Villages

At about 10:23 a.m. on Friday people across Long Island and as far away as Albany and New Jersey reported feeling buildings shake and sway slightly, the result of an earthquake that registered 4.8 on the Richter scale in New York and New Jersey.

In the spring of 1933, 25 East Hampton High School seniors and two chaperones took a class trip to Washington, D.C. In this photo they are seen at Mount Vernon.

In 1949 the village green flagpole came crashing down in a high wind. Read all about it, and much more ripped from the pages of Ye Olde Star, right here.

According to Billboard, 49.61 million vinyl albums were sold in 2023. That marked the 18th consecutive year of growth in the format. And as the appeal of vinyl record albums has continued to expand, Craig Wright, the owner of Innersleeve Records in Amagansett, is following suit by nearly doubling his store's size.

The second annual East Hampton Village Hamptons Whodunit festival, which features mystery and crime authors, interactive simulated crime scenes, walking tours, panel discussions, and escape rooms, will be launched next Thursday and will continue through next weekend.

New Yorkers are in for quite the show on Monday afternoon: A total solar eclipse is coming our way, and here on the South Fork, astronomers say people will be able to see between 83 and 90 percent totality.

If given the opportunity, a turkey vulture would eat you, your kids, and your little dog, too. Other bird species may be struggling, but the turkey vulture is doing just fine eating dead things. Yes, with increasing signs that the end is nigh, the turkey vulture is a strong candidate for Bird of 2024.

It was 1899, and Telegraph Operator McCord called it quits. Plus other tidbits from The Star of Yore.

Michele L’Hommedieu Hofmann had no idea until retiring last fall and starting to research her family history how prominent a role her great-great-grandfather James H. L’Hommedieu had played in Long Island’s late-19th-century architecture. On a trip to New York that included a stop at an East Hampton house he designed for Robert Southgate Bowne, a founder of the Maidstone Club and first president of the Long Island Rail Road, she and her family got a crash course in L’Hommedieu’s work.

On July 16, 1889, while staying in Lenox, Mass., Sarah Diodati Gardiner Thompson wrote to her daughter Sarah Thompson Gardiner, who was vacationing at Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire. Family news was top of mind.

Window strikes kill up to a billion birds annually and rank up there with cats and habitat destruction as the leading causes of recent steep declines. After the recent death of a much-watched Eurasian eagle-owl that was set loose from the Central Park Zoo, a bill calling for bird-friendly building measures has been revived in the New York Assembly and Senate.

The East Hampton Village Fire Department doesn’t usually respond to fires in the middle of the Ozark Mountains, but in a sense, after donating a Spartan pumper fire truck, replete with 4,000 feet of hose and a 500-gallon water tank, to the Eminence Area Volunteer Fire Department in Missouri Friday, it’s done just that.