Information, News, and features from Montauk Library’s local history collection.
Tens of thousands of veterans were sent to Montauk late in the summer of 1898 to quarantine and recover from tropical diseases before fully returning home from the Spanish American War. Montauk was remote, its sea breezes were restorative, and the troops had been “so weakened and shattered as to be ripe for dying like… Read more »
“I don’t know who first coined the term ‘highway haiku’ for vanity plates, but I think it is most appropriate. Lovers of Montauk are so clever in how they express themselves, even in such a brief way,” Mark Levy wrote in a letter to the editor of the East Hampton Star in 2016. At the… 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 »
Who lived in Montauk in 1930? The U.S. Census of that year shines light not only on who lived here but also what they did and where they came from. Tuthill, Grimes, Joyce, McDonald, Syvertsen, Paon, Pfund, Duryea, Burke, Martell, Pitts, Tuma, Gilmartin, Briand – many last names reverberate locally almost 100 years later. A… Read more »
The shore at Fort Pond Bay is often so sleepy it can be difficult to imagine how awake it’s been historically. Thousands of veterans of the Spanish-American War – Teddy Roosevelt’s “Rough Riders” – disembarked from transport ships in Fort Pond Bay in 1898 to quarantine and recuperate at Camp Wikoff, whose entire infrastructure had… Read more »
Gone but (maybe) not forgotten: Slater Drugs, the New York Ocean Science Laboratory, the Dolphin, Bill’s Greenhouse, First National Bank, the Ronjo, the Texaco station, and $50 fines in East Hampton Town. Still kicking (at least so far): the New York State parks, Gosman’s Dock, Uihlein’s, the Viking, White’s, the IGA, John’s Pancake House, Shagwong,… Read more »
Much as they like to talk about real estate, most people in Montauk these days wouldn’t be referencing a 750-or-more-square-foot house with no AC or winter insulation on a 7,500-square-foot piece of property. The product of a late 1950s collaboration, the 200 or so prefab summer residences were designed by Andrew Geller and Raymond Loewy… Read more »
“Mrs. Gunnar Strandberg, whose husband was employed at the Willard restaurant, was helping him put boards over the restaurant windows when the storm struck. Unable to get back to her house in the village until the hurricane abated, she was greatly concerned for the safety of her two-year-old infant, who was alone there.” “As soon… Read more »
Given the price of land today, a waterfront building is more likely to be replaced with something grander than moved from one spot to another. Back in the day, though, homes and even restaurants (like Trail’s End) in the old fishing village on Fort Pond Bay were moved to other places like Shepherd’s Neck and… Read more »
Did that gentle little boy grow up to be a veterinarian? Did that earnest little girl go on to become a broadcast journalist? We don’t know, but in all likelihood some of the children in these photos – taken by Peggy Joyce in, we believe, the early 1960s, today are the grandparents of Montauk School… Read more »