Huntington History

Until it was developed in the 1920s, the area between Depot Road and Lenox Road from Ninth Street south to a point south of Vondran Street was home to a one-mile horse racing track featuring a 1500 seat grandstand, a club house, large barns and open fields.

Horses had been raced at this site since as early as the 1840s.  The Suffolk Racing or Driving Course was a half-mile track that reportedly was the scene of some the first races run by the legendary horse “Lady Suffolk.”  These early races featured trotters pulling a driver in a sulky.  The track sat on a 47-acre parcel and endured an uneven history with different owners and operators.  Races were held sporadically.  For example, in 1874, the summer meeting lasted just three days with only two or three races each day.  Nonetheless, the meet was popular enough to attract visitors from Brooklyn by way the Long Island Rail Road.

After the Civil War, concerns were raised about the future of the track.  In 1878, it was suggested that a fair be held at the course—so long as it didn’t detract from the county fair in Riverhead.  But it took another decade for the idea to be realized.  In 1886, Henry C. Brown, proprietor of the Long Island Brewery in Brooklyn and a recent resident of Northport (his home is now the Indian Hills County Club), organized the Huntington Live Stock Fair Association.  Despite the Association’s best efforts, the grounds were not ready for the hoped for opening in 1887.  The Association had purchased additional land around the track and had made extensive alterations to the grounds and the track itself.

The track and fair grounds were formally opened on the Fourth of July the following year.  The track was hard and pebbly; the grand stand was missing some final details and needed a coat of paint.  Nonetheless, attendance was excellent.  The wealthy summer residents of East Neck and from miles around came.  So did local farmers and their families dressed in their Sunday best.  Several races were run—but there was no betting.  Between heats, a brass band played.  Visitors enjoyed the scene from the wide balconies of the club house; and enjoyed meals in the lunch rooms.  The grounds were surrounded by open meadows and fields of grain with forests on the distant horizon.  It was a “picture so full of beauty and variety” that it “calms the mind when agitated by conflicting thoughts.”  Further improvements were made in time for the September races, erasing all memory of the “unsavory Mecca of the horsemen of olden times.”

By September–when the Association’s first annual fair was held—every pebble had been removed from the track, but racing was not part of the program.  The event featured livestock shows, displays of local produce and flowers, samples of bread, cakes, pies and jellies, as well as quilts and paintings.  Wagons and carriages, and farm equipment were displayed.  Visitors could ride the merry-go-round, have their photograph taken, or watch a baseball game between the Suffolks and the Norwalks.

It was a welcome diversion for a town that had experienced a terrible blizzard the previous March and a devastating fire that had destroyed the block of stores known as the Brush Block, a carriage factory, blacksmith shop and the Central Presbyterian Church just a week before the fair opened.  But the first day of the fair also featured rain, which turned out to be an omen of things to come.  In succeeding years, rain would be a constant problem for the fair’s organizers.   Even though the Long Island Rail Road ran extra trains to get visitors to the fair, which was only a few minutes walk from the train depot, rain kept them away.

By 1893, the Live Stock Association had defaulted on its debts.  A new company, known as the Long Island Fair Grounds Association, was formed to take over.  The group intended to resume the fairs, but it seems the only activity was horse racing.  In 1905, an effort was made to incorporate a new organization—The Huntington Fair and Exhibition Company—to purchase the property and resume the fairs.    The grounds were instead purchased by Singleton Van Schaick, son of one of the founders of the Huntington Live Stock Fair Association.  In 1921, the old fair grounds were purchased by Addison Sammis, who turned the land over to the Huntington Station developers, Koster & Cornehlsen, who subdivided the land into 20 foot wide lots and began building houses where the horses had once raced.

Perhaps the only tangible reminder of the old race track, other than horse shoes found buried in the area, are the cement pillars that flank the south entrance to East Park Drive.  According to neighborhood lore, the pillars were a part of the stable area and were where the jockeys dismounted from their horses.

Although the annual fairs did not last, they did give rise to a new name for the surrounding community—Fair Grounds.  But that too turned out to be a temporary appellation.  In 1911, the name was changed to Huntington Station.

Roads in Huntington today are mostly paved in asphalt.  There are a few concrete roads—especially in Northport—and maybe even a dirt road or two.  But a hundred years ago, Huntington’s Main Street was a wood road.

In 1911, the Town Board decided to pave Main Street with wood blocks.  At the time the road was basically a dirt road with a covering of Peekskill gravel.  It tended to get muddy in wet weather and dusty in dry weather.  For many years around the turn of the twentieth century, Samuel Shadbolt would ride up and down Main Street in a wagon equipped with a water tank in an effort to keep the dust down during the summer months.  In 1907, George Taylor circulated a petition asking that oil be used instead of water because it would last longer.  Those who favored water circulated their own petition.  They say oil and water don’t mix, but that didn’t keep several storeowners from signing both petitions.

The decision was made to use oil.  But oiling the dirt road was not good enough.  For one thing, it did nothing about the mud after a rainstorm.  For another thing, the advent of automobiles took their toll.  In 1907, The Long-Islander predicted that with the arrival of William K. Vanderbilt’s Long Island Motor Parkway, Huntington would became “an Arcadia for Autoists.”  One Sunday afternoon that summer, Mrs. Thomas Aitken counted 250 automobiles pass along Main Street in just three hours.

Four years after the oil was introduced to Huntington’s streets, the Town Board decided it was time for a more permanent solution.  This time salvation from mud and dust came in the form of wood

blocks measuring 8” x 3” and 3” deep (the block pictured here measures 7¾” x 2¾’”and 2½“ deep).  The work began in September 1911.  The blocks were laid on a concrete foundation from New York Avenue to Green Street (the wood paving was extended to Prospect Street two years later).   Private companies wishing to lay water, electric, telephone, or gas lines were warned to do their work before the wood blocks were laid because they would not be allowed to dig up the blocks once they had been installed.

There was some discussion as to the effect the new surface would have on the annual bobsled races down Cold Spring Hill into the village.  Would sleds go faster and further; or slower and less far?  The blocks also inspired a weekly newspaper column, “Along the Wood Blocks.”  The column was inaugurated soon after the blocks were laid and ran for five years.  The witty observations exposing the foibles, idiosyncrasies, and charm of the local population and extolling the beauty of their town were signed, appropriately enough, with the name  “Creosote.”  The writer was, in fact, Harry R. Fleet, a Huntingtonian who had enjoyed a long career in newspapers.

The wood blocks lasted until 1927.  Despite the warning to the utility companies, over the course of a decade and a half, so many holes were dug into the blocks—and improperly filled—that it was almost impossible to keep the street in decent shape.  Out with the wood blocks, in with concrete.

Blocks were salvaged by local residents.  Some were burned to heat houses.  The one pictured here—along with a few thousand others—was used to pave the new cow barn at the Park Avenue Dairy.

Over the last half-century, the Town of Huntington and the County of Suffolk have assembled an impressive collection of open space totaling some 520 acres in the Crab Meadow section of Huntington.  But a small portion of that land was acquired by the Town more than 350 years ago.

Under the Town’s colonial patents issued by various royal governors, the Trustees of the Town were granted all lands that constitute the town.  Over the years, the Trustees sold almost all of the land.  The few remaining trustee lands include the beach at Crab Meadow.  As early as 1901, several residents had erected shacks on this beach.[1]  In 1907, residents of the area sent a petition to the Town Board requesting the Town to remove the houses; “thereby giving all citizens of the Town the use of said property in common.”[2]  The Huntington Board of Trustees retained attorney Willard Baylis to render an opinion on the legal status of these shacks.  After examining records at the County Clerks’ Office as well as the Town Clerk’s Office, Baylis concluded that the Board of Trustees had never conveyed the lands at Crab Meadow beach.  As a result, none of the persons who erected the structures on the beach “has any right in or title to such beach, and certainly their possession has not been long enough in time or of such character as to give any of them adverse rights against the Town, or its Trustees.”[3]

The beach in question extended from the highway leading south from the Sound (what we know as Waterside Avenue) east to the Gut or creek that flows out of the meadows south of the beach.  Prior to 1890, the road jogged to the east and separated the Trustees’ land, which was on the east side of the road, from private land on the west side of the road.  In about 1890, the road had been straightened, and as a result 196.7 feet of the private property along the Sound was now on the east side of the road.

That parcel was part of the land acquired by Willis B. Burt from William Chesebrough in 1900.  Burt developed the land on the west side of the road as Waterside Park.  On the beach on the east side of the road, Burt operated a private beach pavilion.

After Baylis confirmed the Town’s ownership of the beach property east of Burt’s pavilion, residents petitioned the Town Board to maintain the beach as a public park and to appropriate $5,000 to equip and maintain the park.  Proponents pointed out that most of the town’s waterfront was owned by private parties and was, therefore, inaccessible to the public.  In fact, the Town’s only waterfront park at the time was Halesite Park, which had opened a dozen years earlier and had only 200 feet of shoreline along Huntington Harbor.  The proposal was the subject of a special town wide referendum held in October 1919 at the Centerport firehouse.  The two resolutions passed by a 4 to 1 ratio.[4]  Once the park was established, Burt served as the manager of the park on behalf of the Town, in addition to operating his concession stand.

Unfortunately, swimming at Crab meadow was not without risk.  Northeast storms had built up a peninsula from the east side of the Crab Meadow Creek across the outlet of the creek, which diverted the flow of the creek westward directly in front of the town beach.  The swift current created hazardous swimming conditions, especially for children.  The dangers presented by this situation were brought to the Town’s attention as early as 1920,[5] but it would take decades before the problem was resolved.

An attempt in 1920 to cut a channel through the peninsula so that the creek would flow north into the Sound rather than along the beach was met with a letter from one of the owners of the adjoining land on the east side of the creek.  Edwin H. Brown asserted that he and his partner Frank Lambert owned the peninsula.   Lambert and Brown had purchased land on the east side of the creek in 1903.[6]  They claimed ownership of the peninsula as an accretion of their property.[7]  Brown warned the Town, “I hereby forbid the work above mentioned and give notice that if, as I believe, we can establish title to said land I shall claim and endeavor to collect damages if the work is continued.”[8]

Despite Brown’s warning, the Town hired Burt to proceed with the work in 1923.  Brown made good on his threat and sued. The case dragged on for the next twenty years during which time attorneys became ill, interested parties died, and settlement talks fell apart.  All the while, the current caused by the peninsula continued to pose a threat to swimmers.

In the meantime, thousands of residents visited the beach each summer.  Five years after voters approved a resolution to create a park at Crab Meadow, they approved another resolution to spend $20,000 to acquire Burt’s property on which he operated his pavilion.[9]

But the park’s popularity was not without its downside.  Residents of Waterside Park complained about late night partying at the beach.  Members of the Waterside Park Association, many of whom were Brooklynites with summer homes at Waterside Park, reported that young people would arrive at the beach late in the evening after the town’s beach pavilion had closed and they would stay until as late as 3:00 in the morning and sometimes until dawn.  They asserted that “the hilarity and boisterousness that occasionally ensue not only cause serious discomfort, annoyance and disturbance, but are a distinct menace to the good name of the place.”[10]  The problems of late night use of the beach continued—especially when there was a high tide after midnight.  In 1926, the Town Board placed a police officer at the beach to help avoid the problems presented to nearby residents.[11]

There was also another private pavilion nearby.  As early as 1929, Walter Post had opened Post’s Pavilion on Waterside Avenue just south of the town beach.  Having a somewhat unsavory reputation in later years, Post’s Pavilion remained open until the late 1950s.  It then was known as the Soundview Inn and burned to the ground in the early morning hours of June 7, 1963.[12]

Burt’s old wooden pavilion was showing its age and as early as 1927 voters were asked to approve expenditures to replace it.  The measure was defeated each time it was presented.  But the need to create jobs during the Great Depression fit nicely with the need to improve the facilities at Crab Meadow beach.  In 1937, the old pavilion was finally replaced with a Mediterranean style brick and concrete building designed by Huntington architect David Dusenberry that featured men’s and women’s locker rooms, showers and lavatories.  The locker rooms would be in the two wings of the building that were joined by an open-air court.  On the roof of the center portion was a sun deck.  The cost of the building, which was a WPA project, was split between the State and the Town.[13]  The new building also included food concessions.  In front of the building, the Town built an 18 foot wide boardwalk extending 700 feet east and west of the pavilion.[14]  The new building was ready for the opening of the 1938 season.  As part of the dedication ceremony on May 28, 1938, a time capsule was placed in the cornerstone of the building.[15]

The building was a hit, a perfect compliment to the always-popular beach.  However, the dangerous current created by the outflow from the creek continued to be a concern.  Moreover, the erosion occasioned by the current threatened the new pavilion.  In light of the failure of earlier efforts to reach a settlement in the matter, the Town Board voted to seize the offending sand bar by eminent domain.  The action was, of course, challenged by the Brown and Lambert interests.  By this time Edwin Brown and Frank Lambert had both died, but their estates continued to fight the Town.  In 1942, the Town finally prevailed and paid Brown & Lambert $9,258.64 for the disputed sandbar.

After a hurricane in 1944, the Town constructed a breakwater along the creek, which resulted in the accumulation of so much additional land that the Town was able to add parking for 120 to 150 additional cars.[16]  The continued popularity of the beach—one neighbor compared it to Coney Island on a hot summer weekend—led the Town to acquire an additional eight acres south of the parking area for additional parking.[17]  At the time private homes continued to stand on the south side of Waterview Street West, which now runs just past the entrance gate to the beach, but at one time extended as far as the creek.

But Brown & Lambert (or more accurately their estates) continued to own hundreds of acres of the meadow and uplands.  On the higher ground to the south of the meadows, a golf course, known as the Northport Country Club, was laid out in 1923.[18]  The club lasted only about twenty years and the abandoned clubhouse burned to the ground in 1949.[19]

In 1956, a private company with a public sounding name—Empire State Development Company, Inc.—acquired Brown’s interest.  Justine Lambert, Frank Lambert’s widow and heir to the bulk of his estate continued as the co-owner.   In all the years this tract was privately owned, it was never developed.  Of course, the meadows were too wet to be easily developed, but the uplands where the Northport Country Club had been located could have been developed.

By the early 1960s, the Brown & Lambert holdings in Crab Meadow were one of the largest undeveloped lands in a fast growing town.  In June 1961 the Town held a special election to vote on a proposed $2,500,000 park and recreation plan that would involve the acquisition of nine sites for parkland, including the Brown & Lambert holdings.[20]  Town Supervisor Robert J. Flynn explained. “We are trying to solve our desperate need for space while the area is still available.  If we wait much longer, we will have to take what the speculators leave us at costs that would be frightful.”  The referendum failed by 548 votes out of 7,224 votes cast.[21]

At the same time, the Empire State Development Company instituted legal proceedings to clarify title to the property so that it could proceed with development plans.[22]  In 1962, Justine Lambert and Empire State Development engaged in a bidding war at Town Hall.  Bids were made for individual parcels and then the referee asked for bids for the entire tract.  Lambert started at $705,000; Empire responded, only to be outbid by Lambert.  The parties raised their bids by a thousand dollars a bid, sometimes four or five thousand dollars at a time.  Until, finally, Lambert bid one million dollars. There was no response from Empire. [23]

Lambert said she intended to develop the property with luxury homes on lots of two to three acres—and no “split levels”—even though the Town had already announced plans for a re-vote on the parks referendum.

In September of that year, the parks referendum was put before the voters again and passed by an overwhelming majority, 5,272 to 1,815.  The referendum covered only the cost of acquisition; it was estimated that it would cost another $3.8 million to develop the parks.  The proposal for the Crab Meadow parcel included plans to dredge the meadow to create fresh water fishing lakes, restoration of the golf course, bridle paths, a salt-water marina and a wildlife refuge.[24]

Of course, Lambert’s plans to develop the property were rendered moot by the passage of the referendum.  Subsequent condemnation proceedings to establish the fair market value of the land did not commence until 1966.  The case also involved title issues arising from the Town’s Colonial grants.  The Town’s Board of Trustees claimed ownership of the waterways through the meadow under these patents arguing that their ownership had never been transferred.  The Town prevailed and began making payments for the land in 1967.[25]  The Town had hoped to acquire all the land between the Sound and a right of way established by the Long Island Lighting Company for its transmission lines, but there were not enough funds.  However, in 1970, Suffolk County was persuaded to purchase the 140 acres along Makamah Road from the LILCO right of way to the meadows that the Town had not purchased earlier.[26]

The old Northport Country Club golf course was renovated and a new clubhouse was built overlooking the meadow.

In the 1980s, the town undertook an extensive renovation of the Crab Meadow beach pavilion.  What had been a snack bar was expanded to a full service restaurant with the addition of greenhouse enclosures on the west side of the building.  The boardwalk and gazebos were rebuilt, shuffleboard courts were added and lights were installed.  When the work was done, the Town Supervisor and Town Board sent invitation to a 50-year “Golden Anniversary Celebration and Rededication of Crabmeadow Beach.”  Cocktails and hors d’oeuvers were served.  It is doubtful that anyone pointed out that the building was in fact only 48 years old.

By 2009, the WPA pavilion was showing its age.  An engineering report indicated that the breezeway between the two wings was structurally unsound, perhaps because salt water was used to mix the cement when it was built.  The Town replaced the breezeway with an exact replica.  The bricks have not been painted so the building appears as it did when it was originally built.  Another benefit is that the rooftop sundeck is once again open to the public.

In recent years, the Town has added additional parcels to its open space. The Ingraham Nature Preserve, which includes the Crab Meadow Burying Ground and which lies across Waterside Avenue, was added in 1998 with partial funding coming from the Iroquois Pipeline Operating Company.  The Fuchs property was purchased with Suffolk County in 2003.

But a question remains.  Who were Brown and Lambert?

Francois Lambert was born in Lyons, France on June 13, 1851.  He arrived in the United States in 1876.  He was an inventor, eventually holding 60 patents.  His first patent, secured in 1878, was for a striking mechanism for clocks.  He also invented an early recording device, which appears to have been intended to be used for a talking clock.  A recording of his voice announcing the hours of the day made in 1879 is the oldest surviving recording in the world.

Lambert’s most financially successful invention was of a water meter.  He shared that 1887 patent with John Thomson.  The Thomson Water Meter Company was based in Brooklyn.  The company was sold to Neptune Water Meter Co. in 1925, netting Lambert $800,000 (the equivalent of about $10 million dollars in 2012).  Later that year Lambert’s wife died.

The following June, the 74 year old Lambert married 30 year old Jennette Justine Lawson Ebbets, who had sold sheet music in Lambert’s son-in-law’s office.  After a yearlong honeymoon in Europe, the couple moved from Brooklyn to the 22^nd floor of the Savoy Plaza Hotel in Manhattan and later moved to the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.  A profile of Lambert notes that in his retirement “he owned several rental properties in Brooklyn, and some undeveloped land on Long Island.”[27]

Lambert died in 1937 and left the bulk of his estate to his young widow.  Justine Lambert was apparently a successful investor and when she died in 1975, the fortune had grown to an estimated $15 million (or about $64 million in 2012 dollars).  That explains why the widow of a man who had first purchased land in 1903 was still around in the 1960s and was able to coolly bid one million dollars to gain complete control over the hundreds of acres her husband had purchased so long ago.

Edwin H. Brown was Lambert’s patent attorney.  Born in Brooklyn to English parents the same year as Lambert was born in France, Brown graduated from Columbia University Law School in 1874.  He became one of the most well regarded patent attorneys of his day.  He retired in 1902 and traveled extensively, living in London for two years.  When he returned in 1912 he focused his attention on his extensive real estate holdings, which he had acquired previously.  He developed Addisleigh Park in St. Albans, Queens in 1892.  Based on English garden suburb designs, the neighborhood features homes built in the Colonial Revival, English Tudor Revival and Arts and Crafts styles popular in the period from 1910 to 1930.  Starting in the 1940s, the neighborhood became a popular place for jazz musicians.  The Addisleigh Park Historic District was created by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission in 2011.[28]

Brown died in 1930.