Villages

The effort to preserve and restore the Springs house and studios of the late Abstract Expressionist artists James Brooks and Charlotte Park achieved yet another milestone this week when the Preservation League of New York State named the structures to its 2022-23 Seven to Save list, a registry highlighting the state's most at-risk historical places.

For a luxury Montauk rental, it sounds too good to be true. Six bedrooms, 7,300 square feet, ocean view, heated saltwater pool with waterfall edge, and top-of-the-line kitchen appliances listed for $2,500 a night on Airbnb. The catch, says the homeowner: It's a scam offered by "hosts" who've used the legitimate real estate photos to dupe unsuspecting vacationers.

The latest East Hampton Library Item of the Week is the last will and testament of William Barns (1723-1814) of East Hampton, drafted on March 18, 1809. The Barns, or Barnes, family were among the earliest settlers of East Hampton, and this William was the son of another William Barns (1702-1726) and the former Martha Edwards (1706-1745). 

Despite a significant uptick in Covid-19 cases, including the designation of Suffolk and Nassau Counties as a region now at high risk of virus transmission by the federal Centers for Disease Control, the number of patients admitted at Stony Brook Southampton Hospital has remained in the single digits over the last few weeks — very much manageable, the hospital's chief medical officer has said. "We're going to have to learn how to live with it when community spread goes up like it is now."

Catbirds are neither rare nor shy. Work in your garden and you may soon have a catbird working alongside you. They're charming, excellent company, and release a seemingly infinite number of sounds when they open their black bills.

The renovated and reconfigured Montauk Library will host its official ribbon-cutting ceremony on Sunday at noon. The institution's new, state-of-the-art facilities, complete with sustainable elements, look more than ready to deal with the changing future. Yet it's the past, said Denise DiPaolo, the library's director, that has especially captivated the library's patrons, especially the older ones.

When the Sagaponack Village Board offered an amendment to a local law on April 13 that stated that construction of new pickleball courts would be subject to various setback regulations, based on a noise-attenuation study the board had carried out, the people of the village sounded off.

At the end of March, in an ambitious effort to eradicate ticks on North Haven, the village relaunched its campaign to install "four-poster" feeding stations for deer. The stations bait deer with corn. While they feed, a tickicide is applied directly to their necks.

The painter Gaines Ruger Donoho’s house gets an addition in 1897, a 1922 report looks at potato planting on the South Fork, and “the Hamptons as playground” is dissected in a 1947 Holiday magazine article.

With the United State Supreme Court poised to overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade decision, which has protected abortion rights for nearly 50 years, hundreds of East Enders took to the streets of downtown Riverhead on Saturday to make their opinions heard.

After the news broke that the United States Supreme Court, in a leaked draft of a decision, is poised to overturn the landmark case Roe v. Wade, several community organizations came together to organize a rally in support of abortion rights in Riverhead on Saturday.

In honor of “See Their Names,” coming to the library on Monday, this week’s item features an 1803 agreement between Jason Cuffee, of mixed heritage, and Abraham Osborn, an East Hampton property owner.

A pollinator garden is soon to be installed in Amagansett, on the ocean side of Bluff Road between Hand and Meeting House Lanes, just west of the East Hampton Town Marine Museum, the Amagansett Citizens Advisory Committee learned Monday as it got an update on a variety of things happening in the hamlet.

"Right Before I Go," conceived by Stan Zimmerman, directed by Valerie diLorenzo, and starring a host of well-known local actors, will be staged at LTV Studios in Wainscott on Saturday and May 21. The production, which aims to "break the silence and create discussion," is also a fund-raiser for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.

Alcohol and a horse-driven buckboard do not mix in 1897, and Springs hits a freaky boiling point in 1972.

Joseph DeCristofaro has been named the first honorary chief in the East Hampton Fire Department's 132-year history. 

"To me, one of the more beautiful things about the experience was feeling the Springs community come together," said Lindsay Grodzki of Fort Pond Boulevard, who had an unexpected home birth about a month ago.

It wasn’t just bread baking or pet ownership that Covid refugees turned to once they had alighted here during the pandemic. Many also embraced horseback riding, observed Natalie Mattson, who owns Brennan’s Bit and Bridle in the Bridgehampton Commons.

In the 20 years since Fighting Chance, the free cancer-counseling charity based in Sag Harbor, opened its doors, the death rate from cancer in the United States has dropped by about 30 percent. That is certainly cause to celebrate, and Fighting Chance is seizing it.

In addition to an already tight labor market, three major structural problems plague the East End. Lack of affordable housing, lack of public transportation and inadequate roads to handle growing traffic, and a lack of child care add to the already difficult task of hiring and retaining employees.

A ceremonial groundbreaking and donor appreciation event for Stony Brook University Hospital’s new emergency center on Saturday celebrated the raising of $38 million to date toward the center’s construction, which is expected to be complete in 2023.

Construction is under way at 106 Newtown Lane in East Hampton Village, where a new retail store, office space, and two-bedroom apartment are planned on the site of the former East Hampton Cleaners, which closed at the end of 2018.

Over the next two weeks, spring bird migration will peak. Hundreds of millions of birds will fly up the country, largely south to north, in sync with blooming trees, flowers, and insect hatches. Many are attempting to reach the green attic of North America, the boreal forest of Canada, where they will breed and raise their young before reversing course in the autumn.

This postcard from the Harvey Ginsberg Postcard Collection shows the Ruger Donoho House at 48 Egypt Lane in East Hampton, later sold, one Impressionist painter to another, to Childe Hassam.

It happened here, from the hand-organ man of 1897 to the BB gun incident of 1947.

What are pollinator gardens and why are so many people talking about them right now? The idea, according to the organizers of the Pollinator Pathway movement, is to manage backyards without pesticides and with native plantings so they can connect with parks and preserves, creating a sort of bird and insect “refuge corridor,” an "archipelago" of habitats.

This photograph shows a 1937 house, once at 81 Dunemere Lane, that “shook” East Hampton as it was “not traditional.”

Rabbi Joshua Franklin of the Jewish Center of the Hamptons just returned from six days on the Polish-Ukrainian border with a delegation of American and Israeli rabbis where in addition to bringing supplies and providing hands-on aid, his main goals were to listen to the stories of refugees, offer them support, let them know that the world hasn’t abandoned them, and to ultimately bring the stories back home to the people of East Hampton.

From the bicycle craze of 1897 to the 1997 failure to “forestall the transportation ills that plague the rest of the Island,” it happened here.

The modern multiplicity of teenage troubles: anxiety, depression, learning disabilities, overstuffed schedules, social media, self-medication, drugs, alcohol, all of that. So said a father, resolved and knowing, about his son who had struggled with many of the above, but who came through on the other side, ready to alter the bumpy course of his short life. Then, sober for about a year, living independently, about to return to college, a diabolical twist of fate: He experienced a major epileptic seizure and cardiac arrest in his sleep.