Villages

A floating whale that has been a mainstay of Sag Harbor's Harborfest for many years was the object of political vandalism when someone defaced it with the words "TRUMP MAGA."

The Shinnecock Canal remains open to limited boat traffic despite the failure of a hinge on one of the lock gates overnight on Tuesday. The county is discouraging all non-emergency boat traffic.

The application of Landry’s Inc. to install a pool and hot tub at the historic Huntting Inn, parts of which date to 1699, has been in front of the East Hampton Village Zoning Board of Appeals in one form or another for more than three years. On Friday, it is expected Landry’s wíll make a new appeal to the board.

“It’s all in line with what Sag Harbor wants to do on paper, and now it’s something we have to do in reality,” Drew Harvey said at the Sag Harbor Village Board meeting Tuesday night. Mr. Harvey, a member of the village’s parks and open space advisory committee, was speaking of a plan to preserve water access points at seven locations in the village, which, he warned, “are at risk of being lost to adjacent homeowners.”

While East Hampton Town boasts some large, well-known, historic cemeteries, less visible are the smaller family cemeteries dotted throughout the area. Some have just a single headstone. They’re visited infrequently, the families buried are older, and a handful have fallen into disrepair. Last week, restoration was completed on two of the town’s smaller colonial-era cemeteries.

Moments in local history, from the archives of The East Hampton Star.

As Sag Harbor gears up for Harborfest weekend, work behind the scenes has focused on the popular whaleboat races. “There was a tremendous community effort to rebuild the whaleboats,” Ellen Dioguardi, the president of the Sag Harbor Chamber of Commerce, said. A weekend of fun lies ahead.

PSEG Long Island, the region’s electrical power provider, announced this week that work has begun to prepare for winter storms and improve the reliability of its circuits in East Hampton Village, Springs, and Northwest Harbor.

This photograph from The East Hampton Star’s archive shows part of the Old Whalers Festival parade, possibly from 1963, with four men dressed as sailors riding in a whaleboat. Behind them is a car towing a whale float.

Dr. N. Patrick Hennessey, who has practiced dermatology out of the Wainscott Professional Center on Montauk Highway for the last 22 years, has relocated his practice to Southampton Village after being told to vacate the center. He was left scrambling, he wrote in a letter to patients, to see those who had booked appointments months in advance into September.

“People buy them from stores in the spring and then when they get big and messy, they no longer want them,” said Adrienne Gillespie, the hospital supervisor at the Evelyn Alexander Wildlife Refuge in Hampton Bays. “They find local ponds thinking they can survive, but they can’t for long.”

The jail pictured here was built in Sag Harbor in 1916 by George Garypie, with steel prison cells by the E.T. Barnum Wire and Iron Works of Detroit. It was used until 1983.