Villages

To celebrate the start of spring, this photo depicts the Garden Club of East Hampton’s first flower show in 1916 at the home of May Groot Manson on Main Street in the village.

Cardinals, among our earliest singer each spring, are so familiar you might forget to appreciate them, but a century ago they were rare in New York.

The Maidstone Gun Club, which has been closed since early December by a New York State Supreme Court order as an investigation takes place into errant bullets allegedly reaching nearby houses, has countered a lawsuit seeking its permanent closure with several claims of its own.

When a water line break in East Hampton Village flooded several businesses a month ago, Gubbins Running Ahead, a sporting goods shop on Park Place, lost all of its inventory, including 7,000 pairs of athletic footwear. Last week, Geary Gubbins, who has run the sporting goods shop since 2013, parlayed his business’s misfortune into an act of generosity for a local nonprofit.

The Long Island Rail Road has added more trains to its South Fork Commuter Connection on Fridays, increasing service and, let’s hope, removing more cars from the clogged Montauk Highway. The new Friday trains will operate year round.

In East Hampton Town’s villages and hamlets, yes, sales are down, but it’s because the inventory of available properties is at a historic low, brokers here are saying. "Our prices have not dropped off a cliff — we just don’t have any houses to sell.”

For the first time ever, East Hampton Village will offer a lifeguard certification at its own beaches, the village’s head lifeguard, Drew Smith, announced earlier this month.

An East Hampton builder has published a book that advocates for the adoption of a mechanism that he says will harness the free market to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, empowering consumers to choose climate-friendly products in the process.

Jaine Mehring of Amagansett’s Beach Hampton neighborhood is on a quest to focus attention on the wave of development and redevelopment that is transforming neighborhoods and is characterized by building to the maximum allowable size and lot coverage.

The day in 1973 when the giant hanger at the New York Ocean Science Laboratory, a Montauk landmark since it was built during World War II, burned to the ground, and more from the pages of The Star.

Ruth Sterling Benjamin (1882-1957), far right in this photo from The Star’s archive, with five local girls at Home, Sweet Home for a John Howard Payne birthday celebration.

A fire last summer in a Noyac rental house, in which two young women died, has led nearby Sag Harbor Village to re-evaluate its own rental laws. “I think this awful tragedy has awakened a lot of people to these rental activities, that go unaddressed and unregulated,” Sag Harbor Mayor James Larocca said when discussing a proposed law that would establish a rental registry.

This ribboned wedding invitation from the Springs Historical Society collection heralded the marriage of Hiram Miller and Emma Edwards in Springs in 1887.

With a looming northeaster that brought abundant wind and rain this week, the sea-to-shore interconnection of the South Fork Wind farm’s onshore transmission cable with the submarine export cable that will link the wind farm with the electric grid would have to wait.

Take a trip into the past, Star-style.

Robert Chaloner, who was instrumental in establishing Stony Brook Medicine as a trusted partner and provider of high-quality health care on the East End following the Stony Brook and Southampton merger in 2017, has announced he is stepping down as chief administrative officer.

In 1898, three boats gave chase to what was thought to be the largest whale ever seen along the coast. And more from the history-rich pages of The Star.

I’m not sure if Leonard Cohen was into birds, but if he was, he might have appreciated the mess that is the European starling.

Martha Howard Prentice Strong (1851-1949), a founding member of the Garden Club of East Hampton, made this scrapbook documenting her trip to Arizona from 1936 to 1937.

“Our dream is for people to really move up that economic ladder and be able to provide for their families. In Suffolk County, it takes a lot to meet those standards,” said Lukas Weinstein, a social worker who serves on the Bridgehampton Child Care and Recreational Center’s community advisory board and helps in the Teach Me How to Fish program. Through that program, a job fair in the construction trades is planned for Wednesday night.

“We pretty much lost everything,” said Geary Gubbins, whose sporting goods shop, Gubbins, was one of several East Hampton Village businesses that experienced major losses this week when their basements were flooded on Sunday. "The water was up to the ceiling."

John Howard Payne (1791-1852) wrote and composed “Have a Care Mon Ami,” the sheet music for which is seen here, around 1833, for a musical farce called “Fricandeau, or the Cook and the Coronet.”

“In my mind I thought one of the kids asked a coach if he could go down and hold his breath. Then I heard one of the teammates say, ‘Hey, you want me to tell him to come up?’ And the coach said, ‘Yes,’ ” recalled Jason Brunner, a RECenter lifeguard who was on duty on Feb. 1 and was recognized with a proclamation from the East Hampton Village Board for his role in helping to save the boy.

On March 4, 1898, The Star reported that "work has progressed on the bicycle path on Main street in a satisfactory manner this week. Hundreds of loads have already been carted gratuitously, and although the cycle club well knows that it has undertaken a big job, it feels greatly encouraged by the hearty support being given by the citizens."

Sultan Kilic was sleeping in her sixth-floor apartment in Adana, Turkey, with her 10-year-old son, Cagan, at 4:30 a.m. on Feb. 6, when the earth began to speak, and their building began to shake. “We formed a ‘life triangle’ and waited to die,” she recalled this week in Sag Harbor, where she is now staying with her son.

A break in a water line discovered Sunday morning in East Hampton Village caused major flooding at a number of downtown businesses, including Tutto Caffe, Bonne Nuit, Valentino, and Gubbins. Efforts to pump out basements were stalled for nearly eight hours as PSEG struggled to shut down power to affected areas.

From a century ago, documenting the plight of the Montauk Indians. And more from the pages of The Star of yore.

Starting Monday, workers who rely on the South Fork Commuter Connection to get them eastward will notice schedule changes to the Montauk train line that should be rider-friendly.

This logbook tracks the voyage of the Daniel Webster, which set out from Sag Harbor for the Pacific in 1833 seeking whales. Capt. Philetus Pierson was at the helm.

Two very different narratives have emerged as the Maidstone Gun Club seeks to renew its land lease with East Hampton Town and fight off a lawsuit that threatens its future altogether. In one narrative, a number of Wainscott residents push for the club’s permanent closure, painting it as a dangerous nuisance. But the other narrative — the Maidstone Gun Club’s point of view — is rarely heard, owing to the low profile its members intentionally keep.