The snobs got their way.
A street sign commemorating a beloved nun killed in a hit-and-run in the Hamptons was removed after wealthy residents whined that it was just too depressing.
“Any time there is a little pushback from the rich, that’s it,” Southampton highway boss Alex Gregor groused to The Post on Monday.
“If we don’t have a little humanity, what are we doing?”
Gregor had installed the blue sign reading “Sister Jackie’s Way” above the normal green street marker in Water Mill last summer to memorialize Sister Jacqueline Walsh, 59, who was killed walking near the Sisters of Mercy convent on Rose Hill Road in July 2012.
But as The Post first reported earlier this month, a backlash quickly followed, with high-powered Manhattan corporate lawyer and Water Mill property owner John Carley leading the way.
The ensuing controversy proved too much for the publicity-shy Sisters of Mercy, with some wanting to keep the sign but others preferring to stay out of the spotlight.
Some of the nuns even said they were being made to feel unwelcome in the ritzy summer enclave by foes of the sign, Gregor said.
Ultimately, the head nun called Gregor’s office and asked him to take it down, which he did last Wednesday.
“It’s depressing,” said Gregor, who hung the sign on his office wall.
Despite the griping from the town’s wealthier, part-time residents, Gregor said he was flooded with supportive emails and calls about the sign fight.
The Town Board had asked him to remove it, but he defiantly refused. Then parks employees took it down, and he put it back up before the nuns persuaded him to take it down for good.
Carney had written a self-pitying letter to Southampton town officials in January complaining about the memorial.
“Every time someone visits, I am forced to recount this tragedy because they ask who Sister Jackie was,” Carley, a former senior counsel at Cendant Corp. who is now in private practice, said in the letter.
“While I have no doubt Sister Jackie was a wonderful person and deserves to be remembered by those who knew her, her tragic death while visiting us is not an event residents wish to recall, ” wrote Carney, whose wife is former WNBC-TV anchor Pia Lindstrom, Ingrid Bergman’s eldest daughter.
A call to the Sisters of Mercy convent in Water Mill on Monday morning was not immediately returned.
Walsh was taking a walk when she was run down by Carlos Armando Ixpec-Chitay, an illegal immigrant working as a gardener at the nearby home of Andrew Zaro, authorities said.
Ixpec-Chitay is believed to have fled to his native Guatemala with the help of his brother, who served four months in prison for aiding his escape.