When Dore Hammond, a film producer, and her husband, James Normile, a lawyer, began spending summers at Long Island’s East End, they gravitated to the exclusive hamlet of Bridgehampton, where they would be close to friends. “We thought, ‘This is where all the action is,'” Ms. Hammond said.

After three summers in Bridgehampton, the couple got fed up with the traffic and began renting a rambling Victorian 20 miles west, across the Shinnecock Canal, in Quiogue, a hamlet between Westhampton and Quogue.

“We were happy to cut the drive in half — the traffic is killer,” she said, adding that they are looking to buy a summer home in the area.

A decade ago, Westhampton was a disparaged area of the South Fork, with a reputation for seedy nightlife and share-houses. Times have changed, brokers said. While Westhampton and the surrounding areas west of the canal still lack the cachet of their neighbors to the east, the area’s proximity to Manhattan, the availability of waterfront property at lower prices, and revitalized downtown Westhampton Beach are drawing a growing number of well-heeled buyers.

According to Brown Harris Stevens, the median sales price west of the canal was $630,000 in the first quarter, compared to $965,000 for the South Fork overall; at the same time, the number of homes that sold for more than $4 million in the Westhampton area rose to four from the prior-year quarter’s three, even amid a slowing economy. In the South Fork overall, the number of homes selling for more than $4 million dropped to 39from 47 in the prior-year quarter.

Among the recent arrivals in the area is the actor Michael J. Fox, who this winter paid $6.3 million for a newly built 7,000-square-foot home in Quogue, and CNN’s Anderson Cooper, who bought in the area despite spending childhood summers in Southampton. Other well-known names who spend summers west of the canal include the actress Susan Lucci, singer Kathleen Battle, and journalist Tina Brown.

“Because of the traffic, we’ve got more people looking in Westhampton who used to go to Sagaponack or Bridgehampton,” a broker at the Corcoran Group’s Westhampton Beach office, Robert Murray, said. “That’s a major difference. We’ve always wished this would happen, but this is the first year I’ve heard it verbalized by buyers.”

On Dune Road, the single-lane road that runs parallel to the ocean through Westhampton and Quogue, fishing cottages and aging contemporary mansions are being torn down and replaced with the stately, weathered-shingle homes more commonly found east of Southampton, Mr. Murray said.

“In the last four years, Dune Road has changed tremendously,” he said, attributing the change in part to the arrival of wealthy newcomers in once-sleepy Quogue. “The old family money is not turning over,” he said. “They’ve moved on, and in their place have come people from New York and Europe.”

The executive director at Brown Harris Stevens for Eastern Long Island, Charles Manger, blamed the increasing congestion on a construction boom in the Hamptons in the past five years, making homes west of the canal more appealing. “You are seeing more interest in the area because of the proximity to New York City,” he said.

Another draw is the number of waterfront homes available, often at bargain prices, according to Corcoran’s senior vice president for the East End, Rick Hoffman. “You can find deals in Westhampton,” he said. “There’s a much larger supply of waterfront. Of the people who want waterfront who begin looking further east, more and more are ending up in Westhampton.”

The revitalization of downtown Westhampton Beach, with bustling stores and restaurants and a performing arts center, also has helped raise the area’s profile, residents said.

A group of community organizers founded the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center in 1997 as a way to rehabilitate the town’s reputation, which they felt was damaged by nightclubs and the prevalence of share-houses in town, the president of the board of the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center, Leonard Conway, said.

“We very much felt that the performing arts center could serve as a catalyst to enhance the economy and the quality of life,” Mr. Conway, a partner in a New York investment firm who purchased a house in Westhampton Beach in 1989, said.

A decade later, community members credit the theater with luring more retail shops to the area and bringing families in place of share-houses.

“They still have them, but not as much as they used to,” a longtime Westhampton homeowner, Lee Bailin, said of share-houses. “There are many more families here now.”

For Upper East Side residents Melissa and Larry Stoller, the performing arts center was a major factor in their 2002 purchase of a summer home in Westhampton. “We wanted to pick a community that not only was a beautiful beach community but also had vibrant cultural arts,” Ms. Stoller, whose two older daughters recently performed in the center’s production of “Snow White,” said.

As a result of buyers such as the Stollers, home prices in Westhampton are beginning to catch up to those in towns farther east. “There’s definitely a differential that exists, but I think it’s narrowed,” Mr. Conway said. In fact, Mr. Conway is testing the waters and has put his 10-acre waterfront estate on Seafield Lane on the market for $39 million, a figure that would set a new record for Westhampton Beach.

“That’s a Southampton price,” Mr. Murray said.