Villages

“After 35 years here and 15 months off, it feels like where I belong,” said Dave Winthrop, who is back at Brent's General Store in Amagansett and ready to “make people feel like they’re coming to the old Brent’s.”

The Shinnecock Indian Nation’s official cannabis dispensary, Little Beach Harvest, is now open for business, just in time for the Indigenous harvest holiday known as Nunnowa, which the tribe celebrates each year on Nov. 16. “It’s a major achievement. This is something that Long Island is in need of,” said Chenae Bullock, the managing director of Little Beach Harvest, in describing the region’s first tax-free cannabis dispensary, located on the Shinnecock territory.

It happened here, readers.

The South Fork community continues to rally around Jeffrey Yusko, a longtime Wainscott resident and former East Hampton High School gym teacher who was hit by a van while riding his bicycle in Sagaponack on May 5.

There will be much to celebrate at the Third House Nature Center at Montauk County Park on Sunday: the 30th anniversary of the founding of the nature center, the 50th anniversary of Suffolk County’s first purchase leading to the formation of the county park, and the 50th anniversary of Big Reed Pond’s designation as a National Natural Landmark.

John Melillo, who served as a military police officer in the Army from May 1970 to March 1972, copes with his own P.T.S.D. by painting, and he also teaches art classes for veterans and first responders, including police, firefighters, and emergency medical personnel.

The 5-megawatt lithium-ion battery energy storage system that caught fire at a Cove Hollow Road, East Hampton, substation on May 31 is expected to be out of commission until the middle of 2024.

Almost two years after construction began onshore and four months after installation of the first monopile foundation, the project’s final construction began when the barge left the Port of New London, Conn., bound for the wind farm site, around 35 miles off Montauk. Installation of the first turbine generator is expected imminently.

Sandy and Mike McManus of East Hampton and Vero Beach, Fla., have announced the marriage of their daughter, Nina Bond, to Armann Gretarsson, a son of Gudfinna and Gretar Leifsson of Melville and Iceland.

This photo from The Star’s archives dates to Sept. 25, 1975, when the Dock Closing race was first run as part of a series of competitions courtesy of the Montauk bar’s owner, George Watson.

The East Hampton Chamber of Commerce, a more than 60-year-old organization, is retooling, restaffing, and, after hibernating during the Covid years, is waking up and ready to engage the business community.

As the clock turned to 6, there was a flicker, then another and another and then, emanating from the Lighthouse tower, came two rotating beams of light to pierce the night sky with a strength not seen since the 1980s. An antique Fresnel lens, long relegated to the position of prized museum artifact, was back in its rightful place, and with it the familiar sweep of light spinning predictably from sunset to sunrise, visible many miles from shore, had returned.

The poignancy of little kids taking pride in their 1898 classroom’s new flag and clock. A bronze plaque placed on a boulder in Montauk by the American Women’s Voluntary Services on Armistice Day in 1948. This was The Star of yore.

Faced with the enormous task of helping people understand how to move forward after the Black Saturday attack by Hamas on Israel on Oct. 7, South Fork clergy offered a diversity of perspective at Sunday's Rally Israel and Peace at Herrick Park in East Hampton.

November is the month when a dedicated group of citizen scientists begin to count birds as part of Project FeederWatch, a Cornell Lab of Ornithology program now in its 37th year. It’s simple. Go to feederwatch.org, pay $18, learn how to report your birds, get some swag that will help you make proper identifications, and you’re on the team.

Leadership changes are coming to the Friends of Georgica Pond Foundation, an organization established in 2015 to remediate the pond’s degraded water quality and preserve its ecosystem.

East End for Ceasefire, an activist group, has formed to call for an end to hostilities in Israel and Gaza. The group gathered on Oct. 21 and again on Sunday at Long Wharf in Sag Harbor and plans to continue doing so on Sundays at 3 p.m.

Mary Fulford (1884-1975), who helped raise the Talmage family children in Springs, sits on the sand at East Hampton’s Main Beach in this 1957 photograph from the Springs Historical Society collection.

From an 1898 “must vote for Scudder” push to the Election Day “backlash” of 1998, here are tales of campaigns past.

They're creepy and they're kooky, mysterious and spooky — but this isn't the Addams family we're talking about. They're the Social Skellies, a front-yard installation on Route 114 in East Hampton that started as a Halloween display in 2020 but has since become a platform for social commentary and parodies of pop-culture phenomena.

Samantha Harris and William Murphy of St. Louis were married on Sept. 16 at the Country Club in Chestnut Hill, Mass. The bride’s brothers, Jonathan Harris and Dashiell Harris, and the groom’s brother, Andrew Murphy, officiated.

As Halloween approaches, you’re probably not thinking of dressing up as a European monarch or other foreign potentate, but to members of the Maidstone Club in October 1940, as seen in this photo from The Star’s archive, this was a stellar idea.

There is something creepy about cormorants. From most distances, they look black, with long thick necks, tails, and wings. In flight, they appear like black crosses. Against a cormorant, fish have no hope; the tip of their orange bill is hook-shaped, a perfect tool to capture over 250 species of fish. Soon those single black crosses will join to form sky-wide, shape-shifting patterns as they migrate away.

From an 1898 labor shortage in a building boom, to the day 50 years later when a 40-foot gondola was trundled down Main Street, this was East Hampton.

There’s a lot we expect from our local governments, but East Hampton Village may be the only municipality that has a candy assistance program to help residents meet the high cost of handing out candy to trick-or-treaters on Halloween.

This receipt, dated Oct. 21, 1703, records the first annual payment by East Hampton settlers to the Montaukett people. The payment amounted to a rental fee for the use of grazing lands on the Montauk peninsula.

Thirty-three years ago, Theo Landi’s sister-in-law Geri Sanicola said to her, “This town needs a party shop.” Mrs. Landi replied, “You find a spot and maybe we’ll do it.” The Party Shoppe has been helping to make birthday parties and holidays complete ever since.

At a short but sweet East Hampton Village Board work session on Oct. 5, the village dedicated the Pantigo Mill behind the Home, Sweet Home Museum to Hugh King, the village historian.

With its last effort at creating affordable housing legislation struck down by the New York State Supreme Court in April, the Sag Harbor Village Board introduced a new affordable housing initiative at last week’s board meeting, “just to start the conversation,” said Mayor Tom Gardella.

One C. Schenck cleans his gutters in 1898, and other public spiritedness from The Star of yesteryear.