Villages

Kmart, a longtime anchor tenant in the Bridgehampton Commons, has hired the liquidator Eldon W. Gottschalk & Associates to handle the sale of the store contents in advance of the store's permanent closure on Oct. 20.

This whaling log, kept by Edward Mulford Baker (1810-1856), documents two voyages aboard the ship Daniel Webster. The first took place between 1833 and 1837, departing from Sag Harbor for the Pacific Ocean. Baker was first mate under Capt. Philetus Pierson (1801-1879) and documented the journey only between Aug. 27 and Sept. 19, 1833.

Voters will gather next Thursday at the John Jermain Memorial Library in Sag Harbor to vote on the annual budget, elect three library board members, and weigh in on propositions to provide funding for the Sag Harbor Whaling and Historical Museum and the Eastville Community Historical Society.

A minke whale touched down briefly, alive, just west of Montauk’s Kirk Park Beach on Monday. It later moved off the beach, died, and has since been drifting about a mile offshore, according to Timothy Treadwell, East Hampton Town’s senior harbormaster. Marine Patrol had been monitoring the animal but lost sight of it by yesterday.

A peek into the past, courtesy of the East Hampton Star archive.

A floating whale that has been a mainstay of Sag Harbor's Harborfest for many years was the object of political vandalism when someone defaced it with the words "TRUMP MAGA."

The Shinnecock Canal remains open to limited boat traffic despite the failure of a hinge on one of the lock gates overnight on Tuesday. The county is discouraging all non-emergency boat traffic.

While East Hampton Town boasts some large, well-known, historic cemeteries, less visible are the smaller family cemeteries dotted throughout the area. Some have just a single headstone. They’re visited infrequently, the families buried are older, and a handful have fallen into disrepair. Last week, restoration was completed on two of the town’s smaller colonial-era cemeteries.

Dr. N. Patrick Hennessey, who has practiced dermatology out of the Wainscott Professional Center on Montauk Highway for the last 22 years, has relocated his practice to Southampton Village after being told to vacate the center. He was left scrambling, he wrote in a letter to patients, to see those who had booked appointments months in advance into September.

“People buy them from stores in the spring and then when they get big and messy, they no longer want them,” said Adrienne Gillespie, the hospital supervisor at the Evelyn Alexander Wildlife Refuge in Hampton Bays. “They find local ponds thinking they can survive, but they can’t for long.”

The application to install a pool and hot tub at the historic Huntting Inn, parts of which date to 1699, has been in front of the East Hampton Village Zoning Board of Appeals in one form or another for more than three years. On Friday, it is expected the owner, Tilman Fertitta wíll make a new appeal to the board.

As Sag Harbor gears up for Harborfest weekend, work behind the scenes has focused on the popular whaleboat races. “There was a tremendous community effort to rebuild the whaleboats,” Ellen Dioguardi, the president of the Sag Harbor Chamber of Commerce, said. A weekend of fun lies ahead.

This photograph from The East Hampton Star’s archive shows part of the Old Whalers Festival parade, possibly from 1963, with four men dressed as sailors riding in a whaleboat. Behind them is a car towing a whale float.

PSEG Long Island, the region’s electrical power provider, announced this week that work has begun to prepare for winter storms and improve the reliability of its circuits in East Hampton Village, Springs, and Northwest Harbor.

“It’s all in line with what Sag Harbor wants to do on paper, and now it’s something we have to do in reality,” Drew Harvey said at the Sag Harbor Village Board meeting Tuesday night. Mr. Harvey, a member of the village’s parks and open space advisory committee, was speaking of a plan to preserve water access points at seven locations in the village, which, he warned, “are at risk of being lost to adjacent homeowners.”

Moments in local history, from the archives of The East Hampton Star.

In March, a dead bald eagle was found below a nest in Montauk County Park, a victim of rodenticide. Another nest at the edge of Georgica Pond in East Hampton was lost when the pitch pine it was built in was removed because it had been killed by a southern pine beetle infestation.

A proposed administrative change to Gibson Lane Beach prompted backlash from longtime beachgoers after the Sagaponack Village Board voted on July 17 to notify Southampton Town of the village’s intent to take over maintenance of the beach next summer.

The jail pictured here was built in Sag Harbor in 1916 by George Garypie, with steel prison cells by the E.T. Barnum Wire and Iron Works of Detroit. It was used until 1983.

Friends and community members lined the sides of Springs-Fireplace Road last week to greet Kayla Kearney and her family as they made their way home from the Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation in New Jersey. The last eight months have been filled with surgeries, treatments, and physical therapy for Ms. Kearney, who in January was diagnosed with a type of neuroendocrine tumor that attaches to the blood vessels.

If 2023 was the year of the shark on the South Fork, with multiple sightings leading to frequent temporary beach closings, 2024 seems to be the year of the whale. Last week, for the first time ever, “we had to pull people out of the water to let a whale pass. It was only 20 feet offshore,” said Drew Smith, the head lifeguard for East Hampton Village.

The Lars Simenson Skatepark in Montauk is a gathering place for skaters young and old(er), tall and small, as exemplified on Saturday, when people of all ages and genders from across Long Island, even up to Brooklyn, gathered there for the fourth annual Montauk Skate Contest.

The first $15,000 scholarship from East Hampton Village’s new paramedic scholarship program has been awarded to Ariel Engebretson, an emergency medical technician with the village for four years who recently started the Stony Brook University paramedic certificate program.

Tales of bootlegging, of a fishing trip that netted a torpedo, and of a village rocked by the overwhelming stench of seaweed.

What appeared at first to be a quirky but heartwarming story about a friendly mute swan that had taken to roaming the streets of Sag Harbor, often stopping traffic and interacting with people, ended tragically just a few weeks after the bird had become a summertime character on the north end of Main Street.

The trails are mapped today, but when two former college classmates began their horseback rides on them decades ago, without maps or smartphones to guide them, the goal was to find a path that stretched through the woods and reached the edge of the ocean. With an expanded group of women, they are still exploring the trails today.

“This has been a longtime problem on the South Fork,” Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. said in reference to a universal truth about Long Island: that gas prices generally get higher the farther east you go. The change in gas prices between UpIsland and the South Fork can be startling, and the change from just Southampton to Montauk even more so.

When Ken Lustbader and Jay Kidd first saw Casey, a female husky mix with special needs, at the Animal Rescue Fund of the Hamptons adoption center 10 years ago, they were struck by her “sweet energy and intrinsic kindness.” Mr. Lustbader remembers Mr. Kidd saying, “that’s the dog we need.”

On Sept. 6, 1898, Col. Theodore Roosevelt paid a visit to the Montauk Lighthouse, signing this guestbook owned by Capt. J.G. Scott, the Lighthouse keeper.

A hundred years ago, a car came barreling onto a Maidstone Club green, to the astonishment of golfers and a caddy, who had to scramble to avoid being hit. And more adventures from the pages of The Star of yore.