Early one evening in the final days of August, the Hamptons sky filled with streaks of pink and gold as the sun prepared to set a little sooner than usual. The salty air felt crisper than it had all season. As the waves lapped the shore, one regular at Wiborg Beach in East Hampton watched crowds arrive at 6 p.m.—that’s when pricey resident beach stickers are no longer required to park, and sticker-less joes flood the zone. Many carried stacks of pizza boxes for not-so-socially distanced oceanside picnics, filing onto the shore as they had since June. “Nobody is fucking leaving,” said the woman, who preferred not to be named. “The town is bursting at the seams.”

East Hampton has a year-round population somewhere north of 21,000. In the summer, it’s estimated that number quadruples (though no one can say for sure). In a normal year, Labor Day weekend is the drop-off: The sea of humanity that surged in on Memorial Day washes right back to New York City. Long dubbed Tumbleweed Tuesday, the day after Labor Day becomes a wasteland of empty rosé bottles and desolate beaches. Locals who serve the vacation set finally let their shoulders drop, count their cash, and take a break from the summer chaos and traffic. 

In a global pandemic, not so much. “I officially canceled Tumbleweed Tuesday on Facebook because it’s not happening this year,” said Judi Bistrian of East Hampton’s Reutershan Firewood. “I was making a joke. But it’s true.”

Evidence of the ongoing population surge is everywhere. Noel Roberts, a Nest Seekers agent also featured on Netflix’s Million Dollar Beach House, said the rental market has not slowed as it typically would. “I’m going to be showing houses on Thanksgiving. I’m going to be showing houses at Christmas,” he said. “I have a rental in the Northwest Woods, on the lower end of the market, a $2.5 million house. It’s going for $35,000 for Labor Day to the end of September. I also have another rental that just went for $300,000 for September, October, and November.” 

Rita Bonicelli, a local attorney who focuses on real estate, estimates she’s doing twice as many closings as last year, and not just for second homes. “It seems like a lot of young families are moving in to stay,” she said. “That’s a community changer with consistency in one area—a huge volume of deals concentrated between Southampton and Montauk.”

For those riding out the pandemic at their second homes, there’s an added financial bonus. After more than six months not sleeping in New York City (and being able to prove it or risk state audit), tax filers can make the Hamptons their primary residence when they file their 2020 tax returns and skip paying city income tax. (Depending on income and marriage status, personal income tax for New York City in 2020 ranges from just over 3% to just shy of 4%, plus a base tax of up to $3,264.) Unlike most years, when you can typically find someone eating a burger at the bar at East Hampton Grill in the dead of March, meticulously logging every night slept outside the city to meet their residency threshold, this year meeting the requirement was a cinch.

Local public schools have reported increased enrollment, and some New York private schools, like Avenues, are opening satellite schools out East. Amagansett School, for example, expects to see twice as many students registered this year over last—up from 75 to 150. The Ross School is reopening its second campus to accommodate the uptick.

Businesses that would normally see a post-summer slowdown are experiencing the opposite. Bistrian of Reutershan Firewood told me the rush to stock up on wood for the winter began in March. She said some customers were ordering half a cord of wood every other week. “I asked one of them why they needed so much. ‘It’s for ambiance,’ they said. They kept it burning all the time.” The company is already making nonstop deliveries that in past years weren’t ordered until October. “We expect to run out before the holidays this year. It’s so crazy out here,” Bistrian said. “That break we used to get is gone.”

Residents are busy prepping their outdoor spaces for the colder months to ensure the party doesn’t end when the weather gets chilly. Those who would normally book it back to Manhattan are instead dropping hundreds of thousands to spruce up their gardens. “Everybody wants a firepit,” said Michael Derrig, owner of the high-end Landscape Details. Derrig said it’s not uncommon for people to spend up to $500,000 to renovate existing landscape. Those who normally only inquire about it, he said, are actually doing it.

“July and August are slow for landscape construction,” he said. But this year “we were full steam ahead.” And with no end in sight. “Usually in September I get a real break. Not this year. We’ve been busy since COVID, and I see it going through the fall.”

Billy Schmitz, who owns Shelter Island Wine and Spirits, certainly isn’t complaining about those staying on. “I would love it.” He said the booze business has been booming as people build lockdown home bars. “I’ve never seen anything like it since March,” he said. “Good times or bad, people keep drinking.”

Whether the municipal system can handle a year-round crowd is another question entirely. There have been repeated reports over the years concerning the strain on Montauk’s aging septic system—surfers at Ditch Plains smelling sewage, and the celeb-frequented Surf Lodge dropping $1.4 million last year to upgrade their 1940s-era plumbing. Other practical concerns, said one East Hampton official who asked not to be named, include the added stress that comes with consistently large crowds. With no end in sight, the official said, tensions could remain high. “Police have handled it all well so far, but they had more responsibility than usual keeping people separate on the beaches and masking,” the official said. “There was more partying in Montauk than usual, and that will likely continue.”

But the biggest concern is the increased risk of a second wave of COVID. “The numbers here have been low,” the official said, “but that is the weird thing about the numbers—we don’t really know what they are. If someone visits from New York City and tests positive, it doesn’t get recorded here. I think that results, to some degree, in complacency.”

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