Villages

Earlier this month state and local authorities began to roll back mask mandates in a variety of settings including schools and public spaces like restaurants. After two years of such mandates, these changes have given many a feeling that the end of the Covid-19 pandemic may finally be upon us. But is it soon to set aside our masks?

While the great blue heron, the largest heron in North America, is not our only winter heron (black-crowned night herons roost locally all winter), it’s the only one you’re likely to see.

Coming together for a vigil at Hook Mill in East Hampton last Thursday, local clergy spoke about the need to support the people of Ukraine, two million of whom have fled the country since Russia began bombing it last week. “What affects one, affects us all as human beings, which demands that we stand in support of the freedom and rights of every nation,” said the Rev. Walter Thompson Jr. of Calvary Baptist Church.

From an 1897 call for a first-class inn here to a 1997 plan for a drive-in movie complex in Wainscott.

Early last month the Center for Therapeutic Riding of the East End in Bridgehampton threw a retirement party for Pumpkin and Rocket, two of the much loved horses who work there.

Nearly a million refugees have already left Ukraine. They often left quickly and took only what they could easily carry. According to the British Broadcasting Corporation, the European Union expects anywhere from three to six million more to flee. Many local schools, churches, and government offices are putting donation programs together to help the people in Ukraine.

This photograph, taken in the spring of 1900 at Second House, shows Ulysses Tillinghast Payne with his wife, Nellie, and their children, Betsy, Edward, Elias, and Mildred. Built in 1746, Second House is the oldest structure in Montauk.

Pigeons are extremely sensitive to low frequency sounds; they can see into the ultraviolet range of light, and they are able to detect minute changes in air pressure. They don’t keep the tidiest of homes, allowing feces, and even dead nestlings, to remain in the nest, and since they reuse their nests, they get bigger and nastier as time goes on.

An ill-fated bakery wagon in Montauk in 1897, the Maidstone Club's Howard B. Dean's 1947 Spring Party wingding at the Waldorf, and the plight of the Beales in the early 1970s.

For most people, the news out of Ukraine is horrible, but it’s just news. However, there are plenty of local residents who have direct ties to the beleaguered nation, people who are watching the slow-motion, 40-mile-long convoy of future death tear a hole through a country that their mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers still live in.

A tiny chapel now used as a fitness center at the East Hampton Point resort occupied an important place for three interrelated East Hampton communities — Indigenous, Black, and white — from the late 1800s until the 20th century. In this, it is one of the rare functionally integrated houses of worship on Long Island — and rarer still that the building endures.

Hamptons Community Outreach, a nonprofit group that helps economically disadvantaged people obtain food, emergency house repairs, and other support, is a recipient of a new Land Rover donated by the Southampton Village dealership in the company’s Above and Beyond Service Awards.

This postcard from the Harvey Ginsberg Postcard Collection shows a summer cottage belonging to Benjamin Franklin Evans (1843-1913) on the dunes at Lily Pond Lane.

The much-anticipated, newly renovated Montauk Library officially reopened on Friday. “This is our soft opening,” said Denise DiPaolo, the library’s director, noting that the official ribbon-cutting ceremony will take place in May. But fanfare for the newly reconfigured and expanded library space has begun, as excited patrons passed through the doors on Friday, wearing big smiles and looks of wonder.

Many people often wonder when they should make the decision to call 911 or go to an emergency room if they are sick or injured. What precisely constitutes an emergency?

The white-throated sparrow’s song “is a lament,” George Gladden wrote, “a lament which is wistful and ineffably plaintive, but in which there is no despair, only sweet hopefulness.”

A warning about recreational beachfront being washed out to sea from 75 years ago, while back in 1997 Martha Stewart was in top form.

This weekend is the 25th anniversary of the Great Backyard Bird Count. To participate, you spend a minimum of 15 minutes counting birds, and afterward report what you see to the number-cracking scientists at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

Two hundred and two years ago, Sarah Frances Dering of Shelter Island wrote her paternal first cousin Elizabeth (Eliza) Packer Gardiner in New York City about a perilous, snowy trip by sleigh.

Lucky for us, if the ponds remain unfrozen, kingfishers are fairly common around the East End during the winter months.

Much may depend, however, on an assessment of the condition of the site’s four structures, commissioned by the town and to be issued this week. Its author, the consulting engineer Drew Bennett, has said that “there are some things of concern” in his report.

The Star was “well spoken of everywhere” 125 years ago, 50 people were injured in a L.I.R.R. derailment 75 years ago, and one Orrin Pilkey sounded the alarm on beach erosion and the folly of hard structures to prevent it back in 1997.

The winners of the Amagansett Village Improvement Society’s “Love Letters to Amagansett” essay-writing contest were announced on the society’s website on Monday, Valentine’s Day.

Monday marks the federal holiday originally established in 1885 in recognition of President George Washington’s birthday on the 22nd of February. It wasn’t until 1971 that it officially became known as Presidents Day, when it was included in the Uniform Monday Holiday Act, and moved to the third Monday in February, as an attempt to create more three-day weekends for the nation’s workers. Perhaps it’s time to take a historical jaunt and commemorate the South Fork’s ties with many sitting POTUSes over the years.

More than 1,200 trees at Napeague State Park have been identified as infested with the southern pine beetle and are due to be felled late this month.

This 1997 photograph from the Springs Historical Society shows the exterior of the John Edwards House on Duck Creek Farm off Three Mile Harbor Road. The two-story “half house” is believed to have been built by John Edwards (1750-1806) after he bought the property from John and Mary Gardiner in 1795.

It’s gull season on the East End.

The contractor for the developers of the South Fork Wind farm is continuing to remove some vegetation within the Long Island Rail Road right of way this week, in advance of the onshore construction that is set to begin within the next two weeks.

It was lockup for a “knight of the road” 125 years ago, while 75 years ago the Suffolk County Farm Bureau tackled the problem of housing for migrant labor on the South Fork.

The dearth of medical care here was one of the most serious issues facing the community, said Henry Murray, who recently announced his retirement as chairman of the foundation that runs the East Hampton Healthcare Center. The facility is celebrating its 20th anniversary.