Stefan Soloviev is the largest industrial landowner on the North Fork, a native New Yorker turned Floridian, and the type of guy who sometimes momentarily loses track of how many sets of twins he has sired (it’s four). For our very entertaining Hamptons Issue, Reeves Wiedeman sat down with Soloviev over a bottle of wine that Soloviev initially referred to as “Pinot Blank” to discuss the controversy that’s arisen around some of his holdings. This profile has one very fun sentence that I’d like to highlight here: "Soloviev was born in Manhattan, where he lived against his will for the first 18 years of his life.” There are many more fun sentences, of course — Reeves doesn’t disappoint — but that was the most fun one, to me. I talked to Reeves about the whole shebang.
Did you have fun hanging out with Soloviev? He seems … not the most pleasant.
I did enjoy the hang. It was a beautiful early June day on the North Fork, 75 degrees and sunny with a soft breeze, and we were sitting out in the back of a vineyard and having a bottle of wine. That's just a nice place to be. But what I appreciated about him is that he was very direct and very blunt.
Yeah, it’s remarkable that he publicly admitted to hating New York sports teams at this exact moment in history. But I guess when your dad is a billionaire and you’ve also amassed a ton of money and land, you don’t really have to care what people think?
I don't think he concerns himself hugely with broader concerns beyond what he wants to be doing for his business and his family. He obviously has a lot of kids and seems to spend a lot of time with them and really does treat them like siblings, especially the older ones. They were sitting there showing me these videos of them playing indoor hockey together. And he seemed to be having a pretty good time. He’s living a kind of life that seems a little bit crazy, but he genuinely seems pretty happy with it.
I guess that helps temper my gut reaction to hearing “22 children” where I'm like, that's gross.
He didn't really have a good answer exactly for why he wanted to have so many kids. He sort of admits that it's not possible for him to be close to all of them, especially some of the younger ones who live out west.
I was intrigued by your conversation with Robert Lipsyte, the journalist who lives on Shelter Island and who seems like a really interesting and fun local character. Is he the novelist Sam Lipsyte’s dad?
I’m just now Googling it and, yes, it appears that he is Sam Lipsyte’s dad! He used to be at the Times among other places, and he writes this local column about whatever complaints they have about what's going on. He’s also very blunt about his feelings.
The closing of the island’s only pharmacy was a big deal. Obviously, the residents weren’t thrilled that the Solovievs bought the pharmacy and then closed it. But from Soloviev’s perspective, it’s just a business that’s losing money.
They were not the saviors that they kind of tried to present themselves as. Stefan's ex-wife was the one who was really interested in Shelter Island and these businesses, but Stefan is the businessman and he just clearly didn't have any real love for Shelter Island at all. To run these kinds of businesses, you either have to have a total willingness to lose a bunch of money for the good of the community, or you really have to love it. And he wasn't willing to do either thing.
Reeves, are you a Hamptons guy?
I’ve only been there twice before. The first time was for a reporting trip about ten years ago. I'd had a really good day of reporting and I was treating myself to a beer and a sandwich on the beach by myself afterward, and then I was going to drive back into the city in my rental car. Except when I got to my car, I realized that I had put the car keys in the bag that I had just thrown in the trash can, and it was one of those trash cans you can't open. There were some locals who came by and we tried to see if we could figure it out, but we couldn't. I was very cheap and in my 20s, like, I can't afford a hotel. Where am I going to go stay out here in the Hamptons in the summer? And these nice locals were just like, “Why don't you just come crash with us?” So I slept on a couch that night, and in the morning I called the city and was like, “What do I do about my car keys?” And they were like, “You just need to go there the next morning before the trash truck gets there, and he'll open it.” So that’s what I did. It felt very dramatic at the time.
I’m glad you didn’t get murdered in the Hamptons.
