"We've never seen more stores. There are a lot more open full time, year-round." Erin Hatrick has run Topiaire Flower Shop and Candy Shop at 51 Jobs Lane for more than thirty years, long enough to know exactly what used to happen every October: the international pop-ins packed their racks, the seasonal tenants pulled their signs, and Jobs Lane settled into its quieter, off-season self until Memorial Day came back around. Her comment is not a marketing line. It is a resident's read on a pattern that has held for decades, and this year's crop of openings only extends what she had already started to notice.
If you live in or around Southampton Village, you already know Jobs Lane. It is the errand street, the one where you grab coffee at Sean's, drop off dry cleaning, and duck into the Arts Center on a rainy Tuesday. What you may not have clocked yet is that the businesses opening there this year keep using the same word in their own announcements: year-round. That word, repeated across a bookstore, a sushi restaurant, and a wine shop that has been there since Prohibition ended, is the actual story. Jobs Lane is not just adding stores. It is converting from a summer strip into a twelve-month street, and the evidence is sitting right there in the shopfronts.
The Street That Used to Go Quiet
Jobs Lane has carried that name since 1664, when it was a cow path worn into the ground by a farmer named Job Sayre walking his herd down toward the pastureland at Agawam Pond, the same water that now anchors Agawam Park at the lane's western end. A small sign at the corner of Jobs and Main still marks the date. For most of its modern life as a retail street, the lane has run on a seasonal clock: crowded and glossy from Memorial Day to Labor Day, then noticeably thinner once the summer tenants clear out.
The businesses that survived that annual churn tend to be the ones locals mention by name rather than category. Herbert & Rist Wines and Liquors opened its doors at 63 Jobs Lane on December 5, 1933, the very day Prohibition ended, and has been run by the same families ever since. John Rist started there as a delivery boy fifty-four years ago and still works the floor. Down the block, Dazzelle has outfitted East End women in dresses and eveningwear for more than twenty years under owner Ellen Irving, and Stevenson's Toys & Games has kept Roy Stevenson's shelves stocked with Steiff bears and Lego for just as long. These are not seasonal tenants. They are the businesses that made the lane worth walking in February, not just August.
What Actually Opened This Year
This summer's new arrivals are notable less for their polish than for how many of them are explicitly built to stay open past Labor Day.
| Business | Location | What changed in 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Finley's Fiction Southampton | Jobs Lane | Opened May 21 with a ribbon-cutting from Southampton Mayor Bill Manger. First independent bookstore in the village since Southampton Books closed. Confirmed as a year-round shop with Saturday story time. |
| Namiro Sushi | 76C Jobs Lane | Opened last May, then rebuilt after an October fire forced a full reconstruction. Reopened this season with a refreshed design, an expanded menu, and year-round hours. |
| FĒNIKS | Jobs Lane | Chef Douglas Gulija, joined by cousin Skip Norsic, opened a multiconcept space spanning an interactive chef's counter, a dining room, and a lounge. |
| Leallo | Jobs Lane | East End retail favorite added a new storefront carrying sustainable cotton and cashmere pieces. |
Finley's Fiction is the clearest example of the shift. Founder Finley Shaw already runs a seasonal outpost on Shelter Island that closes for winter. The Southampton location, a partnership with longtime village resident Pippa Gerard, is bigger at 450 square feet, has an outdoor sitting area for warmer months, and was built from day one to stay open twelve months a year. Gerard's own motivation traces back to a gap she felt every winter after Southampton Books closed its doors on Hampton Road. That gap is now specifically what the new shop was designed to fill, not just for the summer crowd but for the grandparents bringing kids to Saturday morning story time in the middle of January.
Namiro Sushi tells a version of the same story from the other direction. It opened in the former Bamboo space last May, built a following through its first season, then lost the physical space to an October fire that required a full rebuild. Its return this year, in the same 76C Jobs Lane spot next door to Sean's Place, comes with a commitment to year-round hours rather than the seasonal run it had before the fire. A business that could have simply not come back chose instead to rebuild toward permanence.
Why "Year-Round" Keeps Showing Up
None of this happened by coincidence. Put Hatrick's comment next to the Finley's Fiction launch and the Namiro rebuild and a pattern appears: Jobs Lane's newest tenants are explicitly positioning themselves as fixtures rather than seasonal draws, in a market that has historically rewarded the opposite. International brands still arrive every summer and still pack up in September, as they always have. What is different in 2026 is that the businesses filling the gaps behind them are not doing the same thing. A bookstore, a rebuilt sushi restaurant, and a wine shop that predates the end of Prohibition are not competing for the same eight-week window as the pop-ins. They are betting on the version of Jobs Lane that exists in November.
That bet has a partner a few hundred feet away. The Southampton Arts Center, housed in the 127-year-old Grosvenor Atterbury-designed building at 25 Jobs Lane, has run four major exhibits a year for over a decade, entirely independent of the summer season. Its headline exhibition this year, The Story of America 1776-2026, ran from late May through mid-July and drew visitors down the same lane where they might also have picked up a novel from Finley's Fiction or a bottle from Herbert & Rist. The Arts Center never needed a seasonal clock. It looks now like the rest of the street is catching up to it.
The Loop That Starts and Ends at Agawam Pond
There is a fitting symmetry here. Job Sayre's cattle path led down to the pastureland by the pond that is now Agawam Park, and that same park hosts the Southampton Farmers & Artisans Market every Sunday from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., running May 3 through September 13 this year. More than forty vendors set up there most weeks, among them Mecox Bay Dairy, South Fork Bakery, Bambino Ravioli, North Fork Oyster Company, and Wishbone Farms. It is run by the Southampton Chamber of Commerce and it sits close enough to Jobs Lane that a resident can walk both in the same morning.
A weekend routine along this stretch of the village might look something like this:
- Early coffee and an egg sandwich at Sean's Place, open as early as 5:30 a.m., with outdoor tables for people watching
- A Sunday morning stop at the Agawam Park market for produce, bread, and whatever North Fork Oyster Company brought that week
- A slow walk up Jobs Lane past Herbert & Rist and Topiaire, both still run by the people who opened them
- A browse through Finley's Fiction, especially on a Saturday morning when story time is running
- Dinner at FĒNIKS or a plate of Namiro's Osaka-style pressed sushi to close out the day
None of that loop depends on the calendar reading July. That is the point. A street that used to hand its keys to seasonal tenants every June and take them back every September is now built with enough permanent anchors that the loop works in November just as well as it does in August.
What This Means If You Walk the Lane Regularly
If you already live near Jobs Lane, the practical takeaway is simple: the street you visit in winter is starting to look a lot more like the one you visit in July, and that is a fairly recent change worth noticing on your own next walk down the block. Watch for whether Finley's Fiction keeps its lights on past the holidays, whether Namiro's rebuilt dining room stays full in February, and whether FĒNIKS finds the same crowd in the off-season that it drew this summer. Those answers will tell you more about where the village is heading than any single summer opening ever could.
Michael Petersohn keeps close daily tabs on shifts like this one across every hamlet from Southampton to Montauk, not because storefronts make headlines but because they tell you what a place is actually becoming. If you want that kind of grounded, hyperlocal read on any corner of the Hamptons, from Jobs Lane to your own street, reach out to Michael Petersohn to Request a Personal Market Consultation.
