Villages

    The Great Bonac Fireworks will light up the sky over Three Mile Harbor on Saturday night, getting under way at 9:15 p.m. The extravaganza can be seen from beaches and other locations ringing the harbor, and will of course be viewed by hundreds on boats moored right in the harbor, under the firework lights.

Fireworks by Grucci will present the show, which has been a midsummer tradition, on or about Bastille Day, since it was inaugurated by George Plimpton in the early 1970s, continuing for decades as a fund-raiser for the former Boys and Girls Harbor camp.

   The East Hampton Board of Education heard Tuesday from a promoter of a two-day August rock festival hoping to use school district property for parking.

­    The Home, Sweet Home Museum is showing lithographs and watercolors by Gustav H. Buek, who owned the James Lane house from 1907 to 1927. Etchings by Frederick Childe Hassam and Charles H. Miller are on view as well, through Sept. 30.

    The hours are Monday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., and Sunday from 2 to 4 p.m.

    Looking up East Hampton Village property records, especially those that pertained to permits, design review, zoning, planning, and building inspection, may have been a lengthy, costly paper chore — until recently. But now, “with a few keystrokes,” Larry Cantwell, the village administrator, said, the data on a particular property can show up in one neat, tidy place: the village’s computer system.

The death on June 17 of a Montauk man who had become infected with the hantavirus has shaken the man’s next-door neighbor, who narrowly escaped death two years ago from a similarly virulent respiratory infection.

    “Here endeth the lesson,” said Joan Denny, acting chairwoman of the East Hampton Village Zoning Board of Appeals, using the traditional liturgical wrap-up after the board read aloud its draft approval of the East Hampton Library’s proposed expansion.

    Weather-wise, June has been an odd month so far, and May was unusual too, according to Richard G. Hendrickson, the United States Cooperative weather observer in Bridgehampton.

    “May warms up slowly some years, not this year though,” Mr. Hendrickson wrote in his monthly weather report for May. “Plant and flower growth were over one week ahead of average,” he said, and the lilacs “were faded long before Decoration Day.”

The village zoning board of appeals discussed the East Hampton Library’s expansion for the first time since the State Supreme Court overruled the board’s 2010 denial of a special permit.

Montauk’s commercial and recreational boats will be blessed and the community will honor the watermen who passed over the bar during the year on Sunday during the traditional Blessing of the Fleet in Montauk Harbor. It starts at 5 p.m.

East Hampton Town Councilwoman Julia Prince lashed out on Monday about the protest several weeks ago regarding food vendors at town-owned beaches.

“It was three plastic bags in tree branches in the water that put me over the edge,” East Hampton Village Mayor Paul F. Rickenbach Jr. said at a village board meeting last Thursday, while discussing a possible prohibition on plastic bags in the village.

The team representing Nick Capstick-Dale at the East Hampton Village Zoning Board of Appeals meeting on Friday may have been ...

Deer was killed by a car, but her unborn offspring survived.

Residents of Newtown Lane and nearby streets packed the room during an East Hampton Village Zoning Board of Appeals meeting Friday to hear...

The possibility that the Montauk Harbor Inlet will get an emergency dredging this year moved closer to reality this week.

    East Hampton Village Mayor, Paul F. Rickenbach Jr. made it clear at the village board’s work session last week that, tentatively at least, there would be no tax increase in his bailiwick this year.

    The tentative budget of almost $18.3 million for 2011-12 calls for a spending increase of less than 1 percent and relies on non-tax revenue increasing by 2 percent.

    “At the outset it was indicated that we did not want to have a tax increase,” he said. “But there are some costs we are encumbered with.”

Art for Japan

    Tomorrow afternoon from 2 to 7 p.m., the students of the Ross School on Goodfriend Drive will hold an art sale. They plan to donate 100 percent of their proceeds to the Japanese Red Cross Society, to aid Japan in rebuilding the disaster-affected prefectures.

Peconic Family Fun

    Kids 5 to 10 can learn about water management, agricultural sustainability, recycling, and environmental stewardship during a Peconic Family Fun Day at the Children’s Museum of the East End in Bridgehampton on Saturday.

The question facing the East Hampton Village Zoning Board of Appeals on Friday was this: If an applicant is tearing down most of...

It took a ruling from the State Supreme Court, but c/o the Maidstone finally won approval from East Hampton Village last week to offer outdoor dining to patrons...

The Triune Baptist Church of East Hampton, which for some time has held services at the Neighborhood House on Three Mile Harbor Road, has begun meeting in a temporary home at St. David’s A.M.E. Zion Church in Sag Harbor.

After two public budget sessions at the end of March, attended by a largely vocal group of frustrated parents, teachers, and taxpayers, it ís back to the drawing board on the proposed $65.9 million district budget. Two more budget meetings were set for tomorrow and Saturday before the board is expected to vote on Tuesday.

A colony of feral cats at the Montauk Downs State Park is being disbanded by the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation.

The Montauk Monster is missing. The putrescent carcass of the creature whose image has captivated millions around the globe and spawned nearly as many identities was taken from two Montaukers. They said they planned to supply the beast’s bones to an artist who had already found a buyer for signed monster art.

Ever since Jenna Hewitt, Rachel Goldberg, and Courtney Fruin found the thing in front of the Surfside restaurant, the electronic clones of the creature have invaded computers — by way of Ms. Hewitt’s snapshot — until the Internet itself is threatened.

Spend just an hour with Eleanor Whitmore and you know you have met someone extraordinary. Not that she would ever say so. She focuses not on what she has done, but on what she has gotten from the doing. 

The rugged canyons and sprawling ranches around Penjamo in the central Mexican state of Guanajuato are haunted with stories of hidden treasure, Catholics fleeing persecution by the Spanish crown, and of revolutionaries like Pancho Villa, who rode through this territory in the early 20th century. Along with these tales, which straddle the line between the historic and the fantastic, are the extraordinary stories of ordinary people who went “al otro lado,” as the people in Penjamo say — to the other side, the United States. 

It is too big, too awful, too otherworldly to comprehend without being surrounded by it. Standing at Ground Zero, breathing the mingled rot of burning chemicals, cooked plastics, and the unspeakable, I realize why it will take months if not years before we can begin to rebuild.

Every day since terror found its targets in New York and Washington and was intercepted by heroism in Pennsylvania, worship services here have drawn hundreds of people, some in business dress, some in beach sandals, parents carrying infants, a few elderly in wheelchairs, and almost all with tears welling.

The gate in the high fence that surrounds the Montauk Coast Guard Station was shut tight on Tuesday morning -- the station's people and the crew of the 87-foot cutter Ridley on high alert like all of this nation's military. Without radio and television, the closed fence would have been about the only indication that something terrible had happened 118 miles to the west.