Villages

“It’s not like I went to the moon or anything, but it’s something I did that was pretty cool when I was 10 years old,” Billy Strong said, before objecting to someone else “taking credit” for a 1976 "Jaws"-inspired prank at Town Pond.

It’s fitting that the winner of East Hampton’s first Holiday Spirit storefront-décorating contest should be a business known for having fascinating windows: The Monogram Shop on Newtown Lane has made national headlines not for its holiday décor but for the tally of political cup sales that, in election cycles past, has been a notoriously accurate predictor of presidential outcomes. The window cup count was wrong in November, but the window display in December is, according to a panel of judges, oh so right.

Bridgehampton’s Ernestine Rose, an important figure in the history of the New York Public Library, championed preserving Black culture through the Schomburg Collection.

From 1949 water worries on the eve of massive Long Island development to the small triumph of halting gun sales at the Bridgehampton Kmart, it happened here, news junkies.

Pitch Your Peers, a charitable effort launched here in 2023 by Brooke Bohnsack, has awarded a $35,000 grant to the Springs Food Pantry and a $10,000 grant to Project Most, the organization announced on Dec. 1.

This photograph, taken in 1996, shows the ice house on the grounds of the L.V.I.S. after its rehabilitation.

The Diocese of Rockville Centre’s $323 million settlement in the bankruptcy case connected to a flood of lawsuits concerning child sexual abuse in its parishes stretching as far back as the 1950s was approved yesterday by Judge Martin Glenn of the Southern District of New York Bankruptcy Court.

It’s not the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade yet, but what is now dubbed Santafest seems to be growing year by year in East Hampton Village. This year it will take place on Saturday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., and the parade will feature its first grand marshal, John Ryan Sr.

Georgia Bennett and Evan Fox were married on Sept. 28 at the Hedges Inn in East Hampton, with one of the bride’s uncles officiating and another performing on trumpet.

Kirby Marcantonio doesn’t always read East magazine, but he happened to pick up the Thanksgiving issue last week. Flipping through the pages, he found an illustration that looked familiar: a shark flopping around in Town Pond.

The spotted lanternfly, after making its first appearance on the South Fork last fall, continued its eastward march in 2024, with the fancy-looking insects showing up in every trap placed here by the Town of East Hampton.

A historian’s frank comment from 1924 on the distinct lack of piety in Sag Harbor’s founders. And more from The Star’s pages of yore.

Stephen Deckoff, the billionaire founder of the private equity firm Black Diamond Capital Management, and his son, Stephen E. Deckoff, are no longer simply longtime visitors to Montauk aboard their yacht. They are officially the new owners of Gosman’s Dock and several surrounding properties, acquiring the set for just over $34.35 million in October.

The real estate developer Jeremy Morton discussed his plans for the commercial buildings at 2 Main Street and 22 Long Island Avenue in Sag Harbor at a village planning board hearing on Nov. 26.

By 1971, after almost 200 years of use, Clinton Academy was finally starting to show some wear. In this Star photo, the tulip-shaped cupola gets freshly clad in shingles.

PSEG Long Island unveiled its final plan last week for a 69-kilovolt underground transmission circuit that will pass through Sag Harbor, and not the Long Pond Greenbelt.

The owner of the Huntting Inn, spurned by an October decision of the East Hampton Village Zoning Board of Appeals that a pool and other improvements it had planned for its historic property could not be considered, filed papers last week to sue the board and the village.

Want something nice to talk about on Thanksgiving? Allow yourself to indulge in a little schadenfreude and take joy in the struggles of the hated, the feared, the disgusting, and yes, the misunderstood tick.

Once more unto the liquor smuggling and running wars of the 1920s. And note that Suffolk County expressed interest in acquiring Plum Island way back in 1949. Plus much more from our past pages.

“Market hardening” is the insurance industry buzzword of the day. It refers to insurance companies taking steps to preserve their profitability, often by hiking premiums and imposing stricter terms for customers. And when it comes to home insurance, it’s happening right here and right now.

The Ladies Village Improvement Society, whose website tagline reads, "Keeping East Hampton beautiful since 1895," will have a new executive director, Rachel Cooper, starting Jan. 1.

When it comes to at-home care on the East End, those who need help are finding it, well, hard to find. Factors like long driving distances to reach clients and a perceived lack of competitive wages for aides make the home nursing field challenging to navigate from both perspectives.

When she heard that other municipalities had ceased holding Bingo games with money on the line, Diane Patrizio, East Hampton Town's director of human services, decided to check on East Hampton's own license to conduct the game at its senior center. She discovered that the license had expired.

As Thanksgiving approaches, many of us are digging out favorite holiday recipes or looking for something new to try. The Ladies Village Improvement Society has published cookbooks as a fund-raiser since the group’s founding in 1896, and the society’s 1908 “Cook Book” has some great holiday classics.

“One of the things that I struggle with is people saying the AIDS crisis is a thing of the past, as if the time to remember is something for the past,” said Tom House, the founder of Hamptons Pride, which is bringing quilts from the National AIDS Memorial to the East Hampton Presbyterian Church next week.

The South Fork had more harmful blue-green algae blooms this year than ever before, researchers at Stony Brook University recently announced as part of an annual water quality report.

Rain on Thursday notwithstanding, an unusually dry fall season persists statewide, raising concerns about fire and impact on crops. Last month, the county had only .23 inches of rainfall, just off the record low for October precipitation, and even with rain on Thursday, more than 99 percent of the county was considered to be in "severe drought."

An 1899 experiment in road-making, a 1924 claim relating to death of an officer shot while pursuing an alleged bootlegger’s car, and, in 1949, Grace Phelan, renowned speed typist and former holder of the World’s Amateur Typing Championship, was to demonstrate her extraordinary typing.

Two dozen women from across the South Fork gathered Monday night at Grace Presbyterian Church in Water Mill to kick off a season of soup-making in which the goal is to prepare 1,000 quarts of hearty, homemade soup for people facing food insecurity and homelessness.

In 1970 a trawler’s crew members were surprised to find a full bottle of Indian Hill bourbon whiskey in a trawl eight miles off the coast of Montauk, one of them declaring the “Prohibition stuff” to be “strong as hell.”