In this photograph sporties, or businessmen from New York City who took the “Fishermen’s Special” from Penn Station that arrived in Montauk at the crack of dawn, stand in quiet anticipation aboard charter boats about to embark from Union News Dock. They will try their luck in Montauk’s notorious fishing grounds, fervently hoping… Read more »
The decade of the 1920s is filled with ingenuity and invention in the field of aviation. Visionaries like Sherman Fairchild pushed aviation science forward, intertwining aesthetics and engineering. Fairchild (1896-1971) was fascinated by “photogrammetry,” the science of gleaning map measurements from photographs. When he was 21 years old Fairchild designed an… Read more »
A tweet that surfaced in March about swans reappearing in Venetian canals made hearts rejoice worldwide. Temporarily displacing stories of corona gloom and doom, the original post credited clearer water to fewer tourists. Mother Nature was cleaning up the canals! The post went viral. However, Natasha Daly from nationalgeographic.com took issue with the… Read more »
This aerial view donated by the Windsor family to the Montauk Library Archives shows the center of Montauk Village from the late 1950s or early 1960s. A photographic foray into recent history, it reveals a number of easily recognizable buildings. In addition, gaps in the aerial landscape, i.e., those stores and businesses that… Read more »
When Phillis Ridgeway jumped into the fighting chair of her husband Jack Rounick’s sport fishing boat, she thought she was about to tangle with a swordfish. Its radiant blue sheen made it clear, however, that what she had sighted was a very rare blue marlin. In his “FISHING” column for The… Read more »
This aerial postcard of the Bridgeford Cottage Colony on East Lake Drive came into the Archives with the one cottage already circled, a message from a guest to the addressee, “this is where we stayed!” Edwin Bridgeford owned this cozy group of cottages, advertised as “Your Country Estate at the Sea Shore.” The… Read more »
This week’s Throwback Thursday comes from the Ann Ostrander collection of beach scenes dated 1990. Some of the photographs from the Ostrander collection are single, stand-alone images. Others, such as this page from Ann’s dismantled photo album, contain multiple shots. Photo albums and scrapbooks allow the owner to play with creativity,… Read more »
The Photographic Records of Progress maintained by Fisher’s Montauk Beach Development Corporation document the construction of the Manor, Surf Club, and Shepherd’s Neck homes. These meticulously maintained architectural records — donated to the Archives by Frank Tuma — reveal how the local community was transformed by the Montauk Beach Development Company’s ambitious construction… Read more »