Villages

Edith Windsor, a Southampton summer resident for 40 years, started the fight that led to federally recognized marriages for same-sex couples, and on Monday — 10 years to the day since the Supreme Court ruled in her favor — Southampton Town dedicated a memorial to her: a brick platform in the shape of a heart, surrounded by a circle of diamond-shaped paving stones, where civil marriage ceremonies for people of all stripes can be performed.

Here on the East End, there are more than half a dozen fireworks shows happening over the next 10 days, and more planned later in July and in August. Here's where to see them.

This is the best time of year to observe chimney swifts locally as they burst through the skies over our villages. You’ll never see a chimney swift land, or even come close to street level. In their daily circuits, they can fly 500 miles a day in pursuit of something like 12,000 flying insects.

From a shotgun-wielding skirmish in the Prohibition wars of 1923 to the momentous day in 1998 when Suffolk County banned smoking in bars, it happened here.

Back in March, Peter Zegler and Bob Beck, metal detectorists, saw an opportunity to uncover some East Hampton Village history after learning of plans to renovate the fields at Herrick Park, and they requested permission from the village board to get to work. The basketball court had been laid over an expanse of undisturbed soil, and soon their metal detectors were beeping with excitement.

The New York State Department of Motor Vehicles has unveiled a new $60 custom license plate featuring the Montauk Lighthouse. Only, there is one problem.

“It was only June 2021 when we first saw a scattering of symptomatic foliage in a client’s garden, and two years later, most beech trees have been impacted at some level,” one master arborist said of beech leaf disease, which is threatening the survival of beech trees from forests to estates.

The Last Gasp, published by East Hampton High School’s class of 1912 as part of its graduation festivities, is one of the earliest student publications in the Long Island Collection.

You read it here first. Make that second, as these entries are reprinted from past Stars for your pleasure and edification.

The Bokalift 2, an approximately 750-foot-long vessel that will be used to install foundations for the South Fork Wind farm, arrived off Newport, R.I., last week and is now at the wind farm’s site, in a federal lease area around 35 miles off Montauk Point. 

Rabbi Aizik Baumgarten of Chabad of the Hamptons in East Hampton donated one of his kidneys to Terri Levin Davgin, a longtime congregant who was suffering from kidney failure. “When there’s an opportunity to help, we help. I thanked God for the opportunity for the chance to save a life,” he said.

The anniversary of the 1942 interception of Nazi saboteurs who landed near Atlantic Avenue Beach will be observed on Saturday at 6 p.m. at the Amagansett Life-Saving and Coast Guard Station.