Villages

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Steve (Puck) Dolan retired from the Montauket in December after 38 years, but Montauk isn’t done with him just yet: He will serve as grand marshal of the 62nd Montauk Friends of Erin St. Patrick’s Day parade, which will liven up the hamlet with belated Irish cheer on Sunday starting at noon. 

Holy Week services begin on Sunday, and churches here have special schedules throughout the week. 

The Maritime Folklife Oral History Collection at the East Hampton Library contains interviews and transcripts with Dan King and his crew, among other fishermen and their families. The transcript seen here shows a discussion with Dan’s wife, Marsha King.

The mystery over a painted bronze statue of John Steinbeck and his dog Charley, which suddenly appeared in Sag Harbor’s Steinbeck Park this week, has been solved. 

A barber moves his shop downtown over a century ago and finds much success. And other notes to charm and delight from the venerable Star.

The Anchor Society of East Hampton, a nonprofit community group working to revitalize the village business district and return a warmer sense of community to Main Street and Newtown Lane, has issued a call for applications to its Winter Shops program, which will place pop-up shops in otherwise empty storefronts during the off-season.

After successfully completing her 27,759-mile solo nonstop sail around the world last Thursday as part of the Global Solo Challenge, Cole Brauer received myriad thank-yous from near and far for having not only inspired a generation of young women (and at the beginning of International Women’s Month, no less) who might not otherwise have taken up a historically male-dominated sport, but also for having inspired everyone — young and old, male and female. 

After Jimmy Ernst died, a huge bed / piece of art from his father, the surrealist Max Ernst, had to be moved from Jimmy’s Lee Avenue house. It wasn’t easy.

PSEG Long Island crews have been in Montauk since mid-February working on “circuit reliability upgrades” that are aimed at reducing outages during severe weather.

Another missive from the Prohibition-era rum wars, and more drama ripped from the pages of the venerable Star.

Sag Harbor Village has agreed to sublease the so-called "gas ball lot" from the developer Adam Potter, who controls 5 Bridge Street Limited Liability Company, which was awarded the lease by National Grid at the end of last year.

A live Risso's dolphin washed up on Georgica Beach on Sunday morning but died on the shore shortly after it was discovered, the East Hampton Village Police Department said in a report released Monday.

Cole Brauer, the 29-year-old East Hampton native who has been sailing solo around the world since Oct. 29, arrived at the Global Solo Challenge race’s finish line in A Coruña, Spain, early Thursday morning, as her 40-foot boat, First Light, “would have wanted it,” becoming the first American woman to sail solo nonstop around the world’s three great capes, and the 18th woman to do it overall. 

Kayla Kearney, a 20-year-old college student from Springs, is making “baby steps” toward recovery every day at Weill-Cornell Hospital in Manhattan after undergoing several complicated medical procedures for treatment of a rare type of brain tumor.

According to Marasca family lore, the barber shop pictured here was a direct result of the actor John Drew encouraging his barber, Paul Marasca, to leave New York City for East Hampton.

The developer Harry Macklowe listed his Georgica Pond house last week for $38 million. Despite the legal costs Mr. Macklowe has accrued since 2019, when East Hampton Village first hit him with a stop-work order citing illegal clearing and improvements, he stands to make a tidy profit if he gets close to that number, having bought the property in 2017 for $10.35 million.

The day 75 years ago when 15 tons of potatoes spilled across an East Hampton street, and more surprises from the area’s deep past.

For members of the Garden Club of East Hampton, spring is crunch time, and so it was for Katherine Jordan Appleton (1879-1949) of the Nid de Papillon estate.

With over 400 blood samples collected from Lyme-infected East Enders since 2014, Dr. George Dempsey of East Hampton Family Medicine is the largest contributor to the Bay Area Lyme Foundation Lyme Disease Biobank, and his samples have helped improve the test that can detect it. The new test could catch it even sooner.

Odds are, you’re not going to see an American bittern, despite its large size. Frankly, the American bittern doesn’t want to be seen; it chose invisibility as its superpower. Still, this is the best time of year to try; make the experience at least as much about the journey as the destination.

A hundred years ago, a rumrunning raid was successfully executed at Fort Pond Bay, where dozens of bootleggers were caught moving cases of booze by the score. And other trips deep into the past.

Last week, two large American elm trees, estimated to be between 80 and 100 years old, were cut down at the intersection of Main Street and Newtown Lane: one in front of Louis Vuitton, and the other in front of J. Crew. Neither had Dutch elm disease, according to Olivia Brooks, the chairwoman of the 25-person Ladies Village Improvement Society tree committee since 2008, but both had simply reached the end of their long lives.

Basketball courts, the farmers market, the May Day 5K, and the Hamptons Whodunit festival were topics of interest at Friday's meeting of the East Hampton Village Board.

Julio Florencio Teo Gómez was an inspiration to many people around him, his friends said, despite the tough circumstances he faced. To honor his memory, Hamptons Community Outreach announced on Feb. 10 that it is establishing a job-training program for people in circumstances like those Mr. Teo Gómez faced.