Only a 90-minute drive from Manhattan, this small piece of heaven on earth along the Atlantic coastline is dotted with multi-million dollar summer homes for some of Wall Street's best known names.
This summer, one year after Lehman Brother's collapse, even people in the Hamptons can tell times have changed for some of the wealthiest seasonal residents of their villages.
Real estate is the most important business in the Hamptons. In Southampton, a village of a little over 6.3 square miles, the real estate value of properties exceeds 10 billion dollars, according to Mark Epley, mayor of the Village of Southampton.
But this business is "kind of dried up" this summer, the mayor told Xinhua. Revenue from the real estate sector is down by 33 percent compared to the same time last year. Realtor offices on or near Main Street are mostly empty. Few property pictures are displayed in the windows.
"People are holding on to their money," said Dan Rattiner, who has watched the Hamptons up close for more than 50 years and is the founder and owner of the local publication, Dan's Papers.
Reporting in the tight-knit communities of the Hamptons and being a member of the now famous Atlantic Golf Club, where Bernard Madoff was also a member, Rattiner knows people who have lost all they had to Madoff.
"There is one wealthy man I know who is helping out a friend who doesn't have any money, who lost everything," Rattiner said.
But despite what happened on Wall Street in the fall of 2008, which caused tremendous upheaval in the U.S. and global financial system, and which cost, as in the Madoff case, many people's life savings, Rattiner says Wall Street people vacationing in the Hamptons don't feel any resentment of guilt. "Because they didn't do it collectively. They played by the rules that were enforced," Rattiner said.
Related:
XinhuaNet.com Special Report: Global Financial Crisis
