Town Residents Mark 101 Years

Two East Hampton Town residents were recently celebrated for achieving a rare milestone this month.

With friends and family in attendance, Josephine Crasky and Mary Curles were both recognized for marking their 101st birthdays with a January 9 party at the town’s senior citizens center in East Hampton. Curles was born on November 30, 1923, and Crasky on January 7, 1924.

The twin milestones provided a fascinating local history lesson, which Hugh King, the town historian, delivered at the celebration and again at the Town Board’s January 16 meeting.

In 1923 and 1924, King said, the Amagansett School, which Crasky and Curles attended, stood on the corner of Atlantic Avenue and Montauk Highway, where the John Day Jackson Memorial Tennis Courts are today. It was moved to its present Main Street site in 1936, he said.

In 1923, Miankoma Hall, on Miankoma Lane in Amagansett, was owned by the Ladies Society of Busy Workers.

“If you wanted to have a party, if you wanted to have a dance, if you wanted to have a theater event, you rented Miankoma Hall,” King said. “There was no Guild Hall until 1931.”

The dancer and choreographer Isadora Duncan rented Miankoma Hall one summer, he said. Crasky once lived next door to the hall, which had become a residence and music studio and where Tsuya Matsuki taught piano to generations of children and adults.

The 1881 Amagansett Life-Saving Station that had stood on the corner of Bluff Road and Indian Wells Highway had been moved to Main Street by 1923, King said, but had yet to become LaCarrubba’s clothing store, which happened in 1932. The hamlet’s firehouse, he said, was where the Amagansett School’s parking lot is now situated.

When Crasky and Curles were born, “the Amagansett windmill was still standing, on Windmill Lane,” King said. “It burned down about 1925. The DiSunno, Della Polla, Napilillo and Natale families had arrived in Amagansett.”

“Miss Amelia, of Miss Amelia’s Cottage, was still alive in 1924,” King said of the last known occupant of the museum on Amagansett’s Main Street, Mary Amelia Schellinger, who was born in the structure in 1841 and lived there until shortly before her death in 1930. “The Parish House, or Scoville Hall,” was just being built in 1923 and 1924, he said. The Amagansett Presbyterian Church’s Scoville Hall was destroyed by fire in 2011 and later rebuilt. Today, it is available to rent for events and classes; Mandala Yoga Center for Healing Arts holds its classes and other events there.

The Stephen Talkhouse, now a storied live music venue and bar on Amagansett’s Main Street, was a residence in 1923, King said. Carl Fisher had just arrived in Montauk, which he would endeavor to develop into the “Miami Beach of the North” with some success.

East Hampton High School was just being built on Newtown Lane when Crasky and Curles were born, King said of the structure that is now East Hampton Middle School. The Village of East Hampton had been incorporated just three years before Curles’s birth, its highest ranking official known not as the mayor but the president of the Village Board.

“It was a lovely celebration,” Councilman Tom Flight said of the January 9 party at the Town Board’s work session on January 14.

“And it was a packed house,” Supervisor Kathee Burke-Gonzalez added.