Two winters ago, the strip between Windmill Lane and Amber Waves Farm felt like an off-season photograph of itself. The Main Street Tavern building had traded hands and gone dark. Doubles was open four days a week. The stretch west of Hedges Lane, anchored by the Mobil station and a 1920s building that had spent years drifting between tenants, was the part of the hamlet you drove past on the way to somewhere else. Summer 2026 has rearranged the map. The action has moved west, the sidewalk under it is being physically rebuilt, and for the first time in a long while the walkable center of Amagansett runs the full length of Main Street rather than clustering around Amagansett Square.
The west end finally has a reason to stop
The building at 136 Main Street, a 1920s-era building neighboring the Mobil station at the entrance to the hamlet's business district, is the story. Four years ago its owners floated a proposal that would have leveled both the Main Street building and the red barn behind it and replaced them with a dozen storefronts, offices, and four affordable units. The Planning Board turned it down, and the parcel has been quietly on the market since, listed at $19 million.
What happened instead is more interesting than what was proposed. Rather than a ground-up rebuild, the owners renovated the interiors and let a cluster of small operators move in. As of this July, Jamagansett, in a passage opposite the complex's spacious parking lot; Sett Coffee and its neighbor Sea Dragon Books, on Main Street, and LaParlour, a beauty salon on the ground floor of the barn building, have been individually modernized and transformed into inviting little shops.
Sett Coffee is the anchor. It was opened by John and Kelly Piccinnini, owners of the iconic Clam Bar and most recently The Corner in Sag Harbor, and the room has become the west end's living room. On a Saturday morning the crowd skews under forty, with strollers and dogs and, per the East Hampton Star, conversations about Little League and the price of peanut butter at the I.G.A. Next door, Sea Dragon Books is run by a sister and brother, Tricia Hoefling and Charles Billings, together with their mother, all Sagaponack residents who decided the hamlet needed a bookstore and built one.
The shift matters because Amagansett's commercial life has historically been lopsided. The center of gravity sat between Amagansett Square and Amber Waves Farm. The block at the western entrance was a place you looked at through a windshield. That block now has a coffee shop, a bookstore, a restaurant, and a salon within thirty feet of each other, and residents are treating it as a destination in its own right.
The sidewalk under all of it is being rebuilt
While the tenants arrived, the town rebuilt the ground beneath them. The plan, approved this spring, extends the brick-and-tree-box treatment that already lines the north side of Main Street across to the south side, running from Hedges Lane to the western entrance of Amagansett Square. Town officials would also widen the sidewalk from four to five feet. The construction target was a completion date of between May 1 and May 15, just before Memorial Day.
The change reads as cosmetic and is not. Anyone who has walked this stretch in July knows the old configuration: a four-foot sidewalk with a strip of grass between it and the curb that had long since been beaten to hardpack by pedestrians stepping around one another. Widening it by a foot and formalizing the boundary in brick is what makes side-by-side walking possible on the south side for the first time. The councilman shepherding the project, David Lys, put it bluntly at the March work session: "Let's be honest: Amagansett is happening right now. It is a wonderful hamlet, historical hamlet – great stores, great activity and the sidewalk there right now is not the width for the use of it."
Not everyone loved the trade. Dan Mongan, a trustee of both the Amagansett Library and the Amagansett Historical Association, argued in public comment that paving over the grass sacrificed the softer character of the south side to match the busier commercial north. The board went with brick anyway, citing snow removal, tree health under the summer canopy, and the sheer weight of foot traffic.
Sitting behind the sidewalk project is a second, larger one. The town has been working for years on replacing the cobra-head fixtures on Main Street with roughly 46 to 50 "historical style" light fixtures such as those installed in Sag Harbor, spaced approximately 100 feet apart on either side of Main Street from Windmill Lane to Meeting House Lane. The existing "cobra head" lights affixed to metal poles would be removed. The engineers have specified a 2,700 kelvin LED lamp, the measurement indicating a "soft white" or warm, yellowish light that resembles an old incandescent bulb, with all fixtures directed downward and no trees removed. The estimated cost is $1.3 million dollars, imposed on the Main Street tax district rather than townwide.
This summer's opening dates, in one place
The dining calendar reads differently once you line up the actual dates:
| Opening | Where | Date |
|---|---|---|
| LUNCH Lobster Roll seasonal reopen | 1980 Montauk Highway | April 24, 2026 |
| Sett Coffee | 136 Main Street | Spring 2026 |
| Sea Dragon Books | 136 Main Street | Spring 2026 |
| Jamagansett | 136 Main Street passage | Spring 2026 |
| Nourish (Bridgehampton, Roundtree Amagansett ownership) | Former Arthur & Sons space | May 18, 2026 |
| LUNCH Lobster Roll expands to 7 days | 1980 Montauk Highway | Mid-June 2026 |
A few of these deserve annotation. LUNCH Lobster Roll's Amagansett location opened for the 2026 season on Friday, April 24. The restaurant will operate Thursday through Monday beginning at 11:45 a.m. during the spring season, expanding to seven days a week in mid-June as summer approaches. Doubles, at 12 Amagansett Square, is now on more residents' regular rotation than it was a year ago; the brothers Daniel and Evan Bennett, who also run Mimi and Babs in Greenwich Village, took the space that Hampton Chutney vacated after two decades. And Nourish, while technically a Bridgehampton opening, is a Roundtree Amagansett project: a new wellness-focused restaurant, Nourish, is opening in Bridgehampton from Roundtree Amagansett owner Sylvia Wong. Taking over the former Arthur & Sons space, Nourish will be led by chef Dewa Wijaya, a Bali-born, French-trained chef known for blending lighter preparations with bold global flavors. The Roundtree's chef and program are, in effect, exporting westward.
Read the table as a shape rather than a list. Every new opening except one sits on the western half of the hamlet. The center of dining gravity has followed the retail center of gravity across Hedges Lane.
Why the whole spine now works as one walk
The individually small changes add up to a single structural one. For a decade the hamlet had two commercial personalities. The eastern half, from Amagansett Square out to Amber Waves, was where residents ate and shopped. The western half, from the Mobil station to Hedges Lane, was a gap. This summer that gap has closed. There is a coffee shop and a bookstore where there was a repair garage a few years back. The south sidewalk is now the same width and material as the north. The lighting plan, when it lands, will extend the same fixture from Windmill Lane out to Meeting House Lane, giving the entire strip a single visual signature after dark.
The organizations that hold the hamlet together have not moved. The Amagansett Village Improvement Society, still tending "the roads, sidewalks, cemeteries, parks, and greens of the said Amagansett and vicinity, and for the improvement and advancement of the welfare and the best interest of said village of Amagansett", is now more than a century old. Michael Cinque, who has run Amagansett Wine and Spirits for over 40 years, is still on the north side of the street. Miss Amelia's Cottage, Miankoma Hall, the Life-Saving Station, and the Library are still where they were in 1921. What has changed is that the walk between them is finally continuous.
A resident's Saturday, west to east
- Coffee and a pastry at Sett, then twenty minutes next door at Sea Dragon.
- Cross Hedges Lane on the new south sidewalk instead of the old grass-worn shortcut.
- Lunch at Il Buco al Mare or Doubles in Amagansett Square, depending on the mood.
- A stop at Amagansett Wine and Spirits or Jack's Stir Brew before turning back.
- The drive out to LUNCH on Montauk Highway if the roll matters more than the walk.
Two summers from now, when the historic-district lighting is in and the trees have grown into their new boxes, the change will look inevitable. It is not. It is the result of a very specific set of decisions made in the last twelve months, by the owners of one building at the west end, by a town board willing to widen a sidewalk by twelve inches, and by the operators who bet that residents would treat the Mobil corner as a destination.
If you own here and are thinking about what all of this means for the value of a house on Windmill Lane, Cranberry Hole Road, or one of the side streets radiating off Main, The Jennifer Wilson Team can walk you through what the hamlet's shifting center of gravity is doing to buyer interest block by block. Get property listings delivered.
