Villages

It was a good run for the health food and vitamin shop Second Nature — almost 52 years in East Hampton — but on Sunday the shop closed its doors here for good. It wasn't the high price of rent but rather the lack of foot traffic that drove the decision, an owner said. “Southampton is livelier.”

Twenty-five years ago, 800 students got an early Christmas break when the East Hampton High septic system experienced a logjam for the ages. And other tidbits ripped from The Star of yesteryear.

If the Anchor Society of East Hampton has its way, the current reality of wintertime East Hampton Village, plagued by 55 seasonally closed storefronts, will change by next year as its “winter shops” program gains traction. The idea is “to help fill empty storefronts in the off-season with affordable retail, much-needed services, and other popular pop-ups residents desire.”

The sanctuary at the Jewish Center of the Hamptons was the first and one of only a few nonresidential buildings Norman Jaffe designed in his brief but illustrious career. The temple addition is seen here in a photo from The Star’s archive.

Montauk’s Memory Motel was shuttered and silent on a recent Sunday, but on an adjacent island 116 miles west of Montauk’s downtown, the party was just getting started at another Memory Motel, an East Village pop-up where the D.J. Alexandra Richards, daughter of the Rolling Stones’ guitarist Keith Richards, spun an exhilarating set of uptempo tunes for a throng of enthusiastic young Manhattanites. 

“A steep rise in wage theft cases” since July is impacting East Enders working in the construction and housekeeping industries, Organizacion Latino-Americana of Eastern Long Island said this week.

After breeding on the northern lakes, loons arrive on the East End in the autumn and increase in numbers through the winter as their breeding territories freeze. They can survive our winter water because they’re so well insulated.

One hundred and twenty-five years ago it snowed so much roads and railways were impassible for days. May it be so again.

For Hanukkah, the Festival of Lights celebrated by Jews every winter, eight days of menorah lightings and other festivities are planned from Bridgehampton to Montauk beginning Thursday night.

With most first-responder courses taking place in Sag Harbor and Southampton in recent years, a rare chance is coming up that allows prospective emergency medical technicians living farther east to enroll in a state-approved E.M.T.-training program closer to home

A spicy-sweet gingerbread theme has emerged around East Hampton Village, with candy-decked houses and icing “snow” bringing to life sugarplum scenes for raffle and for charity in the lead-up to the Santa parade. The Jolly Old Elf will arrive by helicopter, plus there's a market on the Village Hall lawn, skating at the Huntting Inn, and a big-name guest at a tree lighting that evening.

The much-fought-over former gas ball lot at 5 Bridge Street in Sag Harbor may not be much to look at, but it contains 93 parking spaces valuable both to the village and to Adam Potter, a developer who outbid the village to win the lease on the lot from National Grid earlier this year. 

For anyone looking for a recipe for an upcoming get-together or meal, the 75-year-old “East Hampton Ladies’ Village Improvement Society Cook Book” is filled with inspiring traditional favorites.   

The day in 1948 when the Bonacker captain Dead-Eye Dick Flach opened up on the basketball court for 20 points in the first half alone, blowing out Hampton Bays. And more from East Hampton’s colorful past.

Margie Ruddick of the landscape planning and designing firm that bears her name has drawn the proverbial line in the sand, choosing to stop taking on projects that involve new construction, except for well-scaled additions. 

East Hampton Village is getting an appraisal for the strip of village-owned land that runs along the south side of Herrick Park. Michael Bebon, a village resident whose house is accessed via an easement along that driveway, wondered during a public-comment period Friday why the board would spend money to appraise the strip unless they were considering selling it to the L.V.I.S.

East Hampton Village's La Forest Lane is busy in the summer with vehicles headed toward Georgica Beach; it connects Georgica Road, to its north, with Apaquogue Road, to its south. Some of its residents showed up at a meeting on Friday to push the village board to designate the road “one way only” to reduce traffic.

Abigail Halsey (1878-1946) begins this 44-page book by describing the setting, the Mulford Farmhouse, and the teller of the snowbound tales, Abigail’s 89-year-old friend, Mary Esther Mulford Miller (1849-1938).

Change is hard but essential if East Hampton Town and the wider world are going to mitigate and adapt to the impacts of climate change, officials of the Nature Conservancy said this week in the wake of the United States government’s Fifth National Climate Assessment, issued last week.

In 1923, from the White House lawn, President Harding introduced a “modern adaptation” of John Howard Payne’s “Home, Sweet Home” home on the 100th anniversary of the song. Then at the Own Your Home Exposition in New York, a full-size duplicate was built for Americans to check out various products of the trades. And more from yesteryear.

This 1946 football schedule belonged to Lorraine Loris (1929-2006), a member of that year’s junior class who attended at least four of the six games played that season, when East Hampton went 3-3.

The Israel-Hamas war, now in its second month, continues to reverberate on the South Fork. For the second consecutive week, the Sunday afternoon gathering of East End for Ceasefire, an activist group calling for an end to hostilities, was met with a counterrally at their protest site, Long Wharf in Sag Harbor.

“After 35 years here and 15 months off, it feels like where I belong,” said Dave Winthrop, who is back at Brent's General Store in Amagansett and ready to “make people feel like they’re coming to the old Brent’s.”

The Shinnecock Indian Nation’s official cannabis dispensary, Little Beach Harvest, is now open for business, just in time for the Indigenous harvest holiday known as Nunnowa, which the tribe celebrates each year on Nov. 16. “It’s a major achievement. This is something that Long Island is in need of,” said Chenae Bullock, the managing director of Little Beach Harvest, in describing the region’s first tax-free cannabis dispensary, located on the Shinnecock territory.

It happened here, readers.

The South Fork community continues to rally around Jeffrey Yusko, a longtime Wainscott resident and former East Hampton High School gym teacher who was hit by a van while riding his bicycle in Sagaponack on May 5.

There will be much to celebrate at the Third House Nature Center at Montauk County Park on Sunday: the 30th anniversary of the founding of the nature center, the 50th anniversary of Suffolk County’s first purchase leading to the formation of the county park, and the 50th anniversary of Big Reed Pond’s designation as a National Natural Landmark.

John Melillo, who served as a military police officer in the Army from May 1970 to March 1972, copes with his own P.T.S.D. by painting, and he also teaches art classes for veterans and first responders, including police, firefighters, and emergency medical personnel.

The 5-megawatt lithium-ion battery energy storage system that caught fire at a Cove Hollow Road, East Hampton, substation on May 31 is expected to be out of commission until the middle of 2024.

Almost two years after construction began onshore and four months after installation of the first monopile foundation, the project’s final construction began when the barge left the Port of New London, Conn., bound for the wind farm site, around 35 miles off Montauk. Installation of the first turbine generator is expected imminently.