Villages

From an 1897 issue of The Star: “Who says this is a slow town?”

Elizabeth Heppenheimer and Colin Worby of Medford, Mass., were married on Nov. 5 at Hampshire House in Boston, the bar that inspired the “Cheers” TV series. Justice Roseanne Pope officiated.

A dead humpback whale, originally spotted off Southampton Village beaches on Dec. 3, finally washed up near Indian Wells beach in Amagansett last Tuesday. The 31-foot female did not appear to have been the victim of a vessel strike or entanglement.

Recently scanned from a glass-plate negative in The East Hampton Star’s photo archive, this highly detailed image of the Montauk Point Lighthouse was probably taken near today’s upper parking lot.

Happenstances comical and contentious, ripped from the pages of Ye Olde Star.

Soccer: the beautiful game. In the last two weeks, the World Cup settled over the East End like a butter pat on an English muffin, filling every nook and cranny. Stressed-out referees, solely responsible for maintaining order amid complete emotion and chaos, tatted-up players (not Morocco!), and grass (yes, grass, not turf!) have become a fixture on screens from Southampton to Montauk.

It has been quite a few years since East Hampton had a robust lineup of adult programs, such as bookkeeping and computer classes, defensive driving, a notary-certification course, and even a class on building one’s own fishing rod. Now, the East Hampton School Board has given the district superintendent the green light to explore bringing back adult education programs — with one caveat.

Volunteer pilots, including East Hampton’s own Dr. George Dempsey, recently came to the rescue of nine puppies and their mother who had been found as strays in a rural town in New Mexico — leading to the puppies’ successful adoption by families here in the weeks since their arrival.

Is that Poseidon’s triton reaching from the littoral shallows, or are you just trying to build a 132-megawatt wind farm? Troy Patton of Orsted, which is building the South Fork Wind farm 35 miles off Montauk, was on the scene last week to give an update on the project.

“There is Christmas spirit,” said Rick White, president of the East Hampton Kiwanis Club, after he received 40 trees deemed too small by East Hampton Village to offer as part of the club's Christmas tree sale, which helps fund scholarships for local high school seniors, a holiday toy drive, and a donation to Katy’s Courage, among other causes.

A year ago, Natalie Massa couldn't have guessed that she'd be the chairwoman of a nonprofit organization, iloveukraine.org, donating money to orphanages in Kyiv. But the world changed when Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, and for many who grew up there, and whose families remain, watching events unfold without helping was impossible.

In this photo, Christopher Cuffee (1862-1939), a tribal council member of the Eastville Montauks, takes a break under his delivery wagon’s canopy on a summer day.

You don’t need to go deep into the woods to find a red-bellied woodpecker, but if you're looking for a distinctive red belly, you won't find it. Instead, its head is red, which explains why people often misidentify it as the red-headed woodpecker, which hardly shows up on Long Island.

Praise the mozzarella sticks and pass the pool cue! The Sail Inn in Montauk’s dock area has been sold to the mother-son team of Colleen Croft and Luca Guaitolini, who also own the upscale Upper East Side restaurant Elio’s, but the new owners say they are not planning to go luxe on the longtime locals’ joint on West Lake Drive when it reopens in the spring.

From a 1922 plea to stop dumping in the woods to a hunting-hiking tension back in 1972, read all about it.

The Hampton Ballet Theatre School has put on a performance of the classic holiday ballet “The Nutcracker” nearly every year since 2009 — the one exception a byproduct of Covid in 2020 — but this year’s production is the first time in school history that the annual production will feature a pair of real-life siblings in the roles of Clara and her brother Fritz.

Demonstrating a supply issue that dates back to 2008, Canadian grower’s first shipment to Fowler’s Garden Center had no larger trees, so it offered East Hampton Village smaller ones at a discount. Now it will provide larger trees of a more expensive variety for the same price. “We don’t do this to make money,” said Rick Fowler. “This is our way to give back to the community.”

East Hampton Village has big plans for the holiday season, including a tree-lighting at the Hook Mill sponsored by Prada and Santa arriving by helicopter in Herrick Park, but those tiny trees that went up last week? Not planned.

The abnormally low water table coupled with the spread of invasive species are combining to threaten the long-term health of the East End’s coastal plain ponds.

It’s hard to decouple the turkey from Thanksgiving, but long before we paired turkeys with mashed potatoes and stuffing and turned them into a national symbol, they were going about their business, hanging out in gangs, flipping leaves, and browsing the ground for nuts.

For lovers of bay scallops, hope gave way to disappointment for a fourth consecutive year, with scattered finds in East Hampton Town and New York State waters since they were opened to the annual harvest.

This Bonac Beachcomber came out the day before Thanksgiving in 1949, but instead of holiday festivities or football coverage, the focus was on a class debate and a 15th birthday party.

One day in 1972, “very little happened at the East Hampton Town Board’s unusually short meeting.”

After three weeks of fund-raising, an online auction dubbed Feed the East End raised more than $10,000 for food pantries in East Hampton, Sag Harbor, and Montauk; sponsorships boosted the total to over $15,000.

Santa has a brand-new helper this year. Her name is Ashley Anne Boer, she drives a Jeep Wrangler, and she just may have a solution to a perennial dilemma that shoppers face.

On the South Fork, it seems the moment a leaf falls to the ground it becomes a nuisance to be blown, corralled, and carted to a landfill. But leaving at least some of those leaves be can be healthy for your lawn and your other plantings.

A month ago, the New York Blood Center announced its fifth blood emergency of 2022. “We need 30 to 32 thousand units per month, but we’re collecting between 28 and 31 thousand,” Andrea Cefarelli, the senior vice president of the blood center, said.

This scrapbook is the work of several years and the hands of Elizabeth Agnew (1863-1955). Elizabeth’s father was Dr. Cornelius Rea Agnew (1830-1888), the first owner of Agnew Cottage, one of the Montauk Association houses.

The Jill, a 183-foot-long lift boat with jack-up legs of more than 300 feet, arrived at its position off the beach in Wainscott on Tuesday, where it is to remain for approximately three months and be used in construction of the South Fork Wind farm.

East Hampton Town has given its blessing to a second spat-on-shell oyster reef restoration project in Lake Montauk, proposed by the Cornell Cooperative Extension’s Back to the Bays program.