When I was a little kid and my parents would take me and my sisters out to eat, it was almost always at one of three places.
There was the Candy Kitchen in Bridgehampton (which we were brought to for what I think are pretty obvious reasons), the Station Bistro in Water Mill (because my mother worked there) and the Corner Bar in our hometown of Sag Harbor. And of the three, we probably went to Corner Bar the most.
We would almost always sit at the same table — the last banquette furtherest away from the front door, right before the curved wall that led to the bathrooms, situated underneath a massive TV. My sisters and I would eat well-done burgers and fish and chips with ketchup and coffee mugs filled with New England clam chowder, while sucking down Shirley Temples and looking out onto the crowd seated around the tiny yet busy dining room as a heavy, slow-moving cloud of cigarette smoke steadily floated above the bar.
(Photo credit: Emily Toy)
It was probably one of the first places I had experienced heavy cigarette smoke, before the big, bad ban happened across the state and smoking became a permanent outside activity. That is, until I got older and had a friend who was a bartender there. I would help her “close” the bar, which meant we would smoke Marlboro Lights and drink Jameson and get very familiar with the nuanced workings of the huge box fan apparatus situated on the ceiling, directly over the bar stools, to help air out the place before we left. But that’s a different story…
Really, when you get down to it, I might not even be around today if not for the Corner Bar. It’s where my parents met back in 1978, when the late Jim Smyth (and his business partner and good friend of my dad’s, Dan Locastro) opened it. My father, who came up to the Harbor from North Carolina with Dan, was brought on as a bartender for the first two years or so they were in business, and my mother, a local Sag Harbor gal, was a waitress.
As teenagers, it was a place we could very easily grab a decent bite with what little money we had. It was also a place — because my parents and their contemporaries hung out there — where we always felt welcome, wanted and, in a way, like we were always being looked after. From the people who were serving us our food to the people sitting next to us eating theirs, it was the one place in Sag Harbor where we always recognized someone, and usually that someone was an adult we knew pretty well. It’s what ultimately made the place so special, and eventually solidified it as a last frontier across the ever-changing plain of the Hamptons. It was stuck in time but a time that was incredibly beloved. Even as youngsters we could feel it.
(Photo credit: Emily Toy)
When I came back to Sag Harbor after college, and for nearly a good decade afterward, when drinking was truly a top priority, Corner Bar was always open. Hurricanes, blizzards, black outs, holidays, none of that mattered because we knew Corner Bar would be up and running and, more often than not, it would be slammed. Apparently, drinking was a top priority for other people besides me. Or maybe it was just to feel connected to the community. Or maybe it was for the onion rings. That was the beauty of the Corner. It didn’t discriminate.
It’s difficult to know that, as of last Sunday, the pre-existing, nonconforming Corner Bar will never really be the same place my parents first met 48 years ago. But, from what I can tell so far, it’s going to reopen as a new chapter for the people of Sag Harbor. Not completely gone, anything but forgotten and ready to accommodate the generation that initially started it, the generations to come, and all of the ones in between.
