125 Years Ago 1900
From The East Hampton Star, January 26
The twentieth century, which will begin the first fraction of a second after 12 o’clock midnight on Dec. 31 of the present year, is destined to work wonderful changes. Within its first few years a great system of underground railways will be built under the city of New York; the great new East River bridge will be completed; a tunnel will connect the metropolis with Long Island and you will be able to take a train at East Hampton and be carried direct to New York City without change.
At home a model system of sewerage will be the pride of East Hampton; good roads will be built; a speedway will run from Main street to Three Mile Harbor, where there will be a fine dock and a safe and splendid harbor; there will be a new Methodist church in the village; the summer population will be greatly increased; railroad facilities will keep abreast of the time by constant improvement; door yards will give way to neighborhood lawns and East Hampton will continue to keep to the front as one of the most charming summer resorts on the continent.
100 Years Ago 1925
From The East Hampton Star, January 23
Word has come from Herbert W. Dimon, agent in charge of the Southampton business office, that the New York Telephone Company has recently signed a lease for the second floor of the post office building on the corner of Main street and Newtown lane. By this lease the Telephone Company will acquire about 2,000 square feet of floor space, which it will use for the installation of the new common battery switchboard to serve about 1,000 East Hampton telephone users.
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On Friday, January 16, the Del Ray of Montauk, said to be owned by the Walker brothers of Southampton, with two dories in tow, was anchored near shore, about a mile west of Mecox Coast Guard Station. Immediately after anchorage was made one dory was loaded with twelve cases of liquor and brought ashore by one of the men on board. There were about twenty-five men on shore who were waiting to help unload the cargo for a quick getaway, but before anything could be accomplished Captain Miller of Mecox Station, and Captain Bennett of Southampton Station, with their crews appeared on the scene and took charge of the dory as she hit shore.
Upon questioning the man aboard the dory he informed them that he had 300 cases of liquor aboard, namely 200 cases of Champagne, the remainder being Scotch.
75 Years Ago 1950
From The East Hampton Star, January 26
The East Hampton Community Council will sponsor, this coming summer, a group of small visitors from New York City who will come out here for two weeks’ vacation in August under the Fresh Air Fund, which was initiated seventy-five years ago by the New York Tribune and now continues under the Herald Tribune. East Hampton will become — or so the Community Council hopes — one of the 1,350 friendly towns receiving children from the big city. Most of these children have never seen a cow, a potato field, or a fisherman hauling in his nets. Their only acquaintance with birds is the sparrows of city streets. Picnics, surf-bathing, digging in the sand will be new to them.
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The Long Island Lighting Company and its affiliates, the Queens Borough Gas and Electric Company and Nassau and Suffolk Lighting Company, had the biggest year in their history in 1949.
An indication of the phenomenal growth of the Long Island area is shown by the record number of new customers the Company connected during the past year. In all about 12,000 gas and approximately 27,000 new electric meters were added throughout the Long Island Lighting System area. Moreover, it appears reasonably certain that during 1950 new business will continue at about the same rate. With building scattered throughout such a large territory one scarcely realizes what this current growth means, but if these new customers were concentrated in one locality they would represent a city of approximately 90,000 population.
50 Years Ago 1975
From The East Hampton Star, January 23
Farmers from the East End, most of them looking like bankers, or maybe a little more prosperous, hunched forward in wary concentration Friday evening as a smooth-talking New York tax attorney told them, “You could conceivably triple your income and still have your farm to work and live on.”
It was an offer John Klein, Suffolk County Executive, hopes the 200 farmers gathered in the grange-like Bridgehampton Community House can’t refuse. In a series of such meetings around the County lately, Mr. Klein has been stumping for the County’s new but already widely emulated farmlands acquisition program.
Under it, farmers would sell the “development rights” to their land while retaining the agricultural rights and the title; the County would sit on these development rights to ensure open space and also to reduce the drain on the civic pocket caused by too precipitous development; and, farmers would continue to work their land while reaping regular dividends.
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Last Friday’s meeting of the East Hampton Town Board was, as they say, lively: the theme being the economy and what the Town Board can or cannot do about it, with several subplots of allegation and rejoinder.
On the economy the Board apparently agreed: spending should be cut in 1975, below what has been budgeted for the year. Supervisor Judith Hope, who has been sounding a quasi-alarm — based on a prediction that revenues in excess of those anticipated would not be forthcoming, as had been the case in the past — said that while East Hampton was in good fiscal shape at present, it would not be by year’s end if something wasn’t done.
25 Years Ago 2000
From The East Hampton Star, January 27
An undercover sting operation with a made-for-Hollywood plot ended last week in the arrest of a Queens man who, police said, tried to unload tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of stolen silver at Christie’s, the international auction house in Manhattan.
Police credited Dean F. Failey of Christie’s, a specialist in American decorative arts and Pelletreau silver, with recognizing the pieces as part of Robert David Lion Gardiner’s collection, housed at the Gardiner mansion on Main Street in East Hampton.
Knowing that Mr. Gardiner owns several of the distinctive pieces created by Elias Pelletreau, an 18th-century Southampton silversmith, Mr. Failey said he became suspicious when a handful of Pelletreau items began to show up at Christie’s.
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Ross School students perched on the floor and ringed the walls last week while their parents and teachers filled the seats and peered through doorways at East Hampton Town Hall during the first official discussion of the vast campus planned by the school and its affiliated Ross Institute.
More than 50 new buildings are proposed in what the Town Planning Department has called “arguably the largest single project ever proposed in the Town of East Hampton, with the potential to have long-range economic, social, and environmental impacts.” It would be built on 130 access off Route 114, next to the existing school buildings at Goodfriend Park, now zoned commercial-industrial.
