Is Springs' General Store Ever Coming Back?

Walk Old Stone Highway on a Tuesday morning and you'll pass the building before you register what's missing. The porch is still there. The parking lot Daniel Bennett fought three town boards to redesign is graded and fenced. What's gone is the smell of coffee and the sound of a screen door, because Springs General Store has been closed since the summer of 2022, and the most recent public timeline points to a summer 2027 reopening at the earliest, with a worst-case scenario stretching to July 2028.

That's not a rumor passed around at the transfer station. It's the timeline Bennett himself has laid out through four years of permit hearings, and it means an entire hamlet has now spent longer without its general store than most people spend in high school.

The Crossroads That Went Quiet

Springs General Store isn't just a place to buy eggs. Built in 1844 and sitting inside the Springs Historic District, it was the hamlet's first store and post office, a spot where, according to local lore Bennett has repeated at planning board meetings, Jackson Pollock once traded a painting for groceries. The store sits partway between the Springs School, the church, and Ashawagh Hall. It's the literal and social center of the hamlet.

The closure started as a burst pipe. It became a four-year odyssey through the East Hampton Town Zoning Board of Appeals, Planning Board, and Architectural Review Board, because Bennett and his co-owners, brother Evan Bennett and Jonas Lafortezza, want to discontinue the old kayak rental operation, add a wine sales shed, and replace failing infrastructure with a low-nitrogen septic system. Here's how that process has actually moved:

Bennett has been candid about how many times he thought the finish line was close. "I've had the you're-there moment with this project six times since we began," he told a reporter last year. "I won't be there now until I'm sitting in the completed store by the fireplace." That's not impatience talking. That's a business owner who has watched four building seasons pass without a coffee counter open.

Then, this June, the hamlet lost a second grocery anchor. Old Stone Market, the shop Wolf Reiter and Vicky Sdrougias opened twenty years ago at 472 Old Stone Highway, closed its doors for good. Two longtime grocery stops on the same road, a few hundred yards apart, are now closed inside the same twelve-month stretch.

Where the Rotation Actually Moved

Here's the part that most coverage of Springs misses: the hamlet's daily food and gathering life didn't disappear when Old Stone Highway went dark. It relocated, almost entirely, to Three Mile Harbor Road.

EHP Resort & Marina anchors that shift, and its timeline runs almost exactly parallel to the store's closure. Sunset Harbor, its contemporary Japanese and sushi concept, debuted over Memorial Day weekend in 2022, the same year Springs General Store went dark. EHP paired it with Sí Sí, a Mediterranean restaurant overlooking the harbor that has since become established enough to host Dan's Chefs of the Hamptons, the summer culinary event that brings together roughly fifteen of the East End's most recognized chefs for one evening on the water. That's not a neighborhood pop-up. That's a marquee regional event choosing Three Mile Harbor over East Hampton village or Sag Harbor as its stage, in the same years Old Stone Highway sat behind construction fencing.

A few doors down, The Blend at Three Mile Harbor has built a loyal local following around a menu that changes weekly, popular enough that regulars will tell you to expect a wait on a Monday night. Ketchy Beach, the nightlife and dining concept from the team behind Manhattan's Ketchy Shuby, is returning this summer to a new Three Mile Harbor Road address, running late on Friday and Saturday nights with DJs and a menu built around shishito peppers and lobster roll. And Harbor Marina, sitting on eight acres at the mouth of the harbor, runs its own waterside restaurant serving dinner with views of Gardiner's Bay.

None of this is coincidence. It's what happens when a hamlet's historic commercial crossroads goes vacant for four years running. The harbor had the infrastructure, the water views, and the parking to absorb the demand, and it did.

The Corridor Isn't Empty, It's Quieter

Old Stone Highway hasn't gone completely still. Ashawagh Hall, the community space at 780 Springs-Fireplace Road that sits just up the road from the shuttered store, is still doing what it's done for decades. This summer's 59th Annual Springs Artists Invitational ran July 31 through August 9 with an opening reception that drew the hamlet's arts crowd the way it has since the Pollock and de Kooning years. This week, ACA Galleries, the Manhattan gallery founded in 1932, is closing out an exhibition at the hall called Vignettes: Where Two Roads Meet, on view August 28 through 31, pulling nineteenth-century and contemporary pieces from its own collection into the same room where Springs residents have gathered for generations.

Earlier this year, Springs resident and film and television line producer Jonathan Shoemaker launched a new theater company, the Accabonac Theater Project, staging its inaugural production at Hoie Hall at St. Luke's Episcopal Church, with one of its short plays titled, fittingly, "General Store."

So the civic core of Springs held. What moved was the errand run, the coffee stop, the place you'd grab a sandwich on your way to the beach. That's a meaningfully different thing than a hamlet losing its identity. It's a hamlet whose commercial spine relocated two roads over while its cultural spine stayed exactly where it's always been.

What This Actually Looks Like Day to Day

If you already live in Springs, the current rotation looks something like this:

• Coffee and breakfast: no longer Old Stone Highway. Three Mile Harbor Road or a short drive into East Hampton village.
• Dinner with a view: Sí Sí or Sunset Harbor at EHP Resort & Marina, or Harbor Marina's waterside spot at the harbor entrance.
• Casual, regulars-only: The Blend at Three Mile Harbor, where the happy hour crowd knows the bartenders by name.
• Late night: Ketchy Beach's new Three Mile Harbor Road location, running Friday and Saturday until close.
• Everyday rotation beyond the harbor: Bostwick's on the Harbor, Springs Tavern and Grill, Little Charli, Camp Rubirosa, Rita Cantina, and Springs Pizza round out the wider hamlet's food options, filling in what the two grocery anchors used to cover on the retail side.
• The one thing that hasn't moved: Ashawagh Hall's gallery calendar, still the place Springs residents gather for openings, invitationals, and the kind of small-town cultural life that predates every restaurant on this list.

The honest read on Springs right now isn't a hamlet in decline. It's a hamlet that lost its historic commercial anchor to a permitting process longer than most people expected, watched a second longtime shop close in the same window, and quietly rebuilt its daily rhythm a few hundred yards away on the water. Whether that rhythm shifts back once Bennett's fireplace room finally reopens, sometime between next summer and 2028, is the kind of question only time in this specific hamlet will answer.

If you're weighing what any of this means for a home you already own in Springs, or you're thinking about what a property near Three Mile Harbor versus one closer to the historic district might be worth in a market that's visibly reorganizing itself, Michael Petersohn can walk you through it. Request a Personal Market Consultation and get a read on the hamlet that's grounded in what's actually happening on the ground, not what the map still assumes.