Villages

    If you have walked around downtown Montauk in recent days and seen men on ladders working on and around its 19th century-style street lamps, no, the men are not lamplighters removing the wires and fueling the lamps with whale oil for the sake of authenticity.

    East Hampton Bowl, where local residents and visitors to the South Fork have bowled competitively and recreationally for the last 54 years, will close next week.

    “We are definitely going to close the doors,” Craig Patterson, who has owned the establishment for 36 years, confirmed to The Star. Reopening under new management is a possibility Mr. Patterson called “very remote,” as is its reopening as another business.

    With a difference of only one vote, Jeff Sander and Jim Laspesa were elected to serve two-year terms on the North Haven Village Board. The candidates received 173 and 172 votes.

    Mr. Sander was elected to his fourth term. Mr. Laspesa is the chairman and a longtime member of the village’s planning board. Mary Whelan, an attorney, was defeated, receiving 74 votes.

    The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center is expecting an extremely active hurricane season this summer and fall.

    The center has indicated that between the months of June and November it is likely that 13 to 20 storms will hit the East Coast. Seven to 11 of those could become hurricanes, and 3 to 6 could become major hurricanes, classified as Category 3, 4, or 5, with winds of 111 miles per hour or higher. There is a 70-percent chance of above-normal hurricane activity.

    Michele Herger, Ms. New York America 2013, will compete in the Ms. America pageant on Sunday night in Costa Mesa, Calif. The competition, for women between 26 and 60, will see contestants judged on the evening gown and sportswear they wear, as well as an interview and on-stage question.

    At the conclusion of an otherwise uneventful meeting on Friday, Andrew Goldstein, chairman of the East Hampton Village Zoning Board of Appeals, announced that the meeting would be his last.

    The Town of East Hampton should authorize a hamlet study for Amagansett, the attendees at Monday night’s Amagansett Citizens Advisory Committee’s meeting agreed after discussing a number of issues that they believe are receiving insufficient attention and adversely affecting residents’ quality of life.

    Nine members voted in favor of requesting a hamlet study, with none opposed or abstaining.

Eight candidates weigh in on police and waterfront

    How to make the Village of East Hampton safer for bicyclists and pedestrians was the primary topic at a village board work session last Thursday, when Paul Fiondella and Howard Lebwith, who had made a presentation  at the board’s April 4 work session, returned to make the case for bike-friendly streets.

    The Hamptons Institute, a symposium on some of the most pressing issues of our time, will be back in East Hampton on Saturday, featuring three panel discussions during the course of the day on education, the economy, and the environment. The free event, organized by the Roosevelt Institute and held at Guild Hall, will provide intellectual perspectives and debate by experts in the given fields.

    “I am disappointed that he shot down federal money that could have saved or helped maintain the 11th position,” Kevin Duchemin, a Sag Harbor Village board member, said on Tuesday of Mayor Brian Gilbride’s announcement last week that the village would not apply for a grant that the police chief, Tom Fabiano, had suggested as a means to help hold onto an officer whose job was eliminated last month.

    “It is most unusual that we have gone through May and at this writing on June 1 there was very little rainfall. Agriculturally it is dry, but I am sure, as long-term records show, rainfall will be here soon.” So wrote Richard G. Hendrickson, the United States Cooperative weather observer in Bridgehampton, in his monthly report for May.

    There was light rain on seven days last month, the heaviest — just over half an inch — coming on May 28. The total for the month was 2.13 inches, as compared to a long-term average of 3.5 to 4 inches, Mr. Hendrickson said.

Willie Nelson is coming to Montauk’s Surf Lodge for a concert on Sunday and a representative of the popular night spot tried to assure members of the Montauk Citizens Advisory Committee on Monday night that everything would be under control.

Four candidates make a bid for village mayor

    Despite the ravages of Hurricane Sandy and a northeaster that followed, East Hampton’s Main Beach has been named the best beach in the United States on the 23rd annual Top 10 Beach list, as ranked Dr. Stephen P. Leatherman of Florida International University.

    East Hampton veterans, volunteer firefighters and ambulance personnel, and the East Hampton High School marching band took part in a Memorial Day parade Monday on Main Street under a cloudless blue sky.

     The parade drew a strong turnout of flag-waving observers along its route from near Guild Hall to the Hook Mill green.

    East Hampton Town Clerk Fred Overton presided over a ceremony at a war memorial on the green following the end of the parade, where approximately 300 people had gathered, including a group of local elected officials.

    While beachgoers can still pay by the day to park at Two Mile Hollow Beach this season, there will be no parking attendant on duty at the parking lot there. Those without a village beach permit who wish to park in the lot between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. will have to purchase a daily permit from the office at the Main Beach pavilion before heading to Two Mile Hollow.

    Good news was the order of the day at the 91st annual meeting of the East Hampton Historical Society, held recently at Clinton Academy.

     Arthur Graham, president of the board of trustees, reported that between fund-raising, memberships, and events such as house tours and parties, the society raised $560,000 in 2012 and now has net assets of $2.5 million. The money helps to fund its school programs, collections, exhibitions, and the upkeep of various buildings — in particular last year, the Mulford farmhouse and the Town Marine Museum in Amagansett.

    Memorial Day observances begin Monday morning at 9 with a ceremony at Main Beach in East Hampton for those members of the United States armed forces who were lost at sea.

    At 10 a.m. veterans and others will begin to gather near Guild Hall for a 10:30 parade along Main Street. Traffic will be diverted onto Dunemere and Further Lanes for the duration.

    Fifteen two-person teams made up of members of all branches of the military, veterans, and first responders will carry a United States flag 136 miles in about 26 hours from the Montauk Lighthouse to Ground Zero in Manhattan on Saturday to remind all in their path of the reason for the Memorial Day holiday.

    “As the parent of a fallen marine, every day is Memorial Day,” said Christian Haerter of Sag Harbor, whose son, Lance Cpl. Jordan Haerter, was killed in Iraq in 2008 at the age of 19.

    Montaukers will proudly wave the American flag this weekend in honor of Memorial Day. The hamlet’s three-day event is in its third year. The services begin at 5 p.m. on Saturday at the Montauk Coast Guard Station, where a fish-and-chips dinner honoring veterans will be held on the grounds overlooking Lake Montauk. Veterans eat free. Guests will be asked for a $20 donation, $10 for children 10 and under.

    “As we look through the weather records from April 1 to April 30, we go through the temperature range of sometimes the 20s to the 60s by the month’s end,” Richard G. Hendrickson wrote in his April weather report from Bridgehampton. “This great variation is due in part to our location — 100 miles out in the Atlantic Ocean, yet but a few miles from the mainland on the north.”

    Changes are afoot in downtown Montauk in time for the summer season. One is a trash recycling pilot program; the other the institution of a two-hour parking limit in much of the area.

    The recycling program was initiated by Laraine Creegan of the Montauk Chamber of Commerce and Catherine Foley, the owner of the Air and Speed Board Shop on Main Street, a member and former director of the Montauk Chamber. Ms. Foley said she had noticed an increase in litter in the downtown area and at the same time some of her customers were shocked there was no recycling in public places.

    The storage building used by lifeguards at East Hampton Village’s Main Beach, damaged by Hurricane Sandy last October, will soon be demolished and reconstructed.

    After winning election to the Montauk Library’s board on April 27, Perry Haberman learned that he was ineligible for the position. The board took action at a meeting on Monday to declare the election null and void, leaving Mr. Haberman, who was elected with 62 votes, off the board.

    Mr. Haberman had switched his voter registration to reflect a New York City residence in order to vote in the presidential election, which meant he was no longer considered a Suffolk County resident for a full year prior to the library election, as mandated under New York State election law.

    New parking regulations in downtown Montauk are planned for this season in an effort to free up parking spaces near businesses close to the beaches, which are often tied up all day by beachgoers.

    The East Hampton Town Board will vote tonight to set a hearing for May 16 on a proposal developed by a parking committee of the Montauk Chamber of Commerce. It would limit parking to two hours in much of the area south of Main Street surrounding Edison Beach, including along South Etna Avenue and South Edison Street.

    A funny coincidence brought Marcus Mumford and Kirsty McGaul and the tandem bike they had ridden from Boston to the Ladies Village Improvement Society’s headquarters in East Hampton on April 23.

   Esther Laufer, who turned 100 on Tuesday, remembers trolley cars and horse-drawn wagons, silent movies, spinning tops in the gutter on the street, and egg creams at the local soda fountain.

    Mrs. Laufer, who lives in Northwest Woods, is the daughter of Russian immigrants who came to the United States to escape the pogroms of the czar. She was born Esther Murofchick in Brooklyn and grew up in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. “Everybody knew each other,” she remembered last week.

   Words of wisdom from Margaret Mead warned to “never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

    Save Sag Harbor, founded in 2007, has taken those words to heart, making it its mission “to safeguard the scale and fabric of a historic village,” effecting positive change while preventing what it sees as negative, and backing the village’s commercial code, which the group helped push for.

With little public discussion of the matter among Sag Harbor Village Board members or residents, two police officer positions were written out of the village budget.