Villages

“Market hardening” is the insurance industry buzzword of the day. It refers to insurance companies taking steps to preserve their profitability, often by hiking premiums and imposing stricter terms for customers. And when it comes to home insurance, it’s happening right here and right now.

Once more unto the liquor smuggling and running wars of the 1920s. And note that Suffolk County expressed interest in acquiring Plum Island way back in 1949. Plus much more from our past pages.

The Ladies Village Improvement Society, whose website tagline reads, "Keeping East Hampton beautiful since 1895," will have a new executive director, Rachel Cooper, starting Jan. 1.

When she heard that other municipalities had ceased holding Bingo games with money on the line, Diane Patrizio, East Hampton Town's director of human services, decided to check on East Hampton's own license to conduct the game at its senior center. She discovered that the license had expired.

When it comes to at-home care on the East End, those who need help are finding it, well, hard to find. Factors like long driving distances to reach clients and a perceived lack of competitive wages for aides make the home nursing field challenging to navigate from both perspectives.

Two dozen women from across the South Fork gathered Monday night at Grace Presbyterian Church in Water Mill to kick off a season of soup-making in which the goal is to prepare 1,000 quarts of hearty, homemade soup for people facing food insecurity and homelessness.

The South Fork had more harmful blue-green algae blooms this year than ever before, researchers at Stony Brook University recently announced as part of an annual water quality report.

“One of the things that I struggle with is people saying the AIDS crisis is a thing of the past, as if the time to remember is something for the past,” said Tom House, the founder of Hamptons Pride, which is bringing quilts from the National AIDS Memorial to the East Hampton Presbyterian Church next week.

As Thanksgiving approaches, many of us are digging out favorite holiday recipes or looking for something new to try. The Ladies Village Improvement Society has published cookbooks as a fund-raiser since the group’s founding in 1896, and the society’s 1908 “Cook Book” has some great holiday classics.

Rain on Thursday notwithstanding, an unusually dry fall season persists statewide, raising concerns about fire and impact on crops. Last month, the county had only .23 inches of rainfall, just off the record low for October precipitation, and even with rain on Thursday, more than 99 percent of the county was considered to be in "severe drought."

An 1899 experiment in road-making, a 1924 claim relating to death of an officer shot while pursuing an alleged bootlegger’s car, and, in 1949, Grace Phelan, renowned speed typist and former holder of the World’s Amateur Typing Championship, was to demonstrate her extraordinary typing.

The East Hampton Historical Society broke ground on a climate-controlled collections-storage center at the Mulford Farm last Thursday. It will unite the historical society’s 20,000 archival items — now stored at five separate sites — under one roof.

In 1970 a trawler’s crew members were surprised to find a full bottle of Indian Hill bourbon whiskey in a trawl eight miles off the coast of Montauk, one of them declaring the “Prohibition stuff” to be “strong as hell.”

A pecan tree that might have been planted well before the American Revolution and is located right in the circle of the Ladies Village Improvement Society, has been recognized by the State Department of Environmental Conservation as a state champion, the tallest of its kind in New York.

The day a junk dealer from Islip Terrace stole a broken-down tractor. Intrigued? And there’s much more ripped from the Star’s fertile pages.

Over the past five-plus years, Peconic Bay scallops have suffered mass die-offs blamed on an infectious parasite, but researchers at the Cornell Cooperate Extension have found a source of scientifically informed hope: genetic diversity.

Friends and family members arrived from near and far — by long trips on planes, trains, and buses — to attend the Sept. 14 wedding of Ethan Bregman and Olha Beskhmelnytsina in Lviv, Ukraine.

"Our lifelong friend Tommy Hupalowsky can use your help right now," Robin Goetz wrote on a GoFundMe fund-raising page last month. Two hurricanes and the loss of his wife have left Mr. Hupalowsky, a former longtime employee of Ben Krupinski Builders, facing difficulty in Englewood, Fla.

In this Star photo by Eileen Bock we see a helicopter grounded below the Montauk Manor on the Montauk Playhouse lawn, as someone from ABC News hoped to catch Perry Duryea Jr. at the polls in his native hamlet.

After 34 years in business — all of them on East Hampton's Park Place — the Party Shoppe will close its doors at the end of February when its owner, Theo Landi, retires.

A Prohibition-era rumrunning arrest, the death of an important pet fish, election results from another era, and more in this week's look back at the East Hampton Star archive.

Michael Clark, the executive director of LTV Studios, was honored with a Recognition Award at a Wainscott Citizens Advisory Committee meeting on Saturday after being invited as a guest speaker.

On Tuesday evening in Sag Harbor, people were busy casting ballots at the firehouse on Brick Kiln Road. The fire trucks themselves were seen and heard on Main Street during a victory parade for the Pierson-Bridgehampton field hockey team, which had just won the class C county championship game. And a small group of worshipers gathered at Christ Church to pray and meditate together, navigating their Election Day anxieties in the comfort of interfaith spiritual discourse and uplifting music.

First came news that Bridgehampton's Kmart, the former retail giant's last full-sized location in the continental United States, was closing. On Monday, the now-empty big-box store's future came into clearer focus: Yes, Target is coming to Bridgehampton.

On Thursday night, a group of fiber artists organized by Erica Huberty, Louise Eastman, and Laurie Lambrecht put up 35 handmade, nonpartisan signs across Sag Harbor Village, all containing a single-word message: "Vote." Village workers promptly took them all down on Friday morning, relegating them to garbage before the artists dug through the trash to save them.

East Hampton Village closed off Newtown Lane starting at 5 p.m. on Saturday — three hours before the first pitch of Game 2 — so the community could come together, with Montauk Brewing Company beverages in hand, and watch the Yankees in the World Series. 

“What is a new land ethic?” Stephan Van Dam, the president of ChangeHampton, asked rhetorically. The idea, he said, is “to disrupt our relationship with the natural world and overcome and change our attitude towards nature — the idea that we need to dominate nature. We need to disrupt that.” 

B. Vintage, run by Linda Buckley and Cristina Buckley, a Springs mother-daughter team, is set to open tomorrow at 79 Main Street in East Hampton. It is the first business in the Anchor Society’s Winter Shops program, an off-season initiative that aims to fill otherwise empty storefronts.

“We are here to talk to the air and hope something talks back,” said James Saccone of Smithtown, the tech manager of the Long Island Paranormal Investigators, while walking through the blacked-out halls of the Nathaniel Rogers House as a group of ghost hunters attempted to bridge the gap between the physical world and what lies beyond. 

This haunting photograph shows the gravestone of Mercy Edwards Van Scoy (1732-1782) in the Van Scoy-Edwards Cemetery in Northwest Woods. Self-guided tours are available from the East Hampton Trails Preservation Society.