Villages

Rip currents kept East Hampton Town and Village lifeguards busy over the Fourth of July holiday weekend, but this week the story was less red flags and more “elevated marine life”: Some 20 sharks, mostly spinner sharks but also threshers, were spotted off Main Beach on Saturday and farther off town beaches as well.

The day in 1948 when 40 people ignored the voting public and got together to save Mulford Farm. And more from The Star of yore.

Jimmy Buffett took his legendary island-music vibes to Sag Harbor’s WLNG radio station on Sunday, dropping by to premiere a new song, “My Gummy Just Kicked In,” on the local airwaves.

This photo from The East Hampton Star’s archive shows Juan Terry Trippe (1899-1981), the founder of Pan Am, receiving an award from the Brazilian government for his contributions to international travel.

Harvested for bait and their blood, horseshoe crabs, which have endured on earth for over nearly 500 million years, are in a state of decline in the New York area.

“Soldier Ride,” said Peter Honerkamp, an owner of the Stephen Talkhouse in Amagansett, where Soldier Ride was conceived, “became a rehabilitative tool so the wounded could get out of their hospital beds, empowering themselves and their fellow wounded, setting an example for the incoming wounded, and going out into the communities they sacrificed so much for.” This year's ride returns on July 15 with a 24-mile cycle taking participants from the Amagansett Firehouse to East Hampton and Sag Harbor before returning to its starting point.

How to say goodbye to a family house that has seen almost eight decades’ worth of life and love? Some might spend this melancholy time wandering through empty rooms, lost in thoughts. Ellie Duke had another idea, inviting the world to Tough Porch, her brainchild of a weekend held as a last hurrah at her family’s grand old summer “cottage” on Georgica Beach.

Important poultry notes from 1898, and more ripped from the pages of Ye Olde Star.

The beloved firefly, or lightning bug, has suffered steep declines in recent years. The three biggest threats to lightning bugs, listed on firefly.org, are habitat loss, landscape lighting, and pesticide use. In New York State there are about 15 species of fireflies that are commonly observed, but on Long Island, we now see only five.

This page is from the newly digitized Village of East Hampton Board of Trustees meeting minutes for March 17, 1925. During the meeting, the board resolved to lobby against the Montauk Steamboat Company’s schedule reduction.

Despite the constant threat of rain and some brief sprinkles, the United States Drought Monitor confirmed last week that “moderate drought” has hit the South Fork, a step up in classification from “abnormally dry.” The next step is “severe drought.”

Following an inspection, the New York State Department of Transportation and the Long Island Rail Road have closed the bridge at Cranberry Hole Road in Amagansett due to structural problems. It is the second closure of the bridge in less than two months.

Be alert: Portuguese man-o-wars sport a transparent float that looks like a clear dumpling or empanada, below which dangle long stinging tentacles that can grow anywhere from 30 to 100 feet long. "If they're on the beach, then they're in the water," said the town's chief lifeguard, who guessed that the creatures came in with strong south swells associated with storms passing off the Island earlier in the week.

A bike path lament in 1898 and neighborhood trouble for the record exec Tommy Mottola in 1998, plus more from The Star of yore.

Do IV vitamin drips really boost your immune system and improve your looks? Our writer went to the NutriDrip IV Lounge at Gurney’s to find out, and her report gives the skinny on this wellness craze.

This needlework sampler was stitched by Lucretia Fithian (1765-1815), probably between 1770 and 1780. Lucretia was one of nine children born to Capt. David Fithian (1723-1805) and Esther Conkling Fithian (1728-1800).

Edith Windsor, a Southampton summer resident for 40 years, started the fight that led to federally recognized marriages for same-sex couples, and on Monday — 10 years to the day since the Supreme Court ruled in her favor — Southampton Town dedicated a memorial to her: a brick platform in the shape of a heart, surrounded by a circle of diamond-shaped paving stones, where civil marriage ceremonies for people of all stripes can be performed.

Here on the East End, there are more than half a dozen fireworks shows happening over the next 10 days, and more planned later in July and in August. Here's where to see them.

The South Fork Wind farm, New York State’s first offshore wind farm and the first utility-scale offshore project in the United States, has passed a milestone with installation of the first monopile foundation at the wind farm’s site, around 35 miles off Montauk Point.

In the Springs house of John and Alice Marlin some 500 boxes of documents — the personal archive of his mother — bring to life the crushing, cruel realities of World War II and of living under a hostile occupying force.

From a shotgun-wielding skirmish in the Prohibition wars of 1923 to the momentous day in 1998 when Suffolk County banned smoking in bars, it happened here.

Back in March, Peter Zegler and Bob Beck, metal detectorists, saw an opportunity to uncover some East Hampton Village history after learning of plans to renovate the fields at Herrick Park, and they requested permission from the village board to get to work. The basketball court had been laid over an expanse of undisturbed soil, and soon their metal detectors were beeping with excitement.

This is the best time of year to observe chimney swifts locally as they burst through the skies over our villages. You’ll never see a chimney swift land, or even come close to street level. In their daily circuits, they can fly 500 miles a day in pursuit of something like 12,000 flying insects.

The Last Gasp, published by East Hampton High School’s class of 1912 as part of its graduation festivities, is one of the earliest student publications in the Long Island Collection.

You read it here first. Make that second, as these entries are reprinted from past Stars for your pleasure and edification.

The Bokalift 2, an approximately 750-foot-long vessel that will be used to install foundations for the South Fork Wind farm, arrived off Newport, R.I., last week and is now at the wind farm’s site, in a federal lease area around 35 miles off Montauk Point. 

The New York State Department of Motor Vehicles has unveiled a new $60 custom license plate featuring the Montauk Lighthouse. Only, there is one problem.

“It was only June 2021 when we first saw a scattering of symptomatic foliage in a client’s garden, and two years later, most beech trees have been impacted at some level,” one master arborist said of beech leaf disease, which is threatening the survival of beech trees from forests to estates.

The anniversary of the 1942 interception of Nazi saboteurs who landed near Atlantic Avenue Beach will be observed on Saturday at 6 p.m. at the Amagansett Life-Saving and Coast Guard Station.

Generations of the Dominy family built the bits and pieces that made life work in the 18th century. East Hampton Village is nearly finished with a $2.3 million restoration of the house and shops that will be known as the Dominy Shops Museum.