Villages

After breeding on the northern lakes, loons arrive on the East End in the autumn and increase in numbers through the winter as their breeding territories freeze. They can survive our winter water because they’re so well insulated.

One hundred and twenty-five years ago it snowed so much roads and railways were impassible for days. May it be so again.

For Hanukkah, the Festival of Lights celebrated by Jews every winter, eight days of menorah lightings and other festivities are planned from Bridgehampton to Montauk beginning Thursday night.

With most first-responder courses taking place in Sag Harbor and Southampton in recent years, a rare chance is coming up that allows prospective emergency medical technicians living farther east to enroll in a state-approved E.M.T.-training program closer to home

A spicy-sweet gingerbread theme has emerged around East Hampton Village, with candy-decked houses and icing “snow” bringing to life sugarplum scenes for raffle and for charity in the lead-up to the Santa parade. The Jolly Old Elf will arrive by helicopter, plus there's a market on the Village Hall lawn, skating at the Huntting Inn, and a big-name guest at a tree lighting that evening.

The much-fought-over former gas ball lot at 5 Bridge Street in Sag Harbor may not be much to look at, but it contains 93 parking spaces valuable both to the village and to Adam Potter, a developer who outbid the village to win the lease on the lot from National Grid earlier this year. 

For anyone looking for a recipe for an upcoming get-together or meal, the 75-year-old “East Hampton Ladies’ Village Improvement Society Cook Book” is filled with inspiring traditional favorites.   

The day in 1948 when the Bonacker captain Dead-Eye Dick Flach opened up on the basketball court for 20 points in the first half alone, blowing out Hampton Bays. And more from East Hampton’s colorful past.

Margie Ruddick of the landscape planning and designing firm that bears her name has drawn the proverbial line in the sand, choosing to stop taking on projects that involve new construction, except for well-scaled additions. 

East Hampton Village is getting an appraisal for the strip of village-owned land that runs along the south side of Herrick Park. Michael Bebon, a village resident whose house is accessed via an easement along that driveway, wondered during a public-comment period Friday why the board would spend money to appraise the strip unless they were considering selling it to the L.V.I.S.

East Hampton Village's La Forest Lane is busy in the summer with vehicles headed toward Georgica Beach; it connects Georgica Road, to its north, with Apaquogue Road, to its south. Some of its residents showed up at a meeting on Friday to push the village board to designate the road “one way only” to reduce traffic.

Abigail Halsey (1878-1946) begins this 44-page book by describing the setting, the Mulford Farmhouse, and the teller of the snowbound tales, Abigail’s 89-year-old friend, Mary Esther Mulford Miller (1849-1938).

Change is hard but essential if East Hampton Town and the wider world are going to mitigate and adapt to the impacts of climate change, officials of the Nature Conservancy said this week in the wake of the United States government’s Fifth National Climate Assessment, issued last week.

In 1923, from the White House lawn, President Harding introduced a “modern adaptation” of John Howard Payne’s “Home, Sweet Home” home on the 100th anniversary of the song. Then at the Own Your Home Exposition in New York, a full-size duplicate was built for Americans to check out various products of the trades. And more from yesteryear.

This 1946 football schedule belonged to Lorraine Loris (1929-2006), a member of that year’s junior class who attended at least four of the six games played that season, when East Hampton went 3-3.

The Israel-Hamas war, now in its second month, continues to reverberate on the South Fork. For the second consecutive week, the Sunday afternoon gathering of East End for Ceasefire, an activist group calling for an end to hostilities, was met with a counterrally at their protest site, Long Wharf in Sag Harbor.

“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.