East Hampton Village Hall will be closed to the public next week, starting on Monday and continuing through Jan. 19, when Martin Luther King’s Birthday is observed. Village Hall will reopen to the public on Jan. 20.
The closure is for upgrades to the building, known as the Beecher-Hand House, which was constructed in the mid-18th century. The village bought the building in 1994, and its carpeting dates to some time before that. “When the village purchased the building, it had the original rug,” Marcos Baladron, the village administrator, said this week. “We’re using this opportunity now, during our quietest month, to redo not just the carpet but internal wiring,” including the building’s Ethernet network cable.
The server at Village Hall will be down for approximately a week and a half, Mr. Baladron said, but the clerk’s office, on the first floor, “will be down only for a full week,” expected to span Monday through Jan. 19, he said. “We’re hoping we can possibly be open by the end of the week, but you never know.”
During the week of Jan. 19, the renovation work will move to the finance office and the offices of Mr. Baladron and Mayor Jerry Larsen, all on the second floor. Those offices will be closed that week, Mr. Baladron said. “It’s the first time we’ve done it in 30 years for that building,” he said at the village board’s Dec. 17 meeting. “It needs it.”
The Rev. Lyman Beecher, a Presbyterian minister who co-founded the American Temperance Society and was the father of Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” bought the structure in 1800. When he decided he could no longer afford to live here, he sold the house to Abraham Hand, a sixth-generation descendant of one of the original proprietors of East Hampton, according to “A Brief History of Our Village Hall” by the late Averill D. Geus, a former town historian.
The village board will hold its first meeting of 2026 on Friday, Jan. 16, at 11 a.m. at the Emergency Services Building.
