Villages

Under a hot mid-September sun, the Burying Ground Preservation Group, a nonprofit organization formed in 2018, was at work last Thursday at the Hog Creek Cemetery, a small parcel on Hog Creek Road in Springs where members of the Parsons family are buried.

“Pleasure is our birthright. And it’s great to experience who you are as a person and as a sexual being without being shamed,” said Dr. Lee Phillips, a psychotherapist, sex therapist, and substance abuse counselor with practices in New York City and Virginia, and now Water Mill.

The outdoor stage at the Southampton Arts Center will be the setting for the first interactive public festival, the Create Fair, hosted by the the East End Special Players’ Explorers Program, from 2 to 3:30 p.m. Theatrical performances are only part of the fun lined up for Saturday’s family-friendly event. There will also be a photography project, drumming, painting, food, mural drawing, and more — all based on skills and activities that the Explorers have been, well, exploring.

One hundred years ago, Thomas Moran, eminent painter, prepared to leave East Hampton. Seventy-five years ago, deep-sea fishing enthusiasts hailed the Shinnecock Inlet, “that priceless gift of the hurricane of 1938 to Long Island.” And more.

On Sept. 17, 1943, in a time of wartime rationing, Norma Edwards (born 1924) married James A. Corwin (1921-1944) in a small ceremony at the home of Norma’s cousin Mary Louise Dodge. The Rev. Francis Kinsler of the East Hampton Presbyterian Church did the honors.

“It’s all about creating an experience that they can go home with and remember and always want to do again,” said Steven Lippman, who co-founded A Walk on Water 10 years ago to give special needs children a healing encounter with the waves. For the past seven years, the organization has been coming to Montauk to for a two-day event where everybody gets a neat wooden trophy and an "amazing day."

Take a trip into The Star’s storied past, won’t you?

This is the last weekend of the year that East Hampton Town beaches will have lifeguards. Lifeguards will protect East Hampton Village beaches during weekends until Columbus Day, Oct. 10.

Long Island’s Car Free Day is next Thursday, with people encouraged to get around without cars, instead traveling by train, bus, bicycle, subway, on foot, or by car-pooling.

The cocktails will have to wait, but the boat slips are back in business. The Montauk mecca formerly known as Liars’ Saloon, which also was home to the Offshore Sports Marina, has a new sign out front from its new owner, Sam Gershowitz, signaling a new chapter is indeed afoot at 408 West Lake Drive in Montauk.

The food critic and writer Florence Fabricant will serve as a judge of clam chowder entries at the East Hampton Town Trustees’ Largest Clam Contest, which happens on Oct. 9 at noon on the grounds of the Lamb Building on Bluff Road in Amagansett. Those residents entering clams or chowders have been asked to arrive a little before noon.

The East Hampton Village Board will dedicate the gardens at Home, Sweet Home to Loretta Orion, who died in July.

In a move that complicates things for doctors and their patients at the East Hampton Healthcare Foundation facility, radiology services offered at the Stony Brook Southampton Hospital offices there will be halved, and the hospital’s blood lab there will close for a month.

“The same costs that a lot of people have at home,” such as electricity, fuel, and insurance, have also gone up for the East Hampton Library, Dennis Fabiszak, its director, said this week ahead of the library’s annual budget on Saturday.

East Hampton Town Councilman David Lys, the town board’s liaison to the Montauk Citizens Advisory Committee, brought up a few projects and problems in his presentation to the committee this week, including the anemic response in Montauk to a joint East Hampton Town and Suffolk County program that would provide up to $30,000 to residents to upgrade their septic systems in hopes of improving water quality in the hamlet.

American oystercatchers, which congregate in the marshes of our barrier beaches before flying south, are about the size of crows, and stout, with heavy white bellies, chocolate-colored wings, and pale pinkish legs. They wear a black executioner’s hood and have a long blood-orange oyster knife of a bill and yellow eyes circled by red eye rings.

With the summer season now in the past, the developers of the South Fork Wind farm are set to accelerate on and offshore construction of its 12 turbines, beginning next month and lasting through April, officials said in a virtual open house on Monday.

East Hampton Town is closing in on a statewide project, funded in large part by the New York Power Authority, to replace the bulbs in more than 700 streetlights from Wainscott to Montauk, with pedestrian safety cited as the guiding principle. Amagansett some have questions about the plan, with one member of the hamlet's citizens advisory committee saying that new poles are needed, too.

Last Thursday was a thrilling day for Laura Hayward of Sagaponack, a hypo-birthing doula and practitioner of reiki. She helped deliver a baby, then she competed in the Hampton Classic for the first time. Here's how it all went down.

Jolie Parcher, the owner of the Mandala Yoga Center for Healing Arts, believes that those in the business of giving, such as first responders, nonprofit workers, and caregivers of the elderly and sick, are depleting themselves, a concern that led to a partnership with the Clamshell Foundation of East Hampton to offer free yoga classes for local E.M.S. personnel, domestic violence survivors, those suffering from Parkinson’s disease, senior citizens, and even the weary farmers.

Samantha Whitmore and James Leakos celebrated their marriage on Aug. 13 at the Chateau Lake Louise in Alberta, Canada. The bride is the daughter of Alice and Wayne Whitmore of Amagansett. Mr. Leakos is the son of Mark Leakos of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, and the late Wanda Leakos.

With a new phase of construction for the South Fork Wind farm to begin early next month, its developers will issue updates during a virtual open house on Monday at 6 p.m.

In this undated photograph, Ettie Hedges Pennypacker (1879-1970) stands in a farmyard in a long pale dress. The dress is anachronistic, a simple Empire style popular into the 1820s but out of fashion during her lifetime. Perhaps she is in costume for a party, such as the ones she attended at Home, Sweet Home or the state historians conference.

East Hampton had “the biggest Labor Day in its history” in 1922, visitor-wise. Fifty years later, the departure of the Miller clan was chronicled. All in The Star of yore.

“It’s like giant scratch-off. You don’t know what’s underground until you dig the hole,” Keith Douglas, a history-obsessed Bridgehamptoner, said of metal detecting. Detectorists explore old cart paths, long-gone colonial home sites, farm fields, and even some parkland digging up small relics that help tell the history of the East End.

The updated Covid-19 booster shots — which protect against both the original strain of the virus and the now-dominant Omicron subvariants — are already becoming available at pharmacies, physicians’ offices, and other sites.

The destruction of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, was deeply felt in Montauk for many months after the attacks, as people sought to get away from the smoldering hellscape of Lower Manhattan and find some comfort and solace at sea.

In this photograph, 12-year-old Mary Huntting Rattray (1927-2016) appears just past her ankles in the surf as she enters the ocean at Napeague in 1939.

There is no vaccine to help prevent Lyme disease, which is transmitted through the bite of an infected deer tick, but that may soon change. In early August, the drug company Pfizer announced that it was seeking 6,000 people ages 5 and older to enroll in its phase 3 trial for a new Lyme vaccine. Separately, there's work underway using MRNA vaccine technology to make bites quickly itchy and red, so that they are easily noticed and the ticks can be removed before the transmit disease.

East End Presbyterians are facing a unique challenge this year as six churches here are without a full-time pastor — and everyone’s trying to find one.