Hundreds of travelers found themselves scrambling for reservations on Manhattan-bound Hampton Jitneys early Monday after a Dumpster struck the underside of the North Main Street railroad trestle in East Hampton Village and the Long Island Rail Road suspended service. Service was resumed between Jamaica and East Hampton in late morning, though how long service between East Hampton and Montauk would be suspended was uncertain.

According to Sgt. Mathew A. Morgan of the East Hampton Village police, the truck is registered to a Bay Shore company, and the Dumpster was being hauled by a 2004 Mack truck. The driver was issued a summons for ignoring signs warning northbound vehicles approaching the underpass that there is only 10 feet of clearance. There were no injuries.

A crew of railroad workers brought in a German-made Liebherr crane with a boom approximately 80 feet long. A strap was attached to the end of the boom, and it appeared the crew was pulling the trestle slightly up. A spokesman for the railroad was not immediately available for comment.

The railroad provided shuttle buses for affected stations and the Jitney was fully booked through the morning for buses leaving Montauk.  

Sag Harbor could get its cinema back. A community organization has entered into a contract with the owner of the Sag Harbor Cinema property four months after part of the iconic building was destroyed by fire. Fund-raising to seal the deal has now officially begun.

The Sag Harbor Partnership, a group that formed more than a year ago to help create a municipal park in the village, announced this week that after months of negotiations a contract has been signed to buy the property from Gerald Mallow, its longtime owner. The price: $8 million.

April Gornik, a North Haven artist and community activist who is the vice president of the partnership and led the charge, said they have until the end of the year to close.

Time is of the essence, she said by phone on Tuesday. They have until about July, when a big fund-raiser is planned, to decide "if what we're looking at in terms of pledges is substantial enough to go forward." One anonymous donor has already pledged $1 million.

A wind-fueled fire ripped through a section of Sag Harbor's Main Street on Dec. 16, ultimately destroying two buildings, including the Sag Harbor Cinema, and badly damaging others, devastating businesses and displacing two people from second-story apartments.

Flames gutted the lobby of the cinema, leaving the Art Deco facade in danger of collapse. Officials tore down the lobby that very night. The theater portion of the 1930s building, with a large screen and located at the back of the L-shaped structure, remained standing. Officials said it had smoke damage only. The theater's neon "Sag Harbor" sign, an 11-year-old replica of the original and considered a village landmark, was saved and is being kept in a nearby storage facility.

"We think it's really important to give our community back what it lost," Ms. Gornik said. "It really was the heart of this place in a big way."

The partnership plans not only to rebuild, but to establish a Sag Harbor Cinema Arts Center. The not-for-profit would expand on the cinema's tradition of art house film programming with educational initiatives for school-age children and residents.

Ms. Gornik said estimates for the construction project are $4 million to $5 million at a minimum.

Plans include rebuilding the facade and repairing the sign, and rebuilding and repurposing some of the space. The group plans to preserve the "curved scope" screen currently in the 480-seat theater, though Ms. Gornik said no one from the group had yet been able to get inside to assess the damage.

The group has plans for two theaters. A larger one would seat about 250 people, another about 150. A private screening room with 30 seats is planned for the second floor above Main Street. It would also serve as a classroom.

"We want to do programming that will serve a really wide range of people and age groups," Ms. Gornik said.

The cinema has long been for sale, and the idea of purchasing it for community use is nothing new. The asking price was $14 million before the fire. Several members of the partnership have been trying to buy it, to ensure it remained a cinema, since 2009.

"We were concerned that we'd lose it to some big business, and Main Street would be irrevocably changed," Ms. Gornik said in a press release.

Giulia D'Agnolo Vallan, a member of the selection committee for the Venice Film Festival, and Andrew Fierberg, a movie producer, came up with the original vision for the cinema arts foundation, Ms. Gornik said.

The small group reconvened in July, when, Ms. Gornik said, Mr. Mallow expressed an interest in having the cinema purchased by someone who wanted to preserve it. Architectural and structural reports were drawn up.

"We were set to be in contract by the end of December, when the fire threw everything into disarray, but we didn't lose hope," she said. The group forged ahead, working with experts on how best to rebuild the cinema, make it profitable, and serve the community. "We're grateful that Gerry stuck with us."

"The Cinema Arts Center will provide an opportunity to draw on the talents and experiences of an ever-expanding year-round community on the East End," Susan Lacy, a filmmaker, creator of the "American Masters" series on PBS, and Noyac homeowner, said in the release.

The partnership's Big Tent party, to be held on Long Wharf on July 16, will serve as a fund-raiser and honor Mr. Mallow. The partnership's inaugural party last year raised more than $130,000, which was donated to the Village of Sag Harbor to help its efforts to establish a waterfront park.

Once money for the purchase has been secured, a capital campaign will begin for the construction. Grant money may also be available.

"We are fortunate to live in a community where so many people are giving of their time, talent, and money toward restoring such a cultural treasure," said Nick Gazzolo, the president of the partnership. "Main Street won't feel whole until that famous sign is shining again. Everyone wants to see this comeback."

Contributions to the project will be tax-deductible and can be made to the Sag Harbor Partnership.

Walking is good for you. My doctors say that. Just about every doctor says that. There are three kinds of recreational walking: fast steady walking, group walking with a guide, and walking by yourself or with another while studying the ground, sky, trees, and maybe water.

When I was a lad growing up in Mattituck, I very rarely got a ride to or from school. I mostly walked or rode my bike. There is a major difference between walking and biking. It is difficult to stop and hold on to the bike while you examine something in the road or alongside it. It’s so much easier to stop and study when you’re on foot.

That’s how I became both a collector and a nature lover. When you’re walking you see everything close up. You hear the sounds — the birds singing, the frogs croaking, and the like. But you also learn the lore of inanimate objects while you make a little on the side: You find pennies, nickels, dimes, even quarters, and, very, very rarely, a half dollar, a denomination that we almost never see these days.

But, more often, you find nails, screws, washers, nuts, bolts, parts of cars, and other hardware, and once in a while a hand tool. You also find tinfoil and matchbook matches, two items that were rare along the way coming and going when I was a school kid. I’d pick each item up and study it; there was no rush, especially on the return trips from school. I still walk, stop, and study in the same way today. I’ve amassed a fine collection of hardware and a few coins to go with it. I even found a claw hammer, which I still use to bang and pull nails.

A walk along the beach is a special treat. You not only find pretty jingle shells, scallop shells, and molted crab exoderms, but also the brown Fucus seaweeds, with the floats that you can squeeze and pop when they are long dried, and the occasional dried starfish or moon snail shell. You also find useful pieces of lumber, fishing line, rope, and so on, among the plastic bottles and cigarette butts. There was very little plastic in use when I was a boy, so the beach was comparably cleaner back then.

That’s the kind of walking I am particularly fond of. It’s good to have an older companion who knows the names of the birds, trees, and wildflowers, who knows what is native and what is alien. My late sister Marjorie was seven years older than I and was that kind of companion. She knew the names of several birds, even the songs of many. She knew when the May pinks were blossoming, when the wild cherries were ripe enough to eat, and where to find beach plums in the early fall.

Victoria Bustamante in Montauk took one such long walk on Saturday in the northern part of the Suffolk County park east of Lake Montauk with only herself as company. She saw many wondrous things: a “kettle of 18 turkey vultures” circling and soaring high up in the sky, and “glass eels,” elvers, swimming up Little Reed Pond from Lake Montauk toward Big Reed Pond — not an annual event, mind you. 

The little guys, the size of “nightcrawler” earthworms, have come all the way from the ocean depths south of Bermuda to get to their nursery of choice, where they will become dark and slowly grow into adult eels. Then, after growing up in Big Fresh Pond for several years, they’ll go back whence they came. They are diadromous like salmon, alewives, shad, and striped bass, meaning they can live in both salt and fresh water. They are catadromous, however, moving downstream into seawater to spawn, while the others are anadromous, moving from salt to fresh to spawn.

A kingfisher was hunting with its rattling call, stopping to hover in one spot, zeroing in on a fish below, while an osprey flew by with a footlong silvery fish, alit on a branch, and began to eat it. A common loon was preening in the inlet to Little Reed, exchanging its winter plumage for a breeding one, Vicki thought. When changing from one plumage to another, they don’t fly. In that case, ornithologists say, the waterfowl is in its “eclipse” stage.

Mourning cloak butterflies were about. They overwinter beneath the fallen leaves and are the first to appear each spring. Their dark brown wings with an ecru edging give this large butterfly its colloquial name. They first appear when there are very few flowers to nectar, and how they survive is a mystery to me.

Vicki also came upon phoebes and two tree swallows, both species of which are insectivorous and need to find insects to get by. Many insects, including a big fat bumblebee observed by Vicki, are emerging in these first days of April. She also came upon three species of woodpeckers: red-breasted, yellow-bellied sapsuckers, and downies. Woodpeckers are also bug eaters; indeed, the insects must be out in force.

And yes, after all that walking and bending over to study this and that, in the narrative email of her trip there was also a photo of Vicki’s hand with a deer tick on it ready to bite. Ticks are arthropods like spiders, but they might as well be insects. 

Patricia Hope in Northwest has been studying ticks for several years running. She relates that thus far this year she has found only deer ticks. The lone stars, a more southern species, wait until it’s warm, but after Sunday’s near-70-degree heat wave I just bet they’re out now.

When you drive or bike you never encounter a tick. For every win there is a loss. Walk along a grassy trail slowly, study the vegetation and the wildlife while doing so, pick some fresh green herbage or a spring flower or two, and you will learn much and gain a deep satisfaction, but when you are done, check yourself thoroughly. Ticks, like mosquitoes, don’t give a darn if you love nature or not, they’re only after a hearty blood meal.

There is a moral to the tale. Nature doesn’t kid around, doesn’t take chances. What if the ospreys arrived to raise a family and there were no alewives? What if the mourning cloak butterfly couldn’t find a single flower to feed on? What if the woodpeckers and other insect eaters were want to find edible insects? What if that kettle of vultures couldn’t find a single roadkill to feast on? What if the glass eels never made it into Big Reed0 Pond? What if we humans stopped killing each other? 

Oops, we better get back to nature, or we won’t survive.

Larry Penny can be reached via email at [email protected].

Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. has introduced a package of legislation intended to aid the commercial fishing industry. Two of the three bills were introduced in the 2015-16 legislative session. One would direct the state attorney general to bring legal action against the National Marine Fisheries Service, or any other federal agency, to challenge existing quotas that the bill calls inequitable and discriminatory against New York State commercial fishermen. The bill is now in the Assembly’s environmental conservation committee.

A second bill, also introduced in the 2015-16 legislative session, adds a new element in its current form. It would establish a commercial fishing advocate and, in its new version, create a commercial fishing jobs development program under State Department of Economic Development jurisdiction. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo vetoed the bill last year, Mr. Thiele said yesterday. “We’ve re-introduced it and made revisions that we hope will help encourage the governor to sign it,” he said.

The third proposed legislation would establish a task force to create a program that would promote the marketing and sustainability of New York seafood.

“Commercial fishing remains a vital part of our economy and our tradition on Long Island,” Mr. Thiele said in a statement issued on Friday. “Our fishermen are under siege like never before from federal and state regulations and a tough economic climate. We need to foster the industry, not strangle it in red tape and regulations.”

“Now more than ever, in the face of losing territory and possibly fishing grounds, it’s really important for our legislators to support our industry, which dates back hundreds of years,” Bonnie Brady, the director of the Long Island Commercial Fishing Association, said on Tuesday. “We appreciate Assemblyman Thiele’s support.”

State Senator Kenneth P. LaValle is co-sponsoring the bills in the Senate.

Jill Malusky has spent her career digging into the past, but at her office at the Osborn-Jackson House on March 24 the new executive director of the East Hampton Historical Society was very much looking to the future.

Ms. Malusky, who had previously been director of visitor engagement at the Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill in Kentucky, was completing her first week on the job in East Hampton and spoke with enthusiasm about all that is on the horizon as she settles in to her new role. “I want to get to know the nature of this place, what the community is like,” she said. “I love that it’s a walkable community and that all our buildings are really central.”

In addition to the Osborn-Jackson House on Main Street, an 18th-century residence that houses exhibitions from the society’s permanent collection of textiles, pottery, and furnishings, the society also oversees the 1680 Mulford Farm on James Lane; Clinton Academy, the Town House, and the Hook Schoolhouse on Main Street, all dating from the 1780s, and the East Hampton Town Marine Museum in Amagansett.

“There are so many great resources here,” Ms. Malusky said, speaking of the various newspapers and magazines and the public access TV channel that cover local happenings and keep the community informed. “There’s a great awareness that we get to tap into.”

Ms. Malusky went to graduate school in England at the University of Manchester, where she earned an M.A. in social anthropology, but her undergraduate degree, from Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, is in film and photography. “I was always interested in people and stories and documenting them,” she said.

 “Farm & Family,” a documentary she made while in college, looks at the story of her own family’s farm in rural Ohio. Growing up on a farm in Ohio’s Amish country “is what set me on the path to studying history,” she said.

“I fell into museums and found that to be more interesting than working in the film industry.” She likes that museum work gives her “the opportunity to build something and support something longer-term.”

Storytelling has remained a strong part of her work. “I’m always into pulling out a story that somebody’s never head of, and making it so that those of us living our lives today can say, ‘Oh, that’s just like me.’ ”

After graduate school, she managed Merchants Adventurers’ Hall, a medieval guildhall in York, England, for a year, while still in her 20s. She inventoried the hall’s collection and planned exhibitions and educational and interpretive programs, while also leading the effort for museum accreditation.

“Ever since I’ve worked in the field of the museum, I’ve always been the youngest person in the room,” Ms. Malusky said, when asked her age. (She is 35.) “I was always just driven and passionate about this work.”

“I don’t look like what people expect in a director,” she said, but that can be ­a good thing. “I think I connect with an audience that doesn’t always see itself at historic sites.”

The position at the Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill was pivotal for her. “It was such a huge site,” with an equally huge budget and a vast number of visitors each year. Shaker Village, a National Historic Landmark, is the largest of five similar Shaker sites that are open to visitors. The 3,000-acre property includes 34 buildings, a farm, and a nature preserve, with an inn and restaurants in some of the historic buildings. She was there for three years. Among her many tasks were envisioning a new visitor experience for the landmark and developing new programs for audiences of all ages.

She is excited that the East Hampton Historical Society is developing an app and plans to use social media and imagery a lot more to spread the word about the society’s holdings and events and share pieces of the collection that might not otherwise be seen often. “It gives access to a different audience, a new audience,” she said.

The app, which has been in development since before her arrival, will be used for a walking tour. “We’d like to have it done for the start of the season,” she said. There may be other ways that the app could enhance people’s experience of the society’s sites or collections. “Over the next few months, we’ll look at where it’s appropriate and where it’s not.” Technology can complement the experience, but “sometimes it’s better not to clutter something up and let people have a hands-on experience.” 

Ms. Malusky is replacing Richard Barons, the society’s energetic longtime director, who is staying on in the role of curator during the transition, but will retire later this year.

She is settling in to a place in Sag Harbor and getting out as much as possible to meet people and get to know the community. A hiker and trail-lover, she has already discovered the Long Pond Greenbelt and a hamlet-to-hamlet trail.

“I want to encourage all of your readers to visit our properties when we have events or open our doors, to come share their ideas, their thoughts,” she said. “This is your museum, your institution, your history.” She feels privileged, she added, to have the chance to help take care of the buildings and “make them come alive and be relevant and important today.”

East Hampton Town will work with the Army Corps of Engineers to have the Lake Montauk inlet dredged, but will drop a plan to pair that project with beach reconstruction work to the west side of the inlet, which the Corps could have done under a post-Hurricane Sandy funding program.

The Army Corps is willing to foot the bill for its preferred alternative only, a $10 million plan that would use dredged sand to build up the beach to the west of the inlet. The plan, however, also includes the installation of several groins made of sand-filled geo­textile bags at intervals along the shore to contain the loose sand, and town officials balked at that idea. The groins would contravene East Hampton’s local waterfront revitalization plan, which details where such hard structures might or might not be built along the shore.

The groin proposal meets the federal agency’s standards of cost-effectiveness and “maximized net benefit,” Steve Couch of the Army Corps said at a meeting last year at which alternatives were discussed, and it would have been largely paid for by the feds. Town officials recommended instead a project that would eliminate the groins while still using dredged sand to similarly rebuild the beach. East Hampton had hoped the Corps would agree to shoulder the $21 million cost.

However, Supervisor Larry Cantwell said Tuesday, “despite the town’s effort to convince the Corps that alternative five was a good alternative, and that the Corps should pay for it, they’re not going to.” Should the town wish to proceed with that project, it would have to come up with the additional $11 million beyond the cost of the other, Corps-approved project.

Instead, Mr. Cantwell suggested pursuing only the dredging of the inlet, which would be designated not as a post-Sandy beach reconstruction effort but as a navigation aid project. The dredging would still yield sand that could be added to the beach, though not the volume that had been hoped.

“I think pursuing this as a navigation project is the way to go,” Mr. Cantwell said at a Tuesday board meeting. The inlet is “such a critical navigation point,” he said.

The most recent plan that was discussed with the Army Corps calls for dredging the inlet to a depth of 19 feet, Councilman Peter Van Scoyoc said. “This is our best opportunity to make that a safer inlet,” he said. With constant shoaling, “that east side is quite shallow . . . at times, it’s difficult for two fishing boats to pass each other. We already have some of the larger fishing boats complaining that they can’t get in or out except on a very high tide.”

With Gov. Andrew Cuomo pushing state legislation that would strip East Hampton Town’s authority to hold Uber car operators to town taxicab regulations — among them car inspections and driver licensing after fingerprinting and background checks — town officials are investigating other solutions to the problems caused by the annual summer influx of out-of-town drivers, who compete with local companies and are sometimes found sleeping in their cars.

The governor favors a proposed law that would oversee Uber and other ride-sharing services summoned through apps, and allow them to operate legally throughout the state. The pending legislation, which is to be attached to a state budget bill, would preclude municipalities from enacting their own local regulations governing the ride services.

  “We need to see the details of the bill,” Supervisor Larry Cantwell said Tuesday. “They’re literally writing these bills right now.”

East Hampton Town’s taxi licensing law does not specifically address Uber, but a provision that requires cab companies to have a physical business office in the town in order to obtain town cab permits, and another that requires cars available for hire to be registered to their associated companies, essentially made it impossible for Uber to do business here.

After East Hampton passed the law, Uber mounted a protest campaign among its customers, but the town stuck to its rules, which were developed in response to numerous complaints about chaotic and unsafe situations in the busy summer season.

“This has never been about East Hampton versus Uber,” Mr. Cantwell said Tuesday. “It’s about the practices of Uber drivers, that caused an untenable situation in Montauk. If we could fix those. . . .”

A year ago, when the proposed state legislation was first being discussed, the supervisor wrote to the governor explaining that the vehicle-for-hire industry, including Uber, “profoundly . . . impact[s] our community.” He said that “questionable tactics and actions” of 89 taxi and livery companies operating close to 1,100 licensed vehicles in the town were overwhelming the public safety resources, and cited roadway congestion, use of limited parking, and “literally fighting over fares.” Mr. Cantwell also mentioned “fare gouging, passenger stranding, and driver assaults (of one another and passengers alike). . . .”

The town’s taxicab regulations, the supervisor wrote, “have been very successful,” and were welcomed by the local business community and the public. He asked the governor, should he pursue state regulation, to include provisions against sleeping in vehicles and taking up public parking spaces, and to allow towns to establish their own taxi and limousine commissions to regulate fares.

State Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. said yesterday that he expected a vote within 48 hours on a budget bill to which the ride-sharing service legislation is attached. It was still being drafted yesterday, he said, but was reportedly to contain three provisions, placing the regulation of ride-sharing services under the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles, bypassing local authority; imposing a 4-percent fee per ride, which would go to the state’s general fund, and revising insurance laws that have curbed the ride-sharing companies’ ability to obtain required coverage.

“If this legislation was stand-alone legislation, I’d vote against it,” Mr. Thiele said. The issue of home rule was contentious, he said, with state senators siding with the governor on regulation of Uber and other companies, and members of the assembly supporting local control. “The Town of East Hampton is a perfect example of the fact that one size does not fit all.”

“This is special-interest politics at its worst,” said Assemblyman Thiele, saying that the proposed law was the result of a “multimillion-dollar lobbying campaign” by Uber.

In light of the expected legislation, Mr. Cantwell said discussions are taking place with town attorneys and other staffers regarding how the town might yet address the influx of Uber drivers here.

“My concern is to keep peace, good order, and protect the health and safety of the people who live here. That’s really the issue,” he said.

Kimco Realty, which owns the Bridgehampton Commons, is hoping to make way for a new discount retailer in the 220,000-square-foot shopping center, which would offer men more options when it comes to clothing and shoes.

An application to expand the T.J. Maxx building by 17,000 square feet to add a Marshalls is nearly ready for public review. The proposal is currently before the Southampton Town Planning Board, which will discuss it again next Thursday at 2 p.m., but it will also require variances from the town zoning board.

T.J. Maxx currently occupies about 33,000 square feet. Marshalls and T.J. Maxx would split the finished 50,000-square-foot space. The plan would increase the square footage of the shopping center, which sits on about 30 acres, by about 6 percent.

TJX Companies owns both T.J. Maxx and Marshalls, both of which offer off-price apparel and home fashions, and also operates HomeGoods in Wainscott. According to Nicholas Brown, vice president of development of Kimco Realty in the Northeast, T.J. Maxx and Marshalls — together known as Marmaxx — have different offerings. “The brands are distinguished in terms of who they target,” he said by phone this week. Marshalls offers more junior apparel, family footwear, and men’s apparel, while T.J. Maxx carries additional designer labels, he said.

The expansion of the building would happen to its rear, toward Marders, and a back door would be added for access. “Offsite parking,” Mr. Brown said, would run along the boundary of the property, adding 85 more spaces, enough, he said, to provide adequate parking for the addition. The shopping center currently has 1,253 spaces.

Based on parking, Mr. Brown said, the shopping center is underutilized during peak hours, with only 70 percent of the spaces occupied, according to traffic studies. Existing parking in back of the stores is generally not used.

The proposal needs site plan approval from the planning board, as well as several variances, including parking, setback relief (because an existing canopy on the side of the building would be extended), and a lot coverage variance. The shopping center is at 24.5 percent for lot coverage, Mr. Brown said, and the expansion would add an additional 1.4 percent. Twenty percent is permitted.

The proposal, which has been in the works for the better part of a year, has already drawn attention from the Bridgehampton Citizens Advisory Committee.    Peter Wilson, a member of the committee, said Bridgehampton is still facing a possible 100,000-square-foot commercial space across the street from the Commons at the property known as the Bridgehampton Gateway. “Why should we encourage this expansion? Where do we stop?” he asked at a recent meeting.

Julie Burmeister, a committee member who has been keeping tabs on the proposal, encouraged other members to write letters when a public hearing is scheduled in the coming months.

Since the expansion is at the rear of the shopping center, the visual impact from Montauk Highway is minimal, Mr. Brown said, adding that additional landscaping is planned along Snake Hollow Road.

Speaking of landscaping, an area of shrubs between Montauk Highway and the parking lot was cleared some time last year, to the ire of the Bridgehampton advisory committee, which complained to town officials. Mr. Brown explained that portions of the landscaping were indeed removed or pruned by those who were unaware that covenants in a previous site plan required the buffer. An agreement for restoration was reached last fall, he said. Some of the landscaping has already been restored along the west side of the shopping center, and the rest will be reinstalled in coming weeks when weather permits.

The Commons is also working on leasing Radio Shack’s soon-to-be empty space. Asked what Kmart’s future is in the Commons — a question raised by advisory committee members following news that its parent company, Sears Holdings, could be facing bankruptcy — Mr. Brown said, “Kmart still currently has a lease with us. We’re continuing to monitor the situation.”

The mortgage on the property at 153 Mulford Lane in Lazy Point, Amagansett, is underwater, and the house there may soon follow. It goes on the auction block Tuesday outside East Hampton Town Hall, where the high bidder gets to assume the roughly $977,000 debt owed to Hudson City Savings Bank, plus interest.

In return, he or she will be able to roll out of bed at dawn and take a quick dip in Gardiner’s Bay. But buyer beware: The bedroom could be at the bottom of the bay before long.

“They should just tear it down,” Linda Badkin, a neighbor, said Sunday. She was out on her deck, two houses north of the distressed property, taking advantage of a sunny spring day to repair some planks. “The bank should cut their losses.”

The property is tiny, about 5,000 square feet. There is nowhere to move the erosion-endangered house, because a neighbor’s driveway runs right behind it. The neighbors, Joshua Young and Christine Lemieux, fought the town in court for the right to build a revetment to hold back the bay, but lost. However, they can move their house if it becomes necessary. 

The former owner of 153 Mulford is Kevin Klenke, who purchased it with his wife in 2005 for $1.2 million. In 2007, Hamptons Cottages and Gardens wrote that “A neglected beach house on Napeague Bay caught the eye of Leigh and Kevin Klenke. It needed a miracle to transform it into what it is today. But the wife, with miracle worker and designer Tom Samet, had the vision. It was completed in record time.”

  The result was a two-bedroom house with two bathrooms, a large living room area, and a wraparound deck, all decorated in a nautical theme.

That was then. This is now. Ms. Klenke has died. The bank foreclosed on the property in November. Every major storm, Ms. Badkin said, takes away up to four feet of shoreline. Water now laps over the rocks beneath the front deck.

Ms. Badkin pointed at an often-photographed house on stilts, standing in the water about 30 yards out from the beach. When she bought at Lazy Point, she said, she could walk to it. “They should tear that down, too. It is an eyesore.”

The owner of the stilt house reportedly paid $1 for it. Ms. Badkin did not know his name, but said he still tries to maintain the structure, going so far recently as to replace part of the roof that had rotted through. “He thought he could make a fishing shack out of it,” she said.

The interior of the Klenke house appears bare, stripped of all fixtures and furnishings. The steps to the front door are gone, and a note pinned to the door warns that the bank has declared the place vacant. The roof appears to be sagging.

And it can all be yours at 1 p.m. Tuesday. Hudson City Savings Bank declined to say what would happen to the property if it does not sell.

James Rosenquist, a progenitor of Pop Art who expanded its scale and developed a painterly language marked by the juxtaposition of fragmented and disjunctive images, died at home in New York City on Friday after a long illness. He was 83.

His best known art, which encapsulated many of his concerns, was “F-111,” an 86-foot-long work he began in 1964 that took as its subject the F-111 fighter plane, parts of which were interspersed with images of a rubber tire, a child beneath a hair dryer, lightbulbs, spaghetti, and more, all rendered with eye-popping colors and cartoon-like imagery.

Describing that painting, he said the plane was “flying through the flak of consumer society to question the collusion between the Vietnam death machine, consumerism, the media, and advertising.” While there is no denying the painting’s political message, he nevertheless responded to a question from the Icelandic painter Erro, saying, “It was more about composition. I’d do anything for composition. I’d tear things up.”

According to Terrie Sultan, director of the Parrish Art Museum, “James Rosenquist’s iconic works definitively heralded a new direction in American painting. Along with his creative colleagues Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, Rosenquist charted the territory of Pop Art beginning in the 1960s and continuing to today. A master technician and inspired thinker, Rosenquist brought his real-world experience as a professional sign painter into the realm of high art.”

Writing about Mr. Rosenquist’s work for The East Hampton Star, the late Robert Long said, “No other painter understands as well as he does the power of juxtaposition; no other painter has used images from popular culture with such extraordinary force.” He also pointed out that the Rosenquist works reproduce easily but deceptively, because, up close, “You can see brushstrokes, and underpainting, and even marks where masking tape has been ripped away from the canvas.”

Born in Grand Forks, N.D., on Nov. 29, 1933, to Louis and Ruth Rosenquist, he moved to New York City in 1955 after three years of art study at the University of Minnesota. He said one of his teachers, Cameron Booth, “told me to get out of the Midwest and go to New York and study with Hans Hofmann. But Hofmann wasn’t there when I got there.”

Instead, he studied for a year with George Grosz and Edwin Dickinson at the Art Students League, and he moved to Coenties Slip in Lower Manhattan, where the artists Jack Youngerman, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Indiana, and Agnes Martin had studios. During those early years, until 1960, his day job was painting billboards, but he was otherwise an abstract painter.

According to Sarah Bancroft, who organized Mr. Rosenquist’s 2003 retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum, the painting “Zone” (1960-61) was the breakthrough that left abstraction behind and utilized “jarring shifts of scale and content for which the artist is known.”

Some established art critics, however, dismissed his and other Pop artists’ work. One noteworthy dust-up occurred in 1972 between Mr. Rosenquist and the New York Times critic John Canaday. In a letter published in The Times, the artist said, “Mr. Canaday has revealed himself over my work in the past when my ‘F-111’ painting was exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum. He disliked this immensely.” Mr. Canaday was subsequently criticized by Thomas Hoving, then the museum’s director.

Mr. Rosenquist lived in East Hampton from 1964 until the mid-1970s. He also had houses in Bedford, N.Y., Miami, and Aripeka, Fla., where a fire in 2009 destroyed his house, office, and studio and much of his work.

His first marriage, to Mary Lou Adams, ended in divorce. His survivors include Mimi Thompson, his wife since 1987, a son, John Rosenquist, from his first marriage, a daughter, Lily, from his second marriage, and a grandson.