“Are you contemplating a ‘good ole summertime’ vacation?” asked a letter to customers of the Wavecrest Motel and Apartments in anticipation of the summer of 1961, which was personally signed by the resort’s owners, Franklin and Lucille Jarmain, as well as their children. “Now is the time to look forward to that special week or… Read more »
This shot from Jane Liebell’s collection of photographs donated to the Montauk Library in 2005 says everything about seasonal celebrations in November: the Girl Scouts are at the firehouse, and have just cooked a delicious Thanksgiving turkey! (Although “the proof of the pudding is in the eating,” as they say.) We know that a Boy… Read more »
Funny – considering it was she who advocated, in “A Room of One’s Own,” for a peaceful, quiet space to write – that it was Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? that made it possible to provide just such a space for writers and visual artists here in Montauk. In the 1960s, after Albee… Read more »
A friend wrote recently to ask if there were ghosts at the Montauk Manor. About 20 years ago, he said, his sister and her husband stayed in a room on one of the upper floors — perhaps one built into the roof level, as she remembered a sloped ceiling – in the massive, four-story landmark…. Read more »
Presumably in town to wrestle the native landscape into a Miami Beach of the North, Carl Fisher’s investors (above) at least had the deference to remove their hats at Montauk’s oldest settlers’ cemetery. That was wise: In 2011, East Hampton Star reported in jest that Montauk’s first lighthouse keeper, Jacob Hand, who was laid… Read more »
“The first annual Community Picnic and Field Day Saturday, sponsored by Montauk Youth Inc., has been termed a success,” The East Hampton Star reported on October 2, 1980. The newspaper added rather poetically that many local families had taken part despite the fields at Montauk County Park having been “windswept.” Baking and cooking contests… Read more »
It was August 1898 when Camp Wikoff opened to what quickly grew to be more than 20,000 sickened, injured, and weakened soldiers returning from the Spanish-American War. A hastily created patchwork of tents and infirmaries blanketed virtually all of Montauk, from Fort Pond Bay to Ditch Plains to Third House. It was intended to… Read more »
After Ruth Woodrow died in 1983, Bessi Hochstein wrote a letter to the East Hampton Star describing her memories of boarding at Mrs. Woodrow’s cabins in Shepherd’s Neck. “The first time I was in Montauk was early spring, 1979, the year before I entered college,” she wrote, “I came, like hordes of others my… Read more »
The man clamming in the foreground of this photograph was known as Augustus Petitpas in his native Nova Scotia, and as Ben Pitts in the United States. The beached boat listing behind him in Lake Montauk was known as the “Pelican,” an open party boat that Long Island Rail Road passengers would eagerly jump… Read more »
If you don’t know what a cow shoe is, you may want to get educated at “How Dry We Weren’t,” a hands-on exhibit presented by the Montauk Historical Society at the Carl Fisher House. The answer is concealed behind a little door – with a crystal pull, of course, this being the decadent 1920s –… Read more »