Villages

Tidings of comfort and joy from The Star of yore to you, dear reader.

Near-hurricane-level winds, tides, and rain blasted the East End on Monday, leaving downtown Montauk with far more damage than any other place in Suffolk County.

From The Star’s photo archive, this Christmas card sent by Lion Gardiner (1878-1936) and Ida S. Loomis Gardiner (1881-1973) shows the Gardiner House on Ocean Avenue covered in snow.

When Santa Claus visited Long Wharf on Dec. 9 as part of the Sag Harbor Chamber of Commerce’s tree-lighting festivities, what families may not have known was that the man originally slated to play the role, Ken Dorph, had been asked to return his red suit to the chamber three days earlier. 

A paved, multiuse recreation path has been completed at Boys and Girls Harbor Park, on the west side of Three Mile Harbor in East Hampton. It will accommodate users of all ages and abilities, including children learning to ride bicycles.

Twenty-five years ago, 800 students got an early Christmas break when the East Hampton High septic system experienced a logjam for the ages. And other tidbits ripped from The Star of yesteryear.

Mariah Miltier has been promoted to executive director of the Montauk Chamber of Commerce, promising “new, exciting directions while holding our traditions close.”

From the Amagansett Historical Association, this 1967 work by Ron Ziel, the railroad historian, shows the train line that dates to 1893 and ran as far east as Sag Harbor.

It was a good run for the health food and vitamin shop Second Nature — almost 52 years in East Hampton — but on Sunday the shop closed its doors here for good. It wasn't the high price of rent but rather the lack of foot traffic that drove the decision, an owner said. “Southampton is livelier.”

One hundred and twenty-five years ago it snowed so much roads and railways were impassible for days. May it be so again.

Montauk’s Memory Motel was shuttered and silent on a recent Sunday, but on an adjacent island 116 miles west of Montauk’s downtown, the party was just getting started at another Memory Motel, an East Village pop-up where the D.J. Alexandra Richards, daughter of the Rolling Stones’ guitarist Keith Richards, spun an exhilarating set of uptempo tunes for a throng of enthusiastic young Manhattanites. 

The sanctuary at the Jewish Center of the Hamptons was the first and one of only a few nonresidential buildings Norman Jaffe designed in his brief but illustrious career. The temple addition is seen here in a photo from The Star’s archive.