Villages

Jack Graves usually sits down to write his East Hampton Star column, “Point of View,” each Wednesday without a predetermined subject in mind.

“Was it de Kooning who said, ‘I see the canvas and I begin’? I do think it’s an advantage to not have anything definite in mind,” Mr. Graves, a fixture at this newspaper since Oct. 15, 1967, said in an interview this week. “Then you become too focused.”

Over the weekend, East Hampton Village celebrated the 100th anniversary of its incorporation, albeit a year late due to the pandemic. The festivities included a parade, a black-tie gala, a carnival, a classic car show, and a community softball game. Here are some scenes from the long-anticipated weekend.

When East Hampton celebrates the 100th anniversary of the village's incorporation this weekend -- with a black-tie party, fireworks, parade, music festival, and more -- it should raise a toast to summer visitors, without whom the milestone would not have been reached, said the village historian and parade grand marshal, Hugh King.

The big question on everyone's lips this month seems to be whether or not they should receive a third (in the case of the Pfizer or Moderna mRNA vaccines) or second (if they opted for the Johnson and Johnson vaccine) "booster" dose against Covid-19.

A proposal to name the Amagansett Youth Park for Lee A. Hayes, a Tuskegee Airman during World War II and a resident of East Hampton Town for most of his life, gathered strength on Tuesday. 

The East Hampton Historical Society has hired Stephen Long, the president of the Children's Museum of the East End in Bridgehampton, to be its new executive director.

A group of investors has purchased 2 Main Street in Sag Harbor Village, home to the K Pasa restaurant and other businesses, and is seeking to have Southampton Town purchase the building with community preservation fund money.

The facility regularly harvested an average of 10 tons of ice daily and relied on a ground-cork-insulated ice box to maintain the product. With increasing trouble from warming winters, Duryea's updates included the purchase of an Atlas-Imperial engine for $4,500, in order to produce ice when it could not be harvested.

Despite a high vaccination rate in the town and statewide, the positive infection rate reported by the testing sites at Town Hall and in Montauk more than tripled in August, from 4 to 13 percent of those tested receiving a positive diagnosis. Between Sept. 14 and 19, the positive rate was 12.2 percent among 1,263 tests in East Hampton and 13.5 percent among 370 tests in Montauk.

East Hampton Village will hold a celebration of the 100th anniversary of its incorporation next weekend, and to mark the occasion, Rose Brown, a trustee, Ray Harden, an owner of Ben Krupinski Builder and a former trustee, and James McMullan, an architect and vice chairman of the village's zoning board of appeals, joined forces to create a keepsake for posterity: a model of Village Hall that will be on display in the parade down Main Street on Sept. 25, and then stored at Mulford Farm. 

Next week, East Hampton Village begins its belated centennial celebration of the village's incorporation. Inspired by the 1920s while planning the events for this anniversary, the village also looked at many of the Town of East Hampton's large anniversary events, such as the 350th anniversary celebration in 1998. One of the earliest town anniversaries we have photographs from is the August 1924 pageant for the 275th anniversary of the town.

Children with special needs and their families got a chance to experience the healing power of the ocean on Saturday at A Walk on Water's surf therapy event at Ditch Plain in Montauk.

As it marks its 100th anniversary, the Amagansett Village Improvement Society demonstrates a remarkable continuity. Now, as then, the society constitutes a committed group that cares deeply about its unassuming hamlet and wishes to preserve its inimitable charm and beauty. It maintains the hamlet's triangles, planters, benches, trees, flagpole, and flower boxes, lines Main Street with flags at the appropriate holidays, and helps to decorate the tree on the green at Christmas and organize caroling up and down Main Street.

The Amagansett Citizens Advisory Committee had to make do Monday without its expected speaker, Katy Casey, executive director of the East Hampton Housing Authority, who couldn't make it to the Zoom meeting at the last minute, leaving the committee with a number of questions but few answers.

Stony Brook Southampton Hospital remains convinced that a 4.5-acre parcel on Pantigo Place in East Hampton is the most appropriate site for its proposed emergency room annex, and it hopes to break ground on the project by the end of the year, according to Robert Chaloner, the hospital's chief administrative officer.

In so many ways, the fact that we are still having to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic feels like a kick to the gut, but here we are. At this juncture in the pandemic, it is worthwhile to once again review some of the current public health guidelines aimed at stopping the spread and protecting yourself and your community.

Much to the chagrin of her legions of loyal customers, Mary Schoenlein announced this week that her retail bakery and takeout spot Mary's Marvelous on East Hampton's Newtown Lane will be shutting its doors for good at the close of business on Sunday.

A deputy commissioner in former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's office, Bradford Billet of East Hampton helped oversee a program to locate people who had been injured, killed, or had gone missing after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in Manhattan. "At one point we had a list of over 20,000 missing people that we had to pare down," he said. "We had a solemn obligation to give the families closure."

Booster shots of Covid-19 vaccines may be on the horizon, but until the federal Food and Drug Administration determines whether additional doses are safe and effective for the general population, only people with moderately or severely impaired immune systems should seek a third dose, according to health care professionals.

With the start of the school year, it's a great time to highlight yearbooks, namely the 1960 East Hampton High School yearbook, The Sandpiper.

Anyone who was on the South Fork on Sept. 11, 2001, and old enough to remember the events of the day will likely start by recounting how perfectly it had begun: the weather dry and cool, the sky a brilliant blue, the surf as good as it gets. It was a perfection made all the more remarkable by what would follow at 8:46 a.m., when the first plane hit the north tower of the World Trade Center. 

The events of Sept. 11, 2001, made an indelible mark on New York City and the rest of the United States, which mourned 2,977 victims of terrorism that day. Some of East Hampton's first responders paused this week to reflect on the impact the terrorist attacks had on them personally.

Memorial ceremonies are planned in Southampton, Riverhead, and East Hampton. And on Tuesday, F.D.N.Y. companies will begin a five-day memorial bike ride in Montauk.

This year's Moby-Dick Marathon at Canio's Books is shaping up to be a whale of a celebration, with new programming additions to go with the longtime tradition of a community coming together to take turns publicly reading from all 135 chapters plus epilogue of "Moby-Dick" by Herman Melville.

An East Hampton medical practice is participating in a research project aimed at accelerating medical breakthroughs for Lyme disease, the most common vector-borne infectious disease in the United States and one of several illnesses that can be transmitted by an infected tick. 

This photograph showing haulseiners working with horses, taken from the C. Frank Dayton Photograph Collection, seems like the perfect image to mark Labor Day weekend and the final days of the summer season. It shows laboring fishermen, with a crew of at least five men and boys gathered around a horse-drawn cart apparatus with wagon wheels, working in surf up to their ankles.

It was news that nobody wanted to hear. For the third summer in a row, there has been a massive die-off of adult bay scallops in the Peconic Bay estuary system. If they had survived, the scallops would have been ready for harvest in early November, when the five-month season opens.

Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. pledged last Thursday to support the Anchor Society, a nonprofit organization seeking to develop a general store in East Hampton Village that would provide residents with daily necessities and a year-round gathering place.

Cannabis industry entrepreneurs foresee a boom in cannabis businesses following New York State's legalization of adult recreational use. While state and local governments may moving slowly on next steps, those seeking to make a killing in the business are already poised to pounce. 

The Big Duck is a nonagenarian. 

Although the life expectancy of a duck in the wild is 8 to 12 years, a big one from Long Island has managed to stay afloat until the age of 90. The Big Duck, located in Flanders, has been a Southampton landmark and legend since it was built in 1931. (Just to clarify, this one is made of concrete, it does not quack, and it has a store inside it.)