Villages

    It seems as if Patsy Topping has brought new meaning to “a warm and fuzzy Christmas.” Ms. Topping, who lives in South Carolina, arrived at her Bridgehampton farm early Friday morning with 20 puppies and young dogs saved from high-kill shelters in the South.

Under a subsidiary called the S.A.M. Trust, the producer and director Steven Spielberg has donated conservation easements over three properties on Georgica Cove in East Hampton Village

It has been surmised in New York magazine that if Gerald and Sara Wiborg Murphy’s property — 77 acres of oceanfront in East Hampton Village — were available for sale today, it could bring as much as $1 billion on the market.

At a meeting Monday night of the Montauk Citizens Advisory Committee, Richard Kahn, a retired attorney, thoroughly criticized revisions of East Hampton Town’s lighting law

The Montauk Lighthouse is one step closer this week to obtaining landmark status

At the East Hampton Village Board’s work session last Thursday, the board discussed changes to the size of signs in the village, and adopted a law amending parking restrictions in the off-season.

    It may not look like the backlot at Warner Brothers, but you can’t beat the location, location, location. For the past few weeks, undergraduate film students from New York University have been building sets, rehearsing, and filming in Tom Ferreira’s backyard at 63 Navy Road on the banks of Fort Pond Bay in Montauk.

    Drivers might have noticed the crew filming on the Napeague stretch last week.

    Spaghetti and meatballs will be on the plate at the first fund-raiser to help restore Scoville Hall in Amagansett, which was destroyed by fire on Oct. 15. Sponsored by the Order of the Eastern Star of the Masons, who held meetings at the hall, the dinner will be held at the Amagansett Fire House on Saturday from 5 to 7 p.m.

        There were several deer in the wrong place at the wrong time recently in East Hampton Town; eight of them caused eight separate accidents in the past few weeks alone.

    On Sunday around 4 a.m., a deer struck the front of Steven Akkala’s 2009 Honda while he was on Montauk Highway near Shipwreck Drive in Amagansett.

Staff of the Retreat shelter in East Hampton and local police chiefs will hold a panel discussion Monday in Bridgehampton about domestic violence.

Billed as "what everyone needs to know" about violence in the home and between people who are in relationships, the session will be held in the Hampton Library on Bridgehampton Main Street. It begins at 7 p.m. Admission is free.

If all goes well Saturday at an Amagansett fund-raiser, a Marine unit deployed in Afghanistan will be getting a shipment of much-needed items very soon.

Possible legislation limiting both the size of signs and the preponderance of bamboo was discussed at the East Hampton Village Board’s work session last Thursday.

Every town, every village, and every hamlet has its unnamed heroes. In Montauk, there’s Vinnie Grimes, who was recognized and given the Good Deed Award from the Boy Scouts

A Main Street apartment and a possible pergola on Lily Pond Lane were at the forefront of discussion during October’s East Hampton Village Zoning Board of Appeals meetings.

The Coast Guard is considering the Lighthouse committee’s request to bring back an exact replica of the Fresnel lens.

    A ledger has recently come to light, a kind of logbook that chronicled the day-to-day activities at the Ditch Plain, Montauk, lifesaving station during the five-year period from 1873 to 1878. Trouble is, you will have to go to Southold to see it.

    The Southold Historical Society purchased the ledger for its Horton Point Lighthouse Museum after it was offered for sale by a private collector.

    The future of the Thomas Moran House, the Long Island Power Authority’s answer to Tropical Storm Irene, and plaques and proclamations were on the agenda at Friday’s East Hampton Village Board meeting.

    Marti Mayo, the executive director of the Thomas Moran Trust, gave an update on the house at 229 Main Street. It is deteriorating, she said, with some sections on the verge of collapse.

     Elias Van Sickle, a junior at East Hampton High School, and Julian Verglas, a junior high school student in New York City, kite-surfed from Montauk to Block Island on Sunday to raise money for and awareness of the East Hampton Ocean Rescue Squad, a volunteer group.

     The crossing took one hour and 45 minutes in winds that averaged 30 miles an hour with 36-miles-an-hour gusts. The feat raised $3,000 for the rescue squad. 

    Kite-surfing is akin to sailing, but with participants on surfboards or smaller kite boards rather than in boats.

    A handful of new parking-by-permit-only signs posted in two public lots in Montauk have some cheering and at least one business owner scratching his head and asking why.

    The signs are part of an East Hampton Town project that added some 40 parking spaces to the hamlet by reconfiguring a number of spaces from parallel parking to head-on early last summer.

    “Just because plastic is disposable, that doesn’t mean it goes away,” says Jeb Berrier in the award-winning documentary “Bag It: Is Your Life Too Plastic?” which will be screened for free at the Rogers Memorial Library in Southampton on Monday. “And where is away?” According to the movie, “away” is overflowing landfills, mountainous islands of trash in the oceans, and even our own toxic bodies.

A week before Tropical Storm Irene ravaged the East Coast, David Ryan, the owner and founder of Sailing Montauk, was left with a lightning-charred Catalina 38, damaged beyond repair.

The Montauk Chamber of Commerce will be host its 30th fall festival on Saturday and Sunday, and, appropriately, 30 restaurants have promised to donate New England and Manhattan clam chowders.

A letter that will be sent to the two East Hampton Town justices asking them to do more to crack down on problems at the Surf Lodge restaurant was unanimously approved by the Montauk Citizens Committee.

    Chaps may have their place in the world of fashion, but when it comes to using a chain saw, they are a definite must.

    Michael Gaines, founder and president of CW Arborists in East Hampton, held a free chain-saw safety class on Sept. 15 at his place of business on Three Mile Harbor Road. Seven people listened intently as he instructed them about the intricacies of chain-saw techniques.

Representatives from the Montauk Friends of Erin, the Montauk Chamber of Commerce, the East Hampton Town Police Department, and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority will gather next week at Gurney’s Inn to discuss how to discourage drunken, under-age people from attending the annual St. Patrick’s Day parade in the hamlet.

Chamber officials drew up the petitions that have been posted in the chamber and at local businesses asking the transportation authority not to send trains to Montauk on March 12, the day of next year’s parade.

The 40-year-old Millstone nuclear facility in Waterford, Conn., is the same distance from Montauk as Montauk is from the Bridgehampton Commons.

In the 40 minutes it took Dr. Valenti and crew to fire up the backup generator, $9,000 worth of striped bass died.

As a huge American flag fluttered in the wind from the top of a ladder truck, the Montauk Fire Department dedicated a Sept. 11 monument on the department grounds on Sunday.

Those who shop at the I.G.A. in Amagansett has discontinued the use of plastic shopping bags in the grocery store altogether.

“Under Our Skin,” a much-anticipated documentary film about Lyme disease, will be shown tomorrow night at 7 at LTV Studio 3 Cinema in Wainscott.