The legs are 16 feet tall, are made of fiberglass and stand on the side of a home that used to be the Bethel Baptist Church. They were constructed by the artist Larry Rivers, who still manages to delight and offend from the grave.  Some people love them as the irreverent embodiment of the rare Hamptons village with a sense of humor and values that transcend dollar signs. Some people hate them as the embodiment of too-cool Manhattanites and art snobs who should have more respect for Sag Harbor’s fishing village past.  And after more than two years of pondering weighty issues of art, taste and land-use law, the village has ordered that they be taken down by Sunday in a classic East End kerfuffle revolving around art, zoning law and the still-charged reputation of the artist buried a few miles away.  “People love the legs,” said Janet Lehr, who along with the art dealer Ruth Vered owns the legs and the house they share at the corner of Madison and Henry Streets. “They’ve become a local landmark. People say, ‘If you want to get to 114, make a left at the legs.’ ”  As for the village she said: “I think it’s too much for them to cope with. It’s monumental art, something beyond their experience. Sag Harbor always considers itself the intellectual village. They’re letting their people down.”  But the village attorney, Fred W. Thiele Jr., who is also a state assemblyman, said the issue had nothing to do with aesthetics — it was about whether the legs were a structure under the village zoning laws and, if so, whether they were a “conforming use” or not. He ruled the answer to the first was yes, and the village’s Zoning Board of Appeals voted no on the second question last spring, leading finally to a letter from the village building inspector saying that the legs must come down.  “It’s a structure, and a structure is a structure is a structure,” Mr. Thiele said. “You could say you should make an exemption for a piece of art, but that puts the village in the position of having to determine what’s art. It would be totally untenable.”  Mr. Rivers, a musician, artist and provocateur who was one of the pioneers of Pop Art, was no stranger to controversies and spats, like the time Jackson Pollock tried to run over one of his sculptures in the Hamptons. Those issues have not been blunted by anything as inconvenient as his death, in 2002.  Some wonder if the reaction to the legs has been affected by an ugly dispute in 2010, when one of his daughters, Emma Tamburlini, sought to remove from his archives videos he took of her and her sister naked or topless as they went through adolescence.  The legs got their start when Mr. Rivers and other artists, like Alexander Calder, were commissioned to build pieces for Smith Haven Mall on Long Island, which opened in 1969.  Mr. Rivers’s contribution was a mixed media assemblage called “Forty Feet of Fashion,” a collection of lips, legs and consumer goods made from vinyl, plexiglass, metal, light bulbs and other materials.  It was disassembled after another developer took the mall over, but Mr. Rivers later installed the legs at his studio in Southampton, annoying neighbors and amusing friends who had to walk under them to get inside. (They were put in storage after his death.)  A second pair of legs was cast in 1994 and was sold to a collector and then to Ms. Vered, an East End publicity magnet, and Ms. Lehr, who in 2008 installed them on the side of their whitewashed home.  But the village had a problem with that. The building inspector said they needed a building permit, and Mr. Thiele issued an opinion that the sculpture should be considered an accessory structure and conform with the village code.  The issue eventually went to the Zoning Board of Appeals. The chairwoman, Gayle Pickering, said it took months for Ms. Vered and Ms. Lehr to make their case before the board. When they did, she said, their representative did not come close to making a credible argument for granting the variances needed for a structure whose size and location, a foot from the property line, were not in compliance with the code.  The board unanimously refused to grant the variances but opened the door for Ms. Vered and Ms. Lehr to apply again. Ms. Lehr said they planned to reapply before the end of the week, which could allow the legs to stay up pending a resolution.  “This is not a decision about art,” Ms. Pickering said. “It’s about setting a precedent for building structures in a very small village on very small lots — about preserving the fabric of the village.”  That has not stopped people from weighing in on Mr. Rivers, small town mores and big city sensibilities.  “You have the entire rest of the world for cute sculptures that look like advertisements for triple X road side attractions,” wrote one poster on the Web site of the local weekly newspaper, The Sag Harbor Express. “Please, leave them outside of Sag Harbor.”  Responded another: “LOVE the Legs! They are artistic expression and should be safeguarded from the dimwits that want to do away with any and all individuality in our society.”  Ms. Pickering said that she liked the legs and that she believed there was room for a compromise, perhaps one that included designation as a temporary structure with a defined period the legs could be shown.  David Joel, director of the Larry Rivers Foundation in Bridgehampton, said that Mr. Rivers’s artistic reach was so broad that it would be hard to judge the place of the legs in his work, but that the current fuss fit squarely into his career. “Larry intended to be controversial; everything he did was controversial,” Mr. Joel said. “So it’s fascinating after all these years he can still get people worked up.  “He used to say, ‘All bad boys eventually become good boys.’ Ten years after his passing, he’s not a good boy yet.”
Some love a sculpture of legs as the embodiment of a villageâs sense of humor, but officials in Sag Harbor have condemned it for not complying with code.