Drive past 29 Old Stone Highway this week and you'll find construction fencing, a lifted foundation, and a building that has not sold a cup of coffee since the end of the 2022 season. The Springs General Store, a wood-frame fixture built in 1844 and anchoring the heart of the Springs Historic District, is now finishing its fourth full summer closed. Farther down the same road, the parking lot at 472 Old Stone Highway sits empty too. Old Stone Market, run for twenty years by Wolf Reiter and Vicky Sdrougias, closed for good this past June.
That's two of Springs' oldest retail anchors gone in the same stretch of road, in the same year. What's easy to miss, if you're only half paying attention between beach trips, is that the hamlet didn't get quieter because of it. It got rerouted. The gathering spots didn't disappear. They moved to a tavern in a former dive bar, a barn at an arts nonprofit, and a community hall that just closed out its 59th consecutive summer show.
What actually happened on Old Stone Highway
The Springs General Store saga has been dragging through East Hampton Town's approval process since the property sold in 2022. The new owners, brothers Daniel and Evan Bennett along with Jonas Lafortezza, spent years in front of the Zoning Board of Appeals, the Planning Board, and the Architectural Review Board just to convert the store's decades-old kayak rental operation along Accabonac Harbor into a small retail wine shed. The Architectural Review Board finally signed off in the spring of 2025, with vice chairman Chris Britton calling the area "authentically Bonac" and noting it had been "little touched by summer vacation colonies." Permit paperwork took the rest of the year, and by this past December, construction fencing had gone up around the building and Daniel Bennett confirmed he'd applied for a building permit.
Even with that, the timeline is not kind. The East Hampton Star reported that best case, the store reopens next summer, in 2027. Worst case, it slides to July 2028. For a business that's been the default answer to "where do I grab coffee and a sandwich in Springs" since long before most current residents moved in, that's a long stretch to go without.
"We're dying to get going. It's hard not having the revenue there," Daniel's father, John Bennett, told the Star.
Old Stone Market's closure landed differently. There was no renovation plan behind it, no town board waiting in the wings. After two decades, Reiter and Sdrougias simply closed the doors this June, and the space has stayed dark since.
The tavern that filled the gap
While the general store sat empty, one address a short drive away quietly became the hamlet's default living room. Alex Rossi, an art history major who'd studied Pollock extensively, wandered into an old neighborhood bar in 2022 for a beer and a soccer match. The building had cycled through names for years, "formerly Wolfie's, formerly Jungle Pete's, formerly a lot of stuff," as Rossi put it. He turned it into Springs Tavern & Grill that same year the general store went dark.
Four years later, the tavern had enough traction that Rossi opened a second restaurant. Lion's Nook Bar & Grill took over the old Rowdy Hall space at 10 Main Street in East Hampton Village this June, a partnership with village entrepreneur Gary Fuhrman. The menu leans on family history too. Rossi's father, Rubrio Rossi, ran Parioli Romanissimo on Manhattan's Upper East Side, a restaurant that earned four stars from the New York Times in 1974, a distinction only one other Italian restaurant in the city's history has matched. His porcini risotto is already on the Springs Tavern menu.
None of that happens if Springs Tavern is just a bar that opened during a slow year. It happens because a neighborhood without a general store still needed somewhere to land, and the tavern became it.
The barn absorbed the rest
Ashawagh Hall, the community space at 780 Springs Fireplace Road that's hosted the Springs Invitational since the 1960s, just wrapped its 59th annual run yesterday, August 9. The show opened July 31 with a reception and closed out a stretch of the calendar that, in past decades, might have felt like a sidebar to whatever was happening at the general store's picnic tables. This year it was closer to the main event.
Not far away, the Arts Center at Duck Creek, at 127 Squaw Road, took on even more of the load. Its Monday Family Night series ran free and weekly from July 6 through today, August 10, and the food table each week didn't come from one shop. It came from ten:
- Almond Restaurant
- Amber Waves
- Balsam Farms
- East Hampton Kitchen
- Rita Cantina
- Harbor Market & Kitchen
- Maidstone Market & Deli
- Shelly's Kitchen
- Springs Pizza
- Springs Tavern & Grill
That's the clearest evidence of the shift. One general store used to cover breakfast, lunch, and a place to sit. This summer, it took a rotating coalition of ten different food businesses, organized by a nonprofit arts center, to cover roughly the same ground on a single night a week.
The rest of August, if you're still deciding where to be
Duck Creek's Thursday jazz series, curated by Peter Watrous, isn't finished. The Tim Watson Trio played August 6, and the Minnie Jordan Sextet closes out the season August 27 with a rain date of August 30, followed by the Caracas Trio with guest Yilmer Vivas on September 3. Watrous has described this year's lineup as a deliberate step up in ambition, commissioning larger ensemble works from younger jazz composers rather than repeating past bookings.
There's a small irony worth sitting with. Jackson Pollock, who lived around the corner from the general store, reportedly once paid for groceries there with one of his own paintings. That kind of casual, transactional intimacy between artist and shopkeeper is the story Springs has told about itself for eighty years. The building where it happened is currently wrapped in construction fencing. The spirit of it, though, the idea that art and daily errands and neighbors trading favors all happen in the same small radius, is still very much alive. It's just happening at Ashawagh Hall's opening receptions and Duck Creek's Monday potlucks instead of over a deli counter.
The pattern, if you're new to it
None of this means Springs lost something and never got it back. It means the hamlet's daily rhythm rerouted itself around two long closures faster than most people who don't live here would guess, and it did it without a single new general store opening to replace the old one. The Bonac character that Chris Britton pointed to at that ARB meeting didn't need a retail anchor to survive the last four summers. It needed a tavern with a good bar, a barn with a strong booking calendar, and enough neighbors willing to bring a folding table on a Monday night.
Whenever the Springs General Store does reopen, best case next summer, it'll be rejoining a community that already figured out how to gather without it. That's a fact worth knowing whether you've lived here twenty years or twenty months.
If you're curious what any of this means for property values or timing on the Springs side of East Hampton, David Tenenbaum works this stretch of the East End regularly and is glad to talk through it, no pressure, no pitch. Schedule a Showing whenever you're ready to see what's actually on the market here.
