At a Southampton Town Planning Board meeting, someone had to decide what color a set of concrete posts could be. Target wanted its usual red bollards out front, the ones that keep cars off the walkway at every store from Fargo to Fort Lauderdale. A board member pushed back, calling the bollards "somewhere between an architectural element and a safety issue and signage," the kind of object that carries a company's brand whether anyone intends it to or not.

That single sentence, argued over a row of concrete posts, tells you more about Bridgehampton Commons than the store opening ever will on its own. The Target arriving at 2044 Montauk Highway on October 11 will have gray bollards. A gray facade. A sign lit from above instead of glowing from within. This is not the retailer's choice. It is the site's fourth national chain in 54 years, and every one of them has had to leave its original colors at the door.

Four Tenants, One Box, No Original Paint

The building itself dates to 1972, built as the anchor of what was then called Plaza East Shopping Center. Its opening did not go unopposed. A group of Bridgehampton and area residents, among them the writer Peter Matthiessen and the artist Saul Steinberg, organized as Citizens Against the Shopping Center and warned in a printed petition that the development would bring traffic, undercut local merchants, and change the look of the surrounding farmland for good. The center was built anyway.

What has followed is a run of national retailers, each one lasting until its parent company collapsed, and each one replaced by something else that filled the same 90,000-square-foot box.

Kmart's quarter-century run ended with the shelves half-empty and Christmas ornaments marked down 75 percent overnight in its final weeks. It held on long enough to become a genuine footnote in retail history: the last full-size Kmart in the continental United States, outlasted only by a small-format store in Miami and a handful of locations in Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

What Target Gave Up To Get In

Target's application went before the Southampton Town Planning Board and its Architectural Review Board starting in December 2024, and the version approved months later looks almost nothing like a standard Target. The concessions, worked out over a series of meetings, include:

• A muted gray facade with a white wordmark and bullseye, in place of the chain's signature red
• Signage lit from above rather than internally illuminated, to match the shopping center's existing sign code
• Gray concrete bollards instead of Target's usual red ones
• A footprint of roughly 90,000 square feet, smaller than a typical store
• Interior plumbing upgrades, including a grease trap, to accommodate the Starbucks cafe now built into the store

Planning Board Chairwoman Jaqui Lofaro signed off on the sign treatment at a February review, telling the applicant, "The sign looks great, you're going to do it in white, so that's nice and simple." The bollards took longer to settle. Lofaro remained unconvinced about the precedent a red accessory could set for whichever tenant follows Target, whenever that day comes.

The Lease Predates the Vacancy by Three Years

Here is the detail that gets lost in most of the coverage: Target signed its lease on the space in 2021, three full years before Kmart actually closed its doors. The company was willing to commit to a location it could not yet occupy, then spend another two years working through design review before it could open at all.

Target's regional real estate director told Newsday the company had wanted a Hamptons location for years, if not decades, but could never find a large enough parcel on the South Fork. That scarcity is the whole story. A retailer with more than 2,000 stores nationwide, part of a plan to open more than 300 stores by 2035, still had to wait five years and repaint its own brand to get into one shopping center on Montauk Highway. Bridgehampton Commons is the only site out here built at the scale a chain this size needs, and Kimco Realty, which owns the center, knows it does not need to make that process easy.

What Actually Opens on October 11

Set that history aside and the practical facts are straightforward. The store will run 7 a.m. to 11 p.m., seven days a week, with a CVS Pharmacy and Starbucks cafe built in, plus Drive Up, Order Pickup, and same-day delivery. It is one of eight Target locations opening nationally in October and the last of 30 new stores the company planned to open in 2026, making it the 109th Target in New York State.

Target has been hiring locally for months, with roles posted for:

1. Food Service Team Leader
2. Specialty Sales, covering style, beauty, or tech
3. Guest Advocate, the company's term for cashier
4. Target Security Specialist
5. 4 a.m. Inbound, for overnight stocking
6. Human Resources positions supporting the new store

The company expects to employ 140 to 150 people once the store is fully staffed, according to figures reported by Newsday.

The Same Stretch of Montauk Highway Hosted a Concours Three Weeks Earlier

Three weeks before the ribbon cutting, the same few square miles of Bridgehampton were given over to something with the opposite relationship to accessibility. The Bridge X, presented by Mercedes-Benz USA and marking a decade of the invitation-only gathering, brought collector cars back to the grounds of the old Bridgehampton Race Circuit on September 19. Robert Rubin, who has owned the circuit since 1981 and founded the Bridge golf club there in 2002, opened the weekend to a guest list built around collectors, designers, and old racing names. The one public window came the next morning, when Cars & Coffee, free and open to anyone, filled the lawn at the Bridgehampton Museum from 9 to 11 a.m. before the weekend closed out with a ticketed Mercedes-Benz anniversary event at Topping Rose House.

That contrast is the whole shape of Bridgehampton in one month. A ten-year-old invitation-only car show on a former racetrack, open to the public for exactly two hours. A Target that took five years, two town review boards, and a repainted brand identity to open its doors to everyone at 7 a.m. Down the road, Almond has spent this same fall marking its own 25th year in business with a full slate of weeknight specials from chef Jason Weiner, the kind of longstanding, locally built restaurant that never had to clear an Architectural Review Board because it was never asking to look like anything but itself.

Bridgehampton does not reject what arrives. It reshapes it, sometimes over years, until it fits.

For more on what's changing along Bridgehampton's commercial corridor, or anywhere else on the East End, reach out to Matthew Breitenbach.