Walks on the beach yield many things; beach glass, a seal sunning itself, and, unfortunately, trash, but beachgoers Friday were surprised to find a few hundred feet of hydraulic dredge pipe stretched out on the surf at Georgica Friday.

Paul Vogel, who wrote to The Star Friday morning, said he was walking by the jetty to the west when he came upon a single section of pipe, approximately 400 feet long and 18 inches in diameter. There were no seams and it was capped off at the west end, he said. 

"My first thought was that it was part of a beach erosion project, but it wasn't anchored in place and the next high tide will most likely shift it," he said. "Any ideas on how it got there? I can't imagine how something that massive could be moved into place, or for that matter how it will be moved out."

The situation left police and government officials asking the same questions for several hours Friday.

East Hampton Village police got calls about it early in the day, and they reached out to the Village Department of Public Works, Chief Michael Tracey said.

"We we are eliminating, one by one, potential owners, but it is clear it came up in the surf," Chief Tracey said. He said they believe it is made of "heavy-duty polyethylene," so while it is not metal, it is still heavy and difficult to move. 

So where did it come from? Rebecca Molinaro Hansen, the village administrator, said the Department of Public Works told her it came off a dredge boat. "We believe it is from a dredge, and there is dredging currently going on at Moriches Inlet." She said the East Hampton Town Marine Patrol "is contacting them to come out," as "we do not have the equipment to remove it."

Ed Michels, the East Hampton Town harbormaster, said he is working with Coast Guard Station Shinnecock to find the owner of the dredge there to see if they lost any pipe. "I'm sure it's worth a lot of money, it's 400 feet long!"

He confirmed that whoever it belongs to is responsible for removing it. It could be removed with a tug boat if they brought in a bulldozer to push it back in the water. If the town ends up having to remove it, it will need to be cut into smaller sections on the beach, he said. 

"It's winter, I think I have some leeway," he said in regard to how quickly it has to be removed. "If it was July, that would be another story." 

Organizacion Latino-Americano (OLA) of Eastern Long Island has opened an office in East Hampton Village, giving the 17-year-old nonprofit a dedicated space to continue its community advocacy work.

OLA's general counsel, Andrew Strong, will now work primarily out of that office, which is at the corner of Newtown Lane and Main Street. The organization will also be able to train volunteers there, hold conferences with outside lawyers, and meet with community members seeking guidance and referrals.

"I think the location, being that accessible, is important for us," Minerva Perez, OLA's executive director, said Tuesday. "Being on Main Street in East Hampton Village is kind of a big deal."

Long a voice for the East End's Latino community, OLA has shifted from being an all-volunteer organization to a professionally staffed one. Ms. Perez became executive director three years ago. Mr. Strong was hired last spring, and Sandra Dunn, an early leader of OLA, signed on as part-time associate director this fall. The nonprofit also has a part-time outreach and transportation advocate, Alma Tovar.

The office space will help the organization "to really focus on things in a way that has a vision connected to it," said Ms. Perez. While OLA aims to be a resource for Latino community members in times of crisis, she is also looking forward to "focusing past the crisis" to the "language and cultural exchange" that could "be a focal point on the East End in a really positive way. . . . There's a whole other cultural piece of this that I'm so excited to get to."

In the near future, the nonprofit will work to "build a stronger network of legal counsel, especially for some of our most vulnerable community members," Ms. Perez said, pointing to immigration, wage-theft, and housing issues as some of the most pressing.

Part of what Mr. Strong does is look at the trends and "see where the deepest and the worst of those trends are" so that OLA can work with partner organizations or "the powers that be" to make up the difference, Ms. Perez said.

Consultations with OLA representatives are by appointment at 631-899-3441.

There was talk of how great and prescient the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was and concern about the ways America sometimes fails his vision a half-century after his death.

But an East Hampton High School senior, Naomi Blowe, a National Honor Society member and student leader who is also planning to visit Nepal later this year as part of a group that will build a school, uttered one of the many grace notes struck during Monday's celebration of Dr. King's birthday at Calvary Baptist Church in East Hampton by quoting "the great man" himself about what to do in difficult times.

" 'Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only love can do that,' " Ms. Blowe read. " 'Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that. Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend.' "

Looking up from her notes, Ms. Blowe added, "I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear."

Dr. King would have been 90 this year. Last April marked the 50th anniversary of his assassination in Memphis.

Calvary Baptist Church honors the slain civil rights icon each year with a service on his national holiday, the only holiday designated for someone who was not a United States president.

While those who spoke at Monday's service made scant mention of current President Donald Trump by name, there were frequent allusions to his controversial policies on immigration and race relations.

East Hampton Mayor Paul F. Rickenbach Jr. began his remarks with an apology to "the youngsters that are present" and expressed hope that greater unity will ultimately prevail in this country, saying, "We as the adult community are not doing too good a job with our national borders right now and all the turmoil that is taking place. It's stymied our federal government. And there are folks -- men and women and children -- that are just begging to get into Estados Unidos, the United States of America, because of the American dream."

The featured speaker, Arthurine Dunn, a church member and longtime teacher in the East Hampton School District who has three master's degrees and is working on her Ph.D. in education at St. John's University, stressed the power of knowledge, the need for perseverance, and the importance of making sure young adults know they can be all they want to be. Ms. Dunn added that the "blueprint" for how all of us can carry ourselves today can still be found in Dr. King's Six Principles of Nonviolence, which she relayed one by one.

"My hope is that these words will inspire and propel us to go out and make a difference," Ms. Dunn said. "Dr. King always said, 'The time is always right to do what's right.' . . . If you get knocked back down, get back up. Get back up."

The Most Rev. Donald Haverill, pastor at the Southampton Full Gospel Church, stressed taking individual responsibility for the state of America today.

"It's not the politicians, it's not the Democrats, it's not the Republicans, it's not Trump, all right? It's us. We've got to get back in the game," Mr. Haverill urged.

"Somebody once said, 'Politics is not a spectator sport.' And that's what we've done. I don't care what your color is, I don't care what language you speak, we've sat on the sidelines and watched things drift. . . . So this year, it's still new, let's make sure all of us don't look to point a finger or blame somebody else. Let's ask ourselves, 'What are we doing? What am I doing to help somebody else, or make this great country better?' "

"It seems at times like there's so much work to be done," County Legislator Bridget Fleming told the crowd, "but Dr. King himself said, 'It needs to be the darkest in order for us to see the stars.' So my prayer is that together we're going to recognize that's where we are. And that we're going to keep moving forward."

Henry Haney, a church deacon, seconded that notion just before the Calvary Baptist choir ended the service with the hymn "We Shall Overcome."

"Whatever boat you came over in, we're all in the same boat now, so let's all work together," Mr. Haney said.

The groundwork is nearly finished on the North Main Street parcel where the historical Dominy shops will return later this year.

“We’ve removed the trees, but we have a little more grading to do to flatten out the land,” said Scott Fithian, the village’s superintendent of public works, whose department has been preparing the site, a 5,400-square-foot parcel adjacent to the municipal parking lot, for the homecoming.

The Dominy family, including Nathaniel Dominy IV, his son, Nathaniel Dominy V, and his grandson, Felix Dominy, were renowned for their woodworking and clock and watchmaking skills. The 1791 woodworking shop and 1798 clock shop, which have been sitting at the Mulford Farm, are the only Dominy buildings still in existence. The Dominy house and other structures were torn down in 1946, and replicas have been constructed at the Winterthur Museum in Delaware.

It was about a year ago, said Mr. Fithian, that he was walking around the North Main Street site when he stumbled upon a piece of Dominy history. “I kicked a stone by accident, and it turned out to be one of the millstones that made up the foundations of the clock shop and house,” he said. “It was pretty exciting.”

That millstone, or others that Mr. Fithian has subsequently dug up, will once again be used to undergird the clock shop. “It’s going to have a foundation of full stone, just as it did,” said Robert Hefner, the village’s director of historic services, who is supervising the project, which includes the restoration of the shops as well as the reconstruction of the Dominy’s timber-frame house, which will serve as the main exhibition space to which the shops will be connected.

 Mr. Hefner said he is being obsessive about having the buildings look as they did in their time. Fortunately, he has detailed specifications about every inch of the structures thanks to the work of two architects employed by the Historical American Buildings Survey, a part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration. In the 1940s, said Mr. Hefner, the architects arrived in East Hampton to document the Dominy compound for posterity.

“They filled four field books with measurements,” he said. Those notes are stored in the National Archives. 

In November, the East Hampton Village board accepted a bid from John Hummel and Associates to do the construction. The process of building the new timber-frame house, which will be visually consistent with the existing 18th-century structures, will begin with the New Jersey Barn Company, a firm with expertise in restoration that will use the measurements collected in the 1940s to manufacture a replica. “From the outside, the house will look authentic,” said Mr. Hefner. The frame will be built in New Jersey and later delivered by truck to East Hampton. 

The front door to the Dominy family’s Georgian-style house, Mr. Hefner said, was likely the widest for an East Hampton residence in its day. In June, the Ladies Village Improvement Society donated $9,000 to reconstruct it. When it’s in place this time, it will open into an exhibition space, not a residence, but the interior will still contain signs of the craftsmen’s original home. “Where you see the house’s frame on the inside, that will all be finished with hand tools as the Dominys would have done it,” said Mr. Hefner. “They would have started off with a log and axed it off to get to a flat surface. The New Jersey Barn Company won’t be starting with a log, but they’re ordering timbers an inch larger than needed so they can saw it down. They’ll finish it with a broad ax, so it will have that appearance.”

One aspect of the reconstruction that will not hew to history will lie within the walls. “Five inches of insulation is going to add some bulk, but that’s the only change,” said Mr. Hefner. “We did contemplate doing it with no insulation, but we decided that for the long term, and to be able to borrow Dominy furniture from Winterthur, and people who want to donate, we would need a museum-quality environment. That was the compromise.”

Ultimately, visitors will walk into a space filled with Dominy memorabilia including the East Hampton Historical Society’s collection of tools from the clock shop, about 50 pieces of Dominy furniture including a tall-case clock (the second that Felix Dominy had made), the original columns from the porch of Clinton Academy, which were made in the woodshop, and Nathaniel Dominy’s memorandum book, which was purchased by Mayor Paul F. Rickenbach Jr. and his wife, Jean, who recently donated it to the village.

The attached structures, which are tiny — the clock shop is 10.2 feet by 14.3 feet, and the carpenter shop is 15 feet by 22.4 feet — will provide a look at the exact environment in which the Dominys worked.

Those existing buildings are in varying degrees of disrepair. “The clock shop frame is in bad shape,” said Mr. Hefner. “It didn’t have shingles and sheathing, so a lot more water got into it than the carpenter shop.” A crew from John Hummel and Associates will have to begin working on the clock shop at Mulford Farm, he said, before it can be transported to North Main Street. The carpenter shop, however, will be restored after it arrives on site. The plan is to have a foundation for the buildings done by spring, have the timber frame of the new house finished and on site soon after, and the Dominy shops joined to it this summer. The remaining work will be done later in the year or in early 2020.

“We’re very lucky because there aren’t many places you could do a project like this,” said Mr. Hefner, who credited the village for making such historical preservation a priority. “The fact that it will be authentic makes all the difference.”

Seeking to raze their house in a coastal erosion hazard area and construct a new, larger one, the owners of the oceanfront property at 33 Lily Pond Lane requested permission and 54 variances from the East Hampton Village Zoning Board of Appeals on Friday. 

The owners, Helene and Norman Stark, were represented at the meeting by Leonard Ackerman, a lawyer, who acknowledged how rare an application like the Starks’ is. “In my 45-plus years appearing before the board, there was only one other case in which a complete house was built in a coastal erosion zone,” Mr. Ackerman said. (He was referring to a house on West End Road belonging to Peter Morton, the co-founder of the Hard Rock Cafe restaurant chain, that was destroyed by fire in 2015.) 

The Starks’ existing house, at 33 Lily Pond Lane, is approximately 4,600 square feet; the property also has a pool and a patio that overlooks the beach. The Starks want to replace it with a 7,567-square-foot house with attached decking. Although the house would be sited farther landward, much of the building plan — including the installation of a swimming pool and hot tub, a patio, retaining walls, staircases, and dry wells — would necessitate variances from the section of the code that is meant to preserve ocean dunes. The code requires a 150-foot setback from the southerly edge of beach grass, and a 100-foot setback from the 15-foot contour line of the dune. 

If the plan is approved, the property coverage would amount to more than 19,000 square feet. The legally pre-existing coverage (including an earlier variance) is about 17,000 square feet.

The zoning code allows for a building permit to be issued in the coastal erosion hazard area if construction is deemed “reasonable and necessary,” and “not likely to cause a measurable increase in erosion.” 

To bolster the case that construction would not have an adverse effect on the dunes, Mr. Ackerman enlisted the help of advisers, including Richard Warren of InterScience Research Associates, a consultant on environmental issues, land use, and development. 

Mr. Warren stood at the lectern next to a poster that displayed the code’s criteria for being granted relief from the coastal erosion regulations. The code states that the restrictions can be modified if “practical difficulty” and “unnecessary hardship” can be shown, but also requires the applicant to use all responsible measures to mitigate adverse impacts on the natural surroundings.

  Providing details, Mr. Warren said that after razing the existing house, a new one would be built farther away from the primary dune, in compliance with the setbacks, and on a part of the property with a lower elevation. As a result, the residence would no longer have an ocean view. “There’s probably not a home along Lily Pond Lane where someone would do that,” he said.

He showed a series of aerial photographs of the property and adjoining beach taken over a 64-year span, from 1954 to 2018. These, he said, demonstrated that the beach had not eroded. 

A construction protocol would be followed, he said, that would confine heavy machinery to the building’s landward driveway, and, therefore, not endanger the dune. He also cited a 2005 determination by the Z.B.A., which, he said, had granted the Starks permission to expand the existing house. At that time, the Z.B.A. had found that the expansion would have no adverse impact. 

When Mr. Ackerman reiterated the assertion later, Lys Marigold, the board’s newly appointed chairwoman, pointed out that a lot has changed since 2005. “The code, the understanding of the environment, protection of the dune,” she said. 

Ms. Marigold then drew attention to the large number of variances being requested by the applicant. 

“We’re trying to adhere to the village code and the coastal erosion hazard line,” she said. “You’re asking for almost double the size of the house [and] you’re requesting a pool and hot tub that’s two times the existing pool [and] you’re asking for increased coverage.” 

The proposed plan would make the house and pool compliant with the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s standards for structures in a floodplain, which met with Ms. Marigold’s approval, but otherwise, she said, she struggled to see the hardship the applicant would suffer by not being allowed to construct a new house. “You have a house now that has ocean views, and you have a pool,” she said. 

   Providing an example of the board’s previous enforcement of the hazard zone code, she noted that a neighbor two houses to the west on Lily Pond Lane had been denied a variance to rebuild a pool.

Mr. Ackerman said that his clients were looking to be as compliant as possible, and asked for feedback from the board on how best to proceed. Ms. Marigold and Raymond Harden, the new vice chairman, suggested a first step might be to design a smaller house. The hearing was adjourned until the board’s next meeting on Feb. 8.

A pilot program providing low-income families with organic frozen produce through the winter months has made its first delivery to the Springs Food Pantry. 

Throughout last year’s peak harvest season, the new program, called Farm to Community, packaged and froze vegetables and fruit, allowing donations to be set aside for the colder months, when fresh produce is less readily available. 

The effort is supported by the Balm Foundation and being run by the Amagansett Food Institute, Share the Harvest Farm, Stony Brook Medicine, and Cornell Cooperative Extension of Suffolk County. 

  Share the Harvest Farm, a nonprofit based on Long Lane in East Hampton that is dedicated to fighting food insecurity, provided more than 3,000 pounds of surplus produce. The bounty of vegetables from Share the Harvest Farm was quickly vacuum sealed and frozen by the Amagansett Food Institute at its South Fork Kitchens facility on Stony Brook University’s Southampton campus. 

The first delivery to the Springs Food Pantry included frozen kale, carrots, peppers, peaches, nectarines, and pears. Last June, Farm to Table coordinated the donation of grass-fed beef, from cattle owned by Acabonac Farms that graze on Shelter Island, to a number of East End pantries.

  The demand on East End food pantries dramatically rises in winter, as heating bills spike and seasonal jobs are lost. The Farm to Community pilot program is meant to supplement the canned and dry goods usually seen on pantry shelves during the long weeks when many residents find themselves hard pressed to put nutritious meals on the table.

Cornell Cooperative Extension’s mission is to provide families with information on nutrition, agriculture, the environment, and wellness; representatives were on hand to witness the first delivery to Springs. Marta Blanco, a bilingual nutritionist and representative from C.C.E., offered visitors a chicken-and-vegetable soup that had been prepared using the donated produce. A recipe sheet with nutritional information and cost per serving was offered alongside the soup.

If all continues to go as planned, the Farm to Community program will benefit the entire town not just by offering families good food, but by eliminating agricultural waste and further integrating organic farming into the community. “Our agricultural soils are so rich,”said Kate Fullam, the executive director of the Amagansett Food Institute. “If we maximize the harvest season . . . we will have a better food economy and environment.” 

Organic farms like Share the Harvest, operating without chemical pesticides, are said to have a positive effect on biodiversity, as well as to be better for the water table: They don’t use synthetic fertilizers, which can have harmful runoff.   

Jess Tonn, a coordinator at Share the Harvest, responded yes when asked if the program had already helped reduce the farm’s food waste. The produce that was frozen and donated in 2018 would have been composted, otherwise, and never consumed.  

There are big plans for the year ahead. 

According to a webpage selling tickets to an “Eating Well All Winter” cooking workshop and fund-raiser to be held at the South Fork Kitchens on Saturday at 11:30 a.m., the program’s goals for 2019 are “to expand refrigeration capacity, add distribution from South Fork Kitchens in Southampton, and partner up with more farms and local institutions.”

The East Hampton Star’s cartoonist, Peter Spacek, will “spill the beans on any dirty little cartooning secrets” during a Golden Eagle-Nick and Toni’s Night Out on Wednesday. For several years, the North Main Street art shop has organized an off-season series in which artists talk about their work or lead a hands-on workshop, followed by dinner at the restaurant, which is next door.

Mr. Spacek was raised on the West Coast and moved to New York after graduating from art school, ending up in Montauk because of the waves. Aside from his weekly editorial cartoon in The Star, he has done illustrations for many major magazines and publishers. As a fine artist, his forms include scrimshaw on discarded surfboard fragments and pocketknives, as well as work intended for wall display that uses several mediums.

He plans to speak Wednesday about his journey from obsessive childhood drawing to making a living with pen and paper. He will also explain how he goes from idea sketches and surfing travel journals to finished cartoons and illustrations. He will cover the process he uses, which includes tracing rough ideas on a light box with inks and washes, then, when needed, “fixing and tweaking sub-par drawings on the computer in Photoshop,” he said.

“Accepting the challenge to create a cartoon every week for The East Hampton Star has brought me back to my drawing roots and revealed perhaps my greatest strengths, and now defines me in this community,” Mr. Spacek said.

The cost for the entire evening, including a two-course meal, tax, and tip is $75 per person. Advance registration at the shop or online at goldeneagleart.com has been requested by noon Monday.

The East Hampton Village Zoning Board of Appeals discussed an application Friday from the Maidstone Club, which is seeking permission to install drainage pipes, sump pumps, dry wells, and a swale on its golf course.

Drew Bennett, an engineer representing the club, said there are several low areas on the course’s second fairway, which is parallel to Dunemere Lane, and near the 16th, which curves around the edge of Hook Pond, that develop large, persistent puddles after periods of rain.

The drainage pipes would be underground and would connect to an existing irrigation reservoir, Mr. Bennett said, and the collected water would be used to irrigate the grounds. The swale, a shallow ditch between six inches and one foot deep containing grasses, would be along a split-rail fence on the second fairway.  

Lys Marigold, the board’s chairwoman, said she understood the club’s need for drainage, having driven there recently and been surprised by how large the puddles were. “They’re little lakes at this point, with ducks swimming in them.” 

The necessary excavation would be surgically done, Mr. Bennett said, adding that the “golf course wants to minimize the amount of disturbances.” 

Ms. Marigold said Billy Hajek, the village planner, had requested wire-backed fencing between the construction areas and wetlands to prevent debris from entering the water. Mr. Bennett agreed. 

Raymond Harden, the new vice chairman of the Z.B.A., asked if after the swale were in place golf carts would be able to traverse the second fairway rather than use Dunemere Lane. “If the area is drier, it should improve the ability of carts to stay on the course,” Mr. Bennett said.

Also on Friday, the board announced three decisions on earlier applications. 

Morad Ghadamian, the owner of 20 and 24 West End Road, was granted permission to merge two lots and construct a single-family house and accessory structures, resulting in 20,315 square feet of coverage, where the maximum in the code is 18,474. He also received an okay to build a 10,423-square-foot house, where the permitted gross floor area is 8,992 square feet, as well as a variance to build two detached garages joined by a roof in the front yard, although the code prohibits detached garages in front yards. A freshwater wetlands permit also was approved for the installation of a 125-foot naturalized buffer adjacent to Georgica Pond on the condition that its planting be maintained. 

The Jewish Center of the Hamptons, at 44 Woods Lane, was granted permission to legalize the conversion of a garage into a building containing four classrooms and to construct additions totaling 1,233 square feet of gross floor area, where the maximum for an accessory building is 250 square feet and limited to one room. A variance also was granted to legalize the 48.7-foot rear setback of the building, where 50 feet is the code requirement. Variances also were granted to allow a tent on the property for more than 21 days a year and for 29,452 square feet of coverage, where the maximum is 21,064 square feet. 

Frank J. Jackson, the owner of 223 Main Street, was granted an area variance for an additional 60 square feet of gross floor area for a residence of 2,938 square feet, where a prior determination had permitted 2,878 square feet.

The East Hampton Library’s Long Island Collection doesn’t have any village maps showing individual homeowners or property lines before 1858 or even 1873 for most of the East End, which can be tricky when we are asked to identify where someone used to live. 

There are, however, many deeds and wills available in the collection, and they frequently describe both the property being transferred and the name of the adjoining property owners.

The deed shown here, from Jan. 23, 1836, transfers land in East Hampton from two Southampton residents, Peleg and Ruth Rogers, to Aaron Osborn Jr., an East Hampton resident. While we don’t know exactly which lot this was, the deed provides a general description of the property’s location, along with a list of property owners. 

The land is described as a six-acre “woodland” lot “at Hands Creek.” Hand’s Creek lies to the west side of Three Mile Harbor, placing this land somewhere in what is now known as Northwest Woods. The property lines are bound “westerly by land of Joseph Dimon, northwesterly by land of Jonathan Mulford Jr., easterly by land of Josiah Mulford, and southeastwardly by the land owned by the heirs of John L. Gardiner.”

Within 40 years of the time this deed was written, published atlas pages would begin to name property owners and mark where houses stood for the residents of East Hampton’s Northwest Woods. The deed itself hints at the advances in printing technology and the gradual transitions to modern records. Large portions of the text of the deed are pre-printed, such as the itemized list of property rights a seller relinquishes. The pre-printed text is paired with blank lines for unique details, such as the property description and the owners’ names. Even the date was printed, leaving space for the day, month, and the last digit of the year.

Andrea Meyer is a librarian and archivist in the East Hampton Library’s Long Island Collection.

When the East Hampton Village Zoning Board of Appeals meets at 11 a.m. tomorrow, it will be the first meeting in that body’s 93-year history — in everyone’s recollection, at least — with a woman as the chair.

Lys Marigold, who has served on the board for a decade and became its vice chairwoman in 2013, was appointed chairwoman at the village board’s Dec. 21 meeting. (Joan Denny, who was on the board from 1991 to 2011, also served as its vice chairwoman.) She succeeds Frank Newbold, a longtime member who was appointed chairman in 2013 and tendered his resignation last month. Ray Harden, who had been an alternate on the board, was appointed vice chairman. 

Ms. Marigold leads a board charged with balancing the rights of property owners with the village government’s effort to maintain a historical and aesthetically pleasing character. It must parse sometimes quirky language in the zoning code and navigate similarly peculiar circumstances on the ground — unusually shaped lots that render setback requirements impossible to meet, for example, and adjacent properties with their own unique characteristics and conditions — all while reining in the grandiose architectural visions of some property owners. Sometimes, it is the reluctant mediator between fuming neighbors. 

The board is mindful of setting precedent by granting variance relief to override the code’s parameters. Today, it is common for an applicant’s representatives — usually an attorney, architect, land-use consultant, or a combination of these — to persist in seeking relief that flouts the spirit of the zoning code, if not the letter. 

Applications to the zoning board can certainly be eye opening, if not mind-boggling. Ms. Marigold recalled, as an example, a recent applicant who sought a 6,000-square-foot garage. “In the old days,” she said last Thursday, “a garage was a one or two-car garage.” 

The board is engaged in “this constant give and take with lawyers, trying to stay ahead of them, which provides a challenge. . . . It seems to me the challenge grows every year instead of lessens. I think it gets harder as the lawyers get craftier about how to get around our code.” 

In recent years, as new construction tended to make use of every square inch of allowable coverage, the village amended its code, moving to rein in massive houses by adding graduated formulas for the maximum allowable floor area and coverage based on lot size, which was denounced by many property owners and resulted in a lawsuit. Worried about more bedrooms and the density that follows, the board moved to counter another trend by prohibiting a basement from extending beyond the footprint of a house’s first floor. “We are constantly working with the mayor and the board, trying to modify the code to prevent things,” Ms. Marigold said. 

“There’s been an awful lot of disrespect in the last years, or playing the code,” she said. As an example, a screened-in porch is not counted in a floor-area calculation, “and right in the middle of an enormous house they’ll put screens on the front of the room and say that it doesn’t count. The reason the code was done that way was to restrict massive buildings.” Or, perhaps, “they want a bowling alley! Or their breakfast nook can only seat 10 and they want 12.” Ever present, she said, is “that pull between ‘This is my land, I bought it, I can do with it what I want,’ and the fact that you’re part of a community and you have to respect the laws of the community.” 

When an application is before the board, each member visits the property in question. “There’s a big difference between reading an application and going there,” Ms. Marigold said. “Sometimes I read an application in the quiet of my bedroom and think, ‘This is horrible,’ and then I go there and realize the nearest house is far away, or they’re next to a common driveway, and I change my mind about it. You have to be open-minded, flexible, and not stick to the code exactly, otherwise there would never be any variances given.”

Succeeding Mr. Newbold will be its own challenge, Ms. Marigold said. The former chairman was unfailingly polite, delivering the most unwelcome news — denial of an application — kindly and with a smile. “He did a lot of homework, he was very fair, and very unruffled, and I was always very hot-headed,” she said. On their “zoning safaris,” during which they examined properties and discussed applications, “Sometimes I would say to him, ‘I don’t think we should listen to this application. It is so outrageous, if I were chair I’d say go back to your architect and then come and not ask for eight variances on a brand-new application.’ I could never get him to be that blunt. Maybe I will be.”