Villages

During the solar eclipse on Monday, when approximately 89 percent of the sun was blocked out by the moon here, it was both a communal and a solitary experience for those taking it in at a watch party at the South Fork Natural History Museum in Bridgehampton. The field behind the museum was dotted with 100-plus voyeurs, in small groupings on lawn chairs and blankets, staring with solar-safe spectacles, taking in every second of the hot action.

In the photo seen here from The Star’s archive, Perle Fine prepares a painting for a show at the Upstairs Gallery on Newtown Lane in the 1970s.

About the earthquake centered in New Jersey and felt here on Friday: “In actuality this is, on a relative basis, a big deal, but yet 4.8 is not big by global standards,” William Holt, a professor of geophysics at Stony Brook University, said that day, a few hours after the shaking stopped. “We’ve had smaller ones, three or four over the last 30 years, in the Long Island area.”

More blasts from The Star’s past.

At about 10:23 a.m. on Friday people across Long Island and as far away as Albany and New Jersey reported feeling buildings shake and sway slightly, the result of an earthquake that registered 4.8 on the Richter scale in New York and New Jersey.

In the spring of 1933, 25 East Hampton High School seniors and two chaperones took a class trip to Washington, D.C. In this photo they are seen at Mount Vernon.

In 1949 the village green flagpole came crashing down in a high wind. Read all about it, and much more ripped from the pages of Ye Olde Star, right here.

New Yorkers are in for quite the show on Monday afternoon: A total solar eclipse is coming our way, and here on the South Fork, astronomers say people will be able to see between 83 and 90 percent totality.

According to Billboard, 49.61 million vinyl albums were sold in 2023. That marked the 18th consecutive year of growth in the format. And as the appeal of vinyl record albums has continued to expand, Craig Wright, the owner of Innersleeve Records in Amagansett, is following suit by nearly doubling his store's size.

The second annual East Hampton Village Hamptons Whodunit festival, which features mystery and crime authors, interactive simulated crime scenes, walking tours, panel discussions, and escape rooms, will be launched next Thursday and will continue through next weekend.

If given the opportunity, a turkey vulture would eat you, your kids, and your little dog, too. Other bird species may be struggling, but the turkey vulture is doing just fine eating dead things. Yes, with increasing signs that the end is nigh, the turkey vulture is a strong candidate for Bird of 2024.

Michele L’Hommedieu Hofmann had no idea until retiring last fall and starting to research her family history how prominent a role her great-great-grandfather James H. L’Hommedieu had played in Long Island’s late-19th-century architecture. On a trip to New York that included a stop at an East Hampton house he designed for Robert Southgate Bowne, a founder of the Maidstone Club and first president of the Long Island Rail Road, she and her family got a crash course in L’Hommedieu’s work.

The East Hampton Village Fire Department doesn’t usually respond to fires in the middle of the Ozark Mountains, but in a sense, after donating a Spartan pumper fire truck, replete with 4,000 feet of hose and a 500-gallon water tank, to the Eminence Area Volunteer Fire Department in Missouri Friday, it’s done just that.

On July 16, 1889, while staying in Lenox, Mass., Sarah Diodati Gardiner Thompson wrote to her daughter Sarah Thompson Gardiner, who was vacationing at Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire. Family news was top of mind.

Window strikes kill up to a billion birds annually and rank up there with cats and habitat destruction as the leading causes of recent steep declines. After the recent death of a much-watched Eurasian eagle-owl that was set loose from the Central Park Zoo, a bill calling for bird-friendly building measures has been revived in the New York Assembly and Senate.

It was 1899, and Telegraph Operator McCord called it quits. Plus other tidbits from The Star of Yore.

Steve (Puck) Dolan retired from the Montauket in December after 38 years, but Montauk isn’t done with him just yet: He will serve as grand marshal of the 62nd Montauk Friends of Erin St. Patrick’s Day parade, which will liven up the hamlet with belated Irish cheer on Sunday starting at noon. 

Holy Week services begin on Sunday, and churches here have special schedules throughout the week. 

The Maritime Folklife Oral History Collection at the East Hampton Library contains interviews and transcripts with Dan King and his crew, among other fishermen and their families. The transcript seen here shows a discussion with Dan’s wife, Marsha King.

The mystery over a painted bronze statue of John Steinbeck and his dog Charley, which suddenly appeared in Sag Harbor’s Steinbeck Park this week, has been solved. 

A barber moves his shop downtown over a century ago and finds much success. And other notes to charm and delight from the venerable Star.

The Anchor Society of East Hampton, a nonprofit community group working to revitalize the village business district and return a warmer sense of community to Main Street and Newtown Lane, has issued a call for applications to its Winter Shops program, which will place pop-up shops in otherwise empty storefronts during the off-season.

After successfully completing her 27,759-mile solo nonstop sail around the world last Thursday as part of the Global Solo Challenge, Cole Brauer received myriad thank-yous from near and far for having not only inspired a generation of young women (and at the beginning of International Women’s Month, no less) who might not otherwise have taken up a historically male-dominated sport, but also for having inspired everyone — young and old, male and female. 

After Jimmy Ernst died, a huge bed / piece of art from his father, the surrealist Max Ernst, had to be moved from Jimmy’s Lee Avenue house. It wasn’t easy.

PSEG Long Island crews have been in Montauk since mid-February working on “circuit reliability upgrades” that are aimed at reducing outages during severe weather.

Another missive from the Prohibition-era rum wars, and more drama ripped from the pages of the venerable Star.

Sag Harbor Village has agreed to sublease the so-called "gas ball lot" from the developer Adam Potter, who controls 5 Bridge Street Limited Liability Company, which was awarded the lease by National Grid at the end of last year.

A live Risso's dolphin washed up on Georgica Beach on Sunday morning but died on the shore shortly after it was discovered, the East Hampton Village Police Department said in a report released Monday.

Cole Brauer, the 29-year-old East Hampton native who has been sailing solo around the world since Oct. 29, arrived at the Global Solo Challenge race’s finish line in A Coruña, Spain, early Thursday morning, as her 40-foot boat, First Light, “would have wanted it,” becoming the first American woman to sail solo nonstop around the world’s three great capes, and the 18th woman to do it overall. 

Kayla Kearney, a 20-year-old college student from Springs, is making “baby steps” toward recovery every day at Weill-Cornell Hospital in Manhattan after undergoing several complicated medical procedures for treatment of a rare type of brain tumor.