Huntington, NY — Crash Data, Roads, History & Law

History

The Town of Huntington dates its founding to April 2, 1653, when Richard Holbrook, Robert Williams and Daniel Whitehead of Oyster Bay purchased from Raseokan, sachem of the Matinecock, a tract bounded by Cold Spring Harbor, Northport Harbor, Long Island Sound and present-day Old Country Road, known as "the First Purchase"; the buyers immediately transferred the land to settlers already living within its bounds.^[1] Early government took the New England form of the Town Meeting, which in 1657 hired Jonas Houldsworth as the town's first schoolmaster and in 1660 voted to build a schoolhouse.^[1] In 1660 the town briefly placed itself under Connecticut's jurisdiction for protection from the Dutch; after the Duke of York's 1664 takeover, Governor Richard Nicholls summoned Long Island towns to Hempstead in 1665 to confirm land titles and adopt the "Duke's Laws," and Suffolk County, including Huntington, became part of an entity called the East Riding of Yorkshire.^[1] Governor Thomas Dongan's 1688 patent confirmed the Nicholls Patent and authorized the town's Trustees and seal.^[1]

Huntington's natural harbors made shipping and, in the first half of the nineteenth century, whaling out of Cold Spring Harbor central to its economy; Cold Spring Harbor ranked second on Long Island only to Sag Harbor as a whaling port.^[1] Slavery existed in the town until the start of the nineteenth century — an 1755 census counted 81 enslaved people held by 35 families — before New York's 1799 act for gradual abolition.^[1] In June 1774 the town adopted a local "Declaration of Rights" opposing taxation without representation, and after the August 27, 1776 Battle of Long Island the British occupied the island until 1783, at one point razing tombstones in Huntington's Old Burying Ground to build an encampment.^[1] Nathan Hale came ashore in the town by boat from Norwalk, Connecticut in 1776 on a scouting mission for George Washington; he was captured and executed in New York City that September, and a memorial today marks his landing site in the area now called Halesite.^[1] During the War of 1812, an unfounded report of a British landing at Lloyd Neck sent 200 town militiamen marching there, and in November 1814 the Town Meeting voted $207.86 for defense costs.^[1]

Poet Walt Whitman, the town's best-known resident, was born in West Hills in 1819 in a farmhouse his Quaker father had built a few years earlier; Whitman later founded the Huntington newspaper The Long-Islander at age 19.^[1][22] The Long Island Rail Road's extension from Syosset to Northport in 1867 passed through the town and hastened the decline of its maritime economy even as shipping remained locally important into the early twentieth century.^[1] In 1872 the town's southern section separated to become the Town of Babylon.^[1] William K. Vanderbilt Jr.'s Long Island Motor Parkway, an early limited-access automobile road built in part to host the Vanderbilt Cup races, opened in 1908 with a stretch running through the town's interior near Dix Hills.^[18][20]

In the twentieth century the town's character split geographically: waterfront villages such as Cold Spring Harbor and Northport retained a harbor-town feel, the hamlet of Melville developed around Route 110 into a major office corridor described by the town itself as a '110 Corridor,' and Huntington Station grew into the town's densest hamlet and the focus of a 1980s federal housing-discrimination lawsuit described in the Law section below.^[2][13]

How the roads got here

New York's Department of Transportation identifies NY 25A as running through Huntington on its way from the Nassau County line toward Smithtown and the Port Jefferson area, and NY 25 (Jericho Turnpike) as passing South Huntington on its route from the Queens-Nassau line toward Riverhead and the North Fork.^[25] NY 110, which the state has separately named the "Assemblyman James D. Conte Memorial Highway" within the Town of Huntington, runs from Amityville north through Huntington to Halesite, and the town's own economic-development description ties its "110 Corridor" of office development specifically to the Melville section.^[24][2] NY 231 (Deer Park Avenue) runs from Babylon through Deer Park and Dix Hills to a junction with the Northern State Parkway.^[26]

The Long Island Expressway (I-495) crosses the town's southern portion on its route from the Queens-Brooklyn expressways to Riverhead.^[27] The Northern State Parkway, like the state's other limited-access parkways, is classified by the state Department of Transportation not as a Department of Transportation route but as a facility of the Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation (OPRHP) under Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation Law Section 13.03 — the same statutory authority that covers the Sagtikos State Parkway, Robert Moses Causeway and other Long Island parkways built under Robert Moses's parks program.^[27] Before the state's limited-access parkways, William K. Vanderbilt Jr.'s privately built Long Island Motor Parkway opened in 1908 as what the Dix Hills-Melville Historical Association's timeline calls "America's very first expressway," running 45 miles from Queens to Lake Ronkonkoma; it hosted the Vanderbilt Cup auto races through 1910, gained a reputation in the 1920s as an unpoliced "Rumrunner's Road," and was closed and sold to New York State for back taxes in 1938.^[18]

Law and legal history

The town's most consequential reported case is a Fair Housing Act dispute over its own zoning code. In the early 1960s, as part of an urban renewal program, Huntington created an "R-3M Garden Apartment District" classification permitting multifamily housing, but restricted private construction under that classification to the town's designated urban renewal area — in and around Huntington Station, where the Second Circuit found 52% of residents were minorities — while a town housing authority project could in theory be built townwide.^[13][14] When Housing Help, Inc. sought in 1980 to build an integrated, subsidized apartment complex on a 14.8-acre site at Elwood and Pulaski Roads in a 98%-white section of Greenlawn/East Northport, the Town Board refused to rezone the parcel or to amend the ordinance, and on January 6, 1981 formally rejected the request; the Huntington Branch of the NAACP, Housing Help and two Black, low-income town residents sued under Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968.^[13]

The litigation reached the Second Circuit twice. In Huntington Branch NAACP v. Town of Huntington, 689 F.2d 391 (2d Cir. 1982), the court held that the plaintiffs had standing and were not required to exhaust local remedies before suing.^[13] After a bench trial before Judge Jack B. Weinstein's colleague Judge I. Leo Glasser, the district court rejected the Title VIII claims, 668 F. Supp. 762 (E.D.N.Y. 1987), but the Second Circuit reversed in Huntington Branch, NAACP v. Town of Huntington, 844 F.2d 926 (2d Cir. 1988): it held that a Title VIII plaintiff need show only discriminatory impact to make a prima facie case, found that the ordinance's restriction of multifamily housing to the largely minority urban-renewal area "significantly perpetuated segregation in the Town," rejected the town's proffered justification as inadequate, and directed the district court to order the town to rezone the Elwood-Pulaski site (called "Matinecock Court") to R-3M and to strike the urban-renewal-area restriction from the ordinance.^[13][14] The Second Circuit's opinion recited that Huntington had about 200,000 residents in 1980, 95% of them white and under 4% Black, with nearly three-fourths of the town's Black population concentrated in six census tracts in Huntington Station and South Greenlawn — the demographic finding underlying the disparate-impact analysis.^[13] In a footnote, the panel declined to credit the town's argument, based on a Town Board proposal announced in December 1987 to build 50 units of subsidized housing in the Melville section, that it was already acting in good faith, calling the timing "entirely speculative."^[13]

The town sought review, and in Town of Huntington v. Huntington Branch, NAACP, 488 U.S. 15 (1988), the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed per curiam on November 7, 1988 (rehearing denied January 9, 1989).^[14] Because Huntington had conceded below that a disparate-impact standard applied to the facial challenge to its ordinance, the Court did not decide whether that standard is the correct one under Title VIII generally; it held only that, on the record, "disparate impact was shown, and that the sole justification proffered to rebut the prima facie case was inadequate," and it expressly declined to review the separate portion of the Second Circuit's judgment ordering the specific parcel rezoned.^[14]

Government, courts and policing

Huntington is governed by an elected Supervisor, four Town Council members, a Town Clerk, a Receiver of Taxes and a Superintendent of Highways, all elected at-large to four-year terms; the town's own website does not list an elected Town Justice among these offices.^[4] The town's "Public Safety Department," headquartered in Room 310 of Town Hall, describes its own mission as "coordinating public safety, code inspection and code enforcement functions" and running the town's animal shelter — it is a code-enforcement agency, not a police force, and the town's list of departments and its published department-hours schedule likewise include no police department and no justice court among Huntington's town-level offices.^[3][5] Policing of the town's unincorporated hamlets — including Huntington Station, Melville, Dix Hills, Cold Spring Harbor and the rest — is instead provided by the Suffolk County Police Department's 2nd Precinct, which describes itself as proudly serving "the residents of the Town of Huntington."^[9] Some of the town's four incorporated villages run their own police departments: Lloyd Harbor's village government states that its "Police & Highway Departments handle daily all patrol, emergency response, sanitation & recycling" from Village Hall.^[12]

For code enforcement, zoning, streets and sidewalks, Huntington maintains its own municipal code (Huntington Town Code), published online through General Code's eCode360 service; the code's Chapter 173, "Streets and Sidewalks," spans Sections 173-1 through 173-23, and Chapter 55 covers the Public Safety Department discussed above.^[7][8]

Railroad and transit

The Long Island Rail Road reached the town in 1867 when its line was extended from Syosset to Northport.^[1]