Villages

After “one of the most egregious violations of a conservation easement in the trust’s 36-year history,” the Peconic Land Trust won a temporary restraining order last Thursday to stop tree cutting on nearly six acres of reserved land.

Fresh from their appearance at the Fisherman’s Fair on Saturday on the grounds of Ashawagh Hall in Springs, the East Hampton Town Trustees have set Oct. 13 as the date of their annual Largest Clam Contest.

After a long stretch of clear days, Tuesday's forecast was for rain and thunder, and the sky delivered. This did not keep a few people from heading to Main Beach, giving the mostly bored staff and lifeguards a little something to do.

Music for Montauk will kick off its summer series of outdoor concerts Thursday with “Brahms Gypsy Dances,” passionate quartet songs, accompanied by piano and strings, under a tent at Third House at Montauk County Park.

On Aug. 17 the selection will be Bach’s most festive Cantata No. 51, featuring strings, trumpet, keyboard, and vocals, with the operatic star Rachelle Durkin and trumpeter C.J. Camerieri. Both concerts, at 6:30 p.m., are free and family friendly. Concertgoers are encouraged to take picnics, chairs, and blankets.

Hook Mill Road in East Hampton Village will remain closed to most traffic through Nov. 10 as construction crews continue replacing the railroad trestles crossing North Main Street and Accabonac Road.

East Hampton Village has hired a landscape architecture firm to develop plans to improve Herrick Park with new pathways, reconfigured ball fields, better lighting, and formalized entrances.

In business for over 50 years in East Hampton, Halsey’s Garage rose from humble beginnings but seemed to find itself in the right place at the right time.

With a segment of the donor class camped on the South Fork this month, President Trump is to attend fund-raisers tomorrow at a Bridgehampton house owned by the developer Joe Farrell and at the Southampton house of the developer Stephen Ross and his wife, Kara Ross.     

Calvary Baptist Church on Spinner Lane in East Hampton will have its annual barbecue on Sunday from 2 to 6 p.m.

The dead adult humpback whale towed to the Montauk ocean beach last week is just one of several humpbacks that we have been reading about this year in the local newspapers. There have been many sightings offshore and even in Great South Bay and other estuarine water bodies.

“The Youth Climate Movement Could Save the Planet,” on Monday at 7 p.m., will be the first in the 2019 Hamptons Institute series of topical panel discussions at Guild Hall in East Hampton.

After a dead humpback whale was found floating six miles off Montauk on July 24, scientists from the Atlantic Marine Conservation Society are seeking to pinpoint the cause of death.

“It’s pretty inconclusive what we’ve found so far,” said Robert DiGiovanni, the founder and chief scientist of the conservation society, which conducted a necropsy of the animal on Friday on a cordoned-off portion of Montauk’s Umbrella Beach. “The whale was severely decomposed so we didn’t really find a lot of internal organs,” said Mr. DiGiovanni.

For years, drivers with handicapped placards have favored a space for easy access to the library and Guild Hall across the street. Now, suddenly, the Handicapped Parking sign was no longer there.

Elizabeth Halliday and Roderic Randolph Richardson were married last Thursday. The barefoot wedding took place in the water, along the foreshore of Havens Beach in Sag Harbor. Kathleen Mulcahy, the newly elected mayor of Sag Harbor and longtime friend of the groom, officiated, her first such wedding.

Susan Wood Richardson, the groom’s stepmother, hosted an intimate gathering in Amagansett preceding the nuptials, and Alice and John Tepper Marlin, family friends, hosted the wedding reception at their house in Springs after the ceremony.

Southampton Town’s purchase of 1.25 acres in Sag Harbor Village that is to become the John Steinbeck Waterfront Park was finalized on July 24 and later that day the public got its first look at conceptual plans for the park.

Sally Krusch wishes the Friends of the Montauk Library had a few more young volunteers to do some of the heavy lifting — literally and figuratively.

Ms. Krusch, the president of the Friends’ board of trustees, said it could benefit from more help with administrative tasks and event planning, and also with the actual carrying of boxes of books. Its roster of volunteers consists mostly of retired folks — Ms. Krusch is 70, and there’s even one member in her 90s — and books are heavy.

Item of the Week From the East Hampton Library Long Island Collection

A proposal from AT&T to build a freestanding 50-foot-high structure at St. Peter’s Chapel on Old Stone Highway in Springs, to house cellphone antennas and associated equipment, was discussed at a meeting of the East Hampton Town Planning Board.

As complaints about water quality at Ditch Plain persist, with surfers falling ill and beachgoers reporting foul odors at low tide, routine testing performed there this week by Concerned Citizens of Montauk turned up nothing amiss.

The whale was towed to a beach in Montauk where the Atlantic Marine Conservation Society will perform a necropsy.

After a humpback whale was caught on July 15 in a fishing net off Town Line Beach in Sagaponack (and managed to free itself), and as several more have been seen feeding and breaching along East End shores this week, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation is assessing whether fishing nets should be temporarily removed from coastal waters to prevent entanglements. 

The owners of an oceanfront property at 33 Lily Pond Lane, who are seeking permission to tear down a house in a coastal erosion hazard area and construct a new one, presented a drastically scaled-back plan for the property to the East Hampton Village Zoning Board of Appeals on July 12.

Visitors to the Montauk Lighthouse may not notice it yet, but a tower restoration expected to cost just shy of $1.1 million is in its early stages this summer, as the Montauk Historical Society committee that oversees the national historic landmark works to raise the money to complete the project by 2021.

Several proposed laws, including one that would prohibit professional landscapers from using gas-powered leaf blowers from June 1 to Labor Day, will be considered by the East Hampton Village Board at hearings on Wednesday at 11 a.m.

Parents who previously opted their children out of routine vaccinations for religious reasons will no longer be able to claim that exemption for school enrollment purposes come September.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, the decorated astrophysicist, author, and host of television shows and podcasts, has been credited with sparking public interest in science — and keeping people’s attention on it — over the last few decades. He will speak at the Spur in East Hampton Friday night.

Item of the Week From the East Hampton Library Long Island Collection

The newly restored Dominy family woodworking and clock shops will return to their original site on North Main Street soon after Labor Day, said Robert Hefner, East Hampton Village’s director of historic services, who is supervising their restoration, as well as the reconstruction of the Dominys’ timber-frame house, which will serve as an adjacent exhibition space.

In its latest round of water testing results for the week of July 15, Concerned Citizens of Montauk identified East Creek at the south end of Lake Montauk as an area of serious concern. Water sampled there showed the highest levels of the bacteria enterococcus of any of the more than two dozen sites monitored by C.C.O.M.

An East Hampton Town official and a representative of Concerned Citizens of Montauk both confirmed this week that they have received reports of foul odors at Ditch Plain and people experiencing skin, eye, and sinus irritation after taking a dip in the water there in the last two to three weeks.