Walk Jobs Lane on any weekday morning and you will pass a construction fence before you pass a single open storefront that wasn't there two years ago. The fence sits around 38-40-42 Jobs Lane, the address most people in the village still call Jobs Lane Court, an overgrown 1970s courtyard of vacant shopfronts that has been the subject of public hearings since before most of the businesses now open around it existed. If you wanted a single symbol for a Jobs Lane comeback, this lot would be it. Three new two-story buildings, new storefronts facing the sidewalk, a pedestrian alley cut through to the parking lot behind. The Southampton Village Board of Architectural Review and Historic Preservation approved architect Siamak Samii's plan for the site in a 4-1 vote on September 22, 2025.
Eleven months later, the most recent public record on the project is a Planning Board hearing that still hadn't approved it.
That gap between the block's most visible project and its actual pace of change is the thing worth understanding if you spend any real time on this street. The comeback everyone talks about didn't wait for the lot. It happened around it.
The sign that explains the street
There is a small marker at the corner of Jobs Lane and Main that most people walk past without reading. It simply says Jobs Lane, Opened, 1664. The lane is named for Job Sayre, a farmer whose cows wore a path from his barnyard down to Agawam Pond and on to open pasture beyond it. Main Street had already existed as a laid-out road for sixteen years by the time Jobs Lane became passable, because an impassable swamp sat between them until part of it was filled in.
The point of that history isn't nostalgia. It's that Jobs Lane has always been the second thing to happen, the route that opens once the obvious path is already busy. That pattern is repeating in real time. The obvious path right now is the storefronts that already exist and already have customers. The permitted, rendered, approved redevelopment at the center of the block is the swamp still waiting to be filled.
What filled in while the village kept meeting
While the courtyard sat behind chain link, the rest of the street kept moving on its own schedule. Some of what's there now is new. Some of it has been there longer than most of the people walking past it.
- FENIKS, at 75 Jobs Lane, opened in 2025 from chef Douglas Gulija, who spent 28 years running The Plaza Cafe before starting this one. It runs across two floors, with an intimate dining room, a six-seat chef's counter in front of the open kitchen, and a cocktail lounge upstairs.
- Leallo, known on the East End for cotton and cashmere pieces, opened a new storefront on Jobs Lane.
- Herbert & Rist Wines and Liquors, at 63 Jobs Lane, has been pouring the same convivial version of itself since 1933. Ninety-plus years on the same street will do that to a business. It's the kind of shop that outlasts three different versions of what's fashionable around it.
- Topiaire Flower Shop & Candy Shop, at 51 Jobs Lane, has been run by Erin Hatrick for more than 30 years. She's watched enough turnover on this block to have an informed opinion about the current stretch. "We've never seen more stores," she said of the year-round tenancy on the lane.
- Dazzelle, at 47 Jobs Lane, has kept Ellen Irving in the dress-shop business for over two decades.
- Stevenson's Toys & Games, at 69 Jobs Lane, and Aloof Icon, at 87 Jobs Lane, round out a stretch of small, independently owned retail that has stayed open full time rather than shuttering after Labor Day the way some seasonal storefronts do.
- The Peter Marino Art Foundation, at 11 Jobs Lane, occupies the former Rogers Memorial Library building, its Victorian Gothic stacks and reading rooms converted into gallery space.
None of that required a Planning Board vote. None of it needed the courtyard resolved first. It happened because individual owners signed leases, opened doors, and built a customer base one season at a time, which is a much slower and much less photogenic story than a rendering of three new buildings, but it's the one that actually explains why the street feels different than it did three years ago.
The lot that's still waiting
The Jobs Lane Court story is worth following closely, not because it's finished, but because of how long it's taken to not be finished. The ARB signed off on the design in September 2025. That should have been the hard part. Instead, the project moved to the Village Planning Board for site plan review, and as of a public hearing in April 2026, the board still hadn't approved it. Attorney John Bennett, representing property owner John Vigna of East End Holdings LLC, told the board the applicant would work out compliance issues with the village zoning code. A resident letter published that same month pointed to specific sticking points: parking, sanitary requirements, size, and style. The public hearing was continued to May 4, 2026.
That's a lot of process for a project that already has architectural approval and a neighboring business owner, Susan Madonia of Ann Madonia Antiques, who negotiated a public alleyway into the plan specifically to protect her building's foundation during construction. The redevelopment isn't controversial in the sense of anyone opposing new storefronts on Jobs Lane. It's controversial in the mundane, procedural sense that governs most commercial construction in a historic village: does the parking pencil out, does the plumbing meet code, does the massing match what a Zoning Board of Appeals variance process would actually allow.
If you live near Jobs Lane, the practical takeaway isn't that the lot is a lost cause. It's that watching this particular parcel for signs of the street's health is watching the wrong indicator. As of the most recent hearing on record, the courtyard was still a courtyard, not a construction site. The lane filled back in without it.
What the street actually tells you
The Southampton Arts Center, at 25 Jobs Lane, is a useful counterpoint to the courtyard precisely because it moves at the opposite pace. Housed in a 127-year-old building designed by Grosvenor Atterbury, with a courtyard of Roman-emperor statuary out back, SAC turns over its exhibitions on a set annual rhythm rather than waiting on anyone's permitting timeline. This past Saturday, August 22, the Center held its SummerFest Gala, an annual fundraiser that keeps its year-round programming funded. Earlier in the summer it hosted "Independency: The American Flag at 250 Years," on view from May 16 through July 18, tied to the country's semiquincentennial. Neither event depended on the fate of a courtyard two doors down. That's the difference between an institution with a working calendar and a construction project stuck in review.
The lesson for anyone reading the block, whether you've lived here for thirty years like Erin Hatrick or you're new enough that Jobs Lane still surprises you, is to separate the two kinds of change happening at once. One is slow, bureaucratic, and eventually visible from the street once it clears the Planning Board, the Zoning Board of Appeals, or whatever body it needs next. The other is the version that's already happened, tenant by tenant, lease by lease, without anyone needing a rendering to approve it first. If you want to know what Jobs Lane is actually like right now, don't wait on the fence at Jobs Lane Court to come down. Walk past FENIKS on a Friday night, or stop into Topiaire, and you'll have your answer already.
If you're curious about what's happening with homes near Jobs Lane, or you'd like a local read on the village beyond the storefronts, Natalie Lewis has spent her career reading exactly this kind of detail across Southampton and the rest of the East End. Reach out for a conversation, no pressure, just a local perspective when you want one.
