Villages

As Thanksgiving approaches, many of us are digging out favorite holiday recipes or looking for something new to try. The Ladies Village Improvement Society has published cookbooks as a fund-raiser since the group’s founding in 1896, and the society’s 1908 “Cook Book” has some great holiday classics.

Rain on Thursday notwithstanding, an unusually dry fall season persists statewide, raising concerns about fire and impact on crops. Last month, the county had only .23 inches of rainfall, just off the record low for October precipitation, and even with rain on Thursday, more than 99 percent of the county was considered to be in "severe drought."

An 1899 experiment in road-making, a 1924 claim relating to death of an officer shot while pursuing an alleged bootlegger’s car, and, in 1949, Grace Phelan, renowned speed typist and former holder of the World’s Amateur Typing Championship, was to demonstrate her extraordinary typing.

The East Hampton Historical Society broke ground on a climate-controlled collections-storage center at the Mulford Farm last Thursday. It will unite the historical society’s 20,000 archival items — now stored at five separate sites — under one roof.

In 1970 a trawler’s crew members were surprised to find a full bottle of Indian Hill bourbon whiskey in a trawl eight miles off the coast of Montauk, one of them declaring the “Prohibition stuff” to be “strong as hell.”

A pecan tree that might have been planted well before the American Revolution and is located right in the circle of the Ladies Village Improvement Society, has been recognized by the State Department of Environmental Conservation as a state champion, the tallest of its kind in New York.

The day a junk dealer from Islip Terrace stole a broken-down tractor. Intrigued? And there’s much more ripped from the Star’s fertile pages.

Over the past five-plus years, Peconic Bay scallops have suffered mass die-offs blamed on an infectious parasite, but researchers at the Cornell Cooperate Extension have found a source of scientifically informed hope: genetic diversity.

Friends and family members arrived from near and far — by long trips on planes, trains, and buses — to attend the Sept. 14 wedding of Ethan Bregman and Olha Beskhmelnytsina in Lviv, Ukraine.

"Our lifelong friend Tommy Hupalowsky can use your help right now," Robin Goetz wrote on a GoFundMe fund-raising page last month. Two hurricanes and the loss of his wife have left Mr. Hupalowsky, a former longtime employee of Ben Krupinski Builders, facing difficulty in Englewood, Fla.

In this Star photo by Eileen Bock we see a helicopter grounded below the Montauk Manor on the Montauk Playhouse lawn, as someone from ABC News hoped to catch Perry Duryea Jr. at the polls in his native hamlet.

After 34 years in business — all of them on East Hampton's Park Place — the Party Shoppe will close its doors at the end of February when its owner, Theo Landi, retires.

A Prohibition-era rumrunning arrest, the death of an important pet fish, election results from another era, and more in this week's look back at the East Hampton Star archive.

Michael Clark, the executive director of LTV Studios, was honored with a Recognition Award at a Wainscott Citizens Advisory Committee meeting on Saturday after being invited as a guest speaker.

On Tuesday evening in Sag Harbor, people were busy casting ballots at the firehouse on Brick Kiln Road. The fire trucks themselves were seen and heard on Main Street during a victory parade for the Pierson-Bridgehampton field hockey team, which had just won the class C county championship game. And a small group of worshipers gathered at Christ Church to pray and meditate together, navigating their Election Day anxieties in the comfort of interfaith spiritual discourse and uplifting music.

First came news that Bridgehampton's Kmart, the former retail giant's last full-sized location in the continental United States, was closing. On Monday, the now-empty big-box store's future came into clearer focus: Yes, Target is coming to Bridgehampton.

On Thursday night, a group of fiber artists organized by Erica Huberty, Louise Eastman, and Laurie Lambrecht put up 35 handmade, nonpartisan signs across Sag Harbor Village, all containing a single-word message: "Vote." Village workers promptly took them all down on Friday morning, relegating them to garbage before the artists dug through the trash to save them.

East Hampton Village closed off Newtown Lane starting at 5 p.m. on Saturday — three hours before the first pitch of Game 2 — so the community could come together, with Montauk Brewing Company beverages in hand, and watch the Yankees in the World Series. 

“What is a new land ethic?” Stephan Van Dam, the president of ChangeHampton, asked rhetorically. The idea, he said, is “to disrupt our relationship with the natural world and overcome and change our attitude towards nature — the idea that we need to dominate nature. We need to disrupt that.” 

B. Vintage, run by Linda Buckley and Cristina Buckley, a Springs mother-daughter team, is set to open tomorrow at 79 Main Street in East Hampton. It is the first business in the Anchor Society’s Winter Shops program, an off-season initiative that aims to fill otherwise empty storefronts.

“We are here to talk to the air and hope something talks back,” said James Saccone of Smithtown, the tech manager of the Long Island Paranormal Investigators, while walking through the blacked-out halls of the Nathaniel Rogers House as a group of ghost hunters attempted to bridge the gap between the physical world and what lies beyond. 

This haunting photograph shows the gravestone of Mercy Edwards Van Scoy (1732-1782) in the Van Scoy-Edwards Cemetery in Northwest Woods. Self-guided tours are available from the East Hampton Trails Preservation Society.

Instead of tossing those old jack-o'-lanterns in the garbage, the South Fork chapter of ReWild Long Island is asking people to compost their old Halloween pumpkins and gourds, and has partnered with three South Fork farms and gardens to make that easy.

Pity Tom Banks, his head stove in by a horse hoof. That was 1899. Fifty years later, two pilots were forced to make daring emergency landings, one on Long Beach and another at the Shinnecock Canal. Do read on.

Shoppers who came to Bridgehampton from near and far on Sunday to mark the closing of the retail giant’s last full-size store celebrated and mourned, recalling affordable clothing, first jobs, and a different era.

The namesake for this recipe was likely Mary Hedges Carll (1831-1900), the aunt of the East Hampton Library’s first librarian, Ettie Hedges Pennypacker.

This week, as Kmart shutters in Bridgehampton, you can read about its grand opening 25 years ago. And much more of interest and semi-interest from our past pages.

Residents of La Forest Lane, citing traffic and a serious summertime accident involving two e-bikes, urged the East Hampton Village Board last winter to consider turning their two-way road into a one-way street. The board then commissioned a traffic study, the results of which were presented on Friday.

Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. will moderate a ChangeHampton discussion Sunday on “between property owners and landscape designers, contractors and entrepreneurs” who are using “restorative landscaping, rewilding, and pursuing nature-based solutions to counteract the climate and biodiversity crises.” 

Margot Pena and Douglas Steigerwald’s recent wedding is proof that true love comes when you least expect it. Married last month at Clearwater Beach in Springs overlooking Gardiner’s Bay, the soulmates found each other late in life.