Montauk fundraises for community swimming pool

Most of the summer fundraisers in the Hamptons stress elegance and sophistication, along with creative food menus, quiet background music and high ticket prices.

But on Saturday, the biggest event in Montauk will start with attendees walking across a dirt floor -- not a red carpet -- and end with cocktails and entertainment provided by a popular local band.

Despite a $250 general admission price, about 400 people are expected to turn out to help raise enough money to build a large community swimming pool in the historic Montauk Playhouse.

It's the next-to-last act in an improbable dream in the community, one that has already turned a huge, crumbling wreck of a building into a combination town hall annex, recreation center, day care facility and cultural and youth activities hub, complete with a basketball court (but no room for bleachers). Last year, for the first time, the center was used as a polling site.

"Everyone in Montauk comes in here at some point," said Maureen Rutkowski, project director for the Montauk Playhouse Community Center Foundation, a nonprofit group that operates some of the services at the facility.

Still, with all that the Playhouse offers, the Montauk community has no swimming pool. For a hamlet surrounded by water, having a place where children can learn to swim is a community obsession.

"We've already got $2 million in the bank," Rutkowski said.

Community volunteers also have more money in solid pledges, and expect to get an additional $1 million to fund the project in the next year. If fundraising is completed, the pool would open in 2014.

The Playhouse, built in the 1920s to match the outsized dreams of Montauk developer Carl Fisher, was an immense tennis auditorium originally named the Montauk Tennis Auditorium. It had two indoor courts under a vast glass ceiling and seating for 6,000 people. At the time, it was the largest facility of its kind in the world.

Over the years, the building changed hands and names several times and was finally donated to East Hampton town in 1999. Even though the building was just a shell, the steelwork remained strong, and the gift came with 4.4 acres of land on a hill overlooking the water.

East Hampton spent $6 million to rebuild the front half of the building, but the back of the structure -- including the dirt floors and part of the original tennis courts -- was closed off by the Playhouse foundation.

That group wanted to spend $10 million to build a pool and reopen a playhouse, but this year decided to split the job in half -- building the pool first and leaving work on the theater above it for the future.

Saturday's "Diamond in the Rough" fundraiser is the start of a formal fundraising campaign.

"We have lots of naming opportunities" for the pool facilities, said Lisa DeVeglio, president of the Playhouse board of directors.