"Do you like sand, quaintness, twenty-eight-dollar salads, parties under white tents, investment bankers, hip-hop stars, Barbara Walters, locally grown produce, D.J. Samantha Ronson, and lovely tablescapes? Then Southampton is the place for you: a land of natural splendor and immodest indulgence. A Victorian cottage on Hill Street—nowhere near the beach—rents for a hundred thousand dollars a summer. (The Web site advertising it says that it’s “perfect for your staff or overflow guests.”) A spacious place with a water view will set you back about five hundred thousand. The real cost, though, isn’t money; it’s time. To get to the Hamptons, just east of Manhattan, you must sit on the Long Island Expressway—the biggest parking lot in the world, as they say—for hour upon hour of overheated immobility.

And it’s only going to get worse, because the Shinnecock Indian Nation, based on a reservation just minutes from the center of Southampton, intends to open a casino—or several—on Long Island. A set of architect’s renderings, picturing a great room with burgundy banquettes and rows of shining slot machines, is already hanging on the walls of a trailer that the three tribal trustees use as an office. The Shinnecocks want a “high-class Monte Carlo-type” operation, a member of the tribe’s Gaming Authority said, somewhere “near our homelands in Southampton,” and perhaps another, less posh facility in Nassau County. “If the Mashantuckets can have the highest-grossing casino in the world in the woods of Connecticut,” a former Shinnecock trustee named Fred Bess told me, referring to the Mashantucket Pequots’ Foxwoods resort, “just think what we could do twenty miles out of Manhattan.”

The Shinnecocks have said that they will build roads to funnel casino traffic away from the L.I.E., but there are many people in the Hamptons—people who don’t have the money to commute from Manhattan by helicopter but who are still rich enough to be accustomed to getting what they want—who are aghast at the prospect of more cars on the road, not to mention the unquaintness of a casino marring their manicured pastoral. Such people “do not want their idyllic environment hurt by the added traffic, congestion, and noise of a gaming facility,” Senator Charles Schumer wrote to the Bureau of Indian Affairs several years ago. The state senator Kenneth LaValle said that the tribe was “blatantly threatening the quality of life on the East End.”"

Get the Story:
Reservations A tribe stakes its identity on a casino—in the Hamptons (The New Yorker 12/13)
Full article available only to subscribers.

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