Editorials

Protecting Old Houses Two of the oldest houses on the South Fork, the 1707 Capt. John Dayton house in East Hampton and an Osborn house in Wainscott thought to have been built in 1695, were saved from demolition not long ago. In both cases, the owners wanted to do away with them to make room for new houses. Had it not been for quick thinking by Averill Dayton Geus and Barbara Osborn Meyer, valuable pieces of our heritage could have been lost. Plover Protection It has been a busy week for those who make it their business to look after piping plovers. The endangered birds, each one hardly bigger than a baseball but nowhere near as tough, showed up early this month, a week ahead of returning ospreys, as Larry Penny reports in this issue, and will soon begin nesting along ocean and bay beaches. End Of The Road The Long Island Rail Road shut its Southampton College station last week, on the grounds that it was too "lightly used" to justify its reconstruction. An average of just 16 riders a day were getting on or off there, the L.I.R.R. said. This melancholy statistic qualified the stop as one of 10 that seemed unlikely ever to repay the cost of the kind of renovations now proceeding elsewhere on the Montauk branch, as the Metropolitan Transportation Authority readies for new double-decker diesel trains. Please address correspondence to editor@easthamptonstar.com