwrights who has volunteered to work with kids in programming organized by the CMEE staff.

If there’s been one downside for the organizers, it’s been a simultaneous development over the decade -- of their own children.

Muhlfeld’s triplets, two boys and a girl, are now 12. “They’ll find this very cool for a little bit, but not for a long time,” she said.

And the cute 6-year-old boy with Jorie Latham at that bike-a-thon back in ‘95? Ben Latham is a 195-pound high school bruiser now, not likely to be caught dead at anything called a children’s museum.