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SOUTHAMPTONPOSTCARD
MEETTHEM AYO R
W
hen William F. Buckley ran for
mayor of New York City, in 1965,
a reporter asked him what he would do
first if elected. “Demand a recount,” he
said. Jesse Warren, Southampton’s young-
est-ever mayor, at thirty-seven, had no
such impulse in June, as he watched the
ballot count that gave him a victory, by
forty-five votes, over the incumbent.
“I wasn’t expected to win,” Warren,
who moved to the village in 2009, said.
(His opponent was a lifer.) “My cam-
paign manager said my run was sup-
posed to be a learning experience.” War-
ren grew up in Roslyn, graduated from
Brown, worked in finance, and then quit
to move to Southampton and open a
high-end boutique called Tenet, on Main
Street. He ran on the Unity Wave ticket,
a party he created to expand local par-
ticipation in government. One of his
first acts as mayor was to pass a popu-
lar resolution to allow surfing schools
to reopen on the beach. “But only twelve
students at a time,” he said.
To woo Southampton’s full-time pop-
ulation of thirty-three hundred, War-
ren used social media, a campaign-track-
ing app, search-engine optimization,
Freedom of Information Act requests
(to locate absentee voters), and old-fash-
ioned door knocking. The Southamp-
ton Press referred to him as a “wake-up
call” for his opponent (Warren’s plat-
form included cleaning up Lake Aga-
wam, which is dangerously polluted, and
revitalizing the business district), but
the paper didn’t endorse him.
On a recent Thursday, the mayor, who
does not like to discuss his outfits with
the media (tight gray jeans, untucked
checkered shirt, and sneakers as bright
white as his teeth), was minding his nearly
empty store. “This time of day, everyone
is at the beach,” he said. “But they’ll be
back to shop later, and if we have a cloudy
weekend we’ll need all hands on deck.”
The hands were a squad of young women,
several in very short jean cutoffs.
It was a good time to wander over to
Village Hall, his other workplace, with
a quick stop for lunch. Warren, who is
the same age as Mayor Pete, of SouthBend, and who has the same bouncy
step, has already learned that getting
from one place to another requires a
time-allotment strategy. Southampton
has a diverse population, which in-
cludes—along with Thurston Howell-ish
blue bloods and unreal housewives—
many middle-class residents, and mem-
bers of the Shinnecock tribe, whose res-
ervation borders the village. An older
man stopped and thanked him for re-
cently showing up in person (along with
the police) to shush a noisy night club.
In Catena’s Market, a supporter named
Denise Smith, a former Southampton
High School cheerleader, stopped to chat.
Part Shinnecock, part African-Ameri-
can, she owns a food truck called Native
Soul. “When I first met you, I thought,
Who is this little boy?” she said. Warren
cringed a little, wolfed his sandwich, and
told her that he was late for a meeting.
She walked with him as he popped in
to Ralph’s Barber Shop and greeted con-
stituents. They passed a Club Monaco,
which Smith said used to be a five-and-
ten, and Herrick Hardware, a family-run
store with beach chairs hanging on its
exterior like climbing roses.
At the red-brick Village Hall, War-
ren greeted staffers who were dealing
with parking stickers and ice-cream-
truck permits, and slipped into his dingy
office. (He said that he plans to “brighten
it up.”) After a meeting with county
officials about sharing services, he hus-
tled to the ribbon-cutting of a thrift
store at the Southampton History Mu-
seum. Photo op done, he shook hands
with Fred Thiele, a New York assem-
blyman, who is sixty-six.
“So far, I love it. No issues yet,” War-
ren said, when Thiele asked him about
the new gig.
“Well,” Thiele, in a blue blazer, re-
plied, “there’s still time.”
On his way back to Village Hall for
a planning-commission meeting, War-
ren was accosted by four noisy women
at a table outside Sant Ambroeus. They
were dressed in white and were drink-
ing rosé. One, a Tenet customer, showed
Warren a dress that she had just bought,
and asked how business was.
“I’m the mayor now,” he said.
“Shut up! You are not,” she replied.
“How old are you?”
The next morning, after a meeting
at a private residence about the lake (ahave a big quote on the wall in my mu-
seum, and it says, ‘The unattainable is
invariably attractive,’ ” he said. “It’s not
my quote—I got it from the Porsche
Museum, in Germany—but I think it’s
true.” The quote is by the artist Jenny
Holzer, who painted it on the side of a
BMW “art car,” and is widely under-
stood to be a critique of consumerism.
—Mark Yarm