Villages

It didn’t take long for the East Hampton Village lifeguard squad to get called into action this season, and their save of two boys caught in a rip current provided a good chance to educate the young swimmers about the dangers of such currents and how to deal with them.

Sparks will be flying in Springs on Saturday, when the Parsons Blacksmith Shop finally reopens after a two-year pandemic hiatus. The smithy, James DeMartis, ready for the day’s work in his knee-length leather apron, will be back at the centuries-old forge, hammering hot steel into hooks, nails, and horseshoes to delight the holiday weekend crowds.

East Hampton Village’s “2023 tentative budget includes the biggest tax cut of the last 20 years,” the village’s administrator, Marcos Baladron, announced at a village board meeting on Friday.

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.

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.

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.

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). 

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.

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.

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."

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.

This is a public cervix announcement: East Enders are not going to stand idly by as the United States Supreme Court appears poised to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark decision that for nearly 50 years has protected women's right to choose to have an abortion. That was the takeaway on Saturday on the steps of the Suffolk County Supreme Court in Riverhead, where hundreds of people from Montauk and Orient to Brookhaven and Patchogue rallied in support of Roe v. Wade, hoping to send the nation's highest court a resounding message.