Downtown Comebacks Nurtured

Threatened by malls and megastores, some of Long Island's old hubs find strategies for survival

In 1908, you could pick up a streetcar in Downtown Hempstead.

DOWNTOWNS are often taken for granted, but over time they have managed to survive. Historically, they have thrived, withered and revived. But in recent decades, the encroachment of malls and megastores has changed the dynamic and pulled commerce away.

Pessimists say the end is near -- but that's not necessarily so.

"It's been up and down, up and down, up and down," says Lee Koppelman, executive director of the Long Island Regional Planning Board and director of the Center for Regional Policy Studies at the State University at Stony Brook. "However, they still serve a useful function. For those that make the effort, they not only can hold their own but in some cases can even increase their strength."

For Ron Stein, a financial planner who is president of the not-for-profit Vision Huntington advisory group, downtowns have lost their historic reason for being -- proximity to goods and services -- because of the automobile. "It's a one-word reason," Stein says. "The automobile has made it possible for people to live elsewhere than in central communities served by mass transportation."

"We have basically sucked the lifeblood out of many of our downtowns and that's the bad news," Stein says. "The good news is that people are becoming increasingly aware that what represents our sense of place in our communities are the downtown areas. These are the ideal forms of community when we think of places where we want to be."

Among the Long Island downtowns officials are trying to nurture, according to Koppelman and Stein, are Rockville Centre, Northport, Glen Cove, Great Neck, Patchogue, Bay Shore, Port Jefferson, Huntington and Hempstead. Others are in varying stages of making the attempt.

Here's a look at the business districts of Hempstead and Huntington, two of Long Island's oldest centers of commerce.

Downtown Hempstead

Hempstead means business. It also has gotten the business, figuratively speaking, being forced out of its early eminence as Long Island's shopping center to become one of the downtowns that planners worry about.

"It's a bad rap," says James York, historian of the oldest incorporated village in New York State, a place with three and a half centuries of history and its share of pain. Known as The Hub for its central location and its dominance of commerce, the village of Hempstead has evolved, trying, as many downtowns are, to redefine itself as a viable satellite to the megamalls and Big Box stores that have redirected the flow of business.

For York, the business history of Hempstead village is, with some exceptions, typical of the ebb and flow of most of Long Island's hubs.

"It is certainly a shadow of its former self," says York, project coordinator for the village's Community Development Agency, "but it still has the potential to come back and be a reasonably heavy hitter."

This area of the vast Hempstead Plain, bounded by two freshwater streams, was settled in 1643 and quickly became the place for farmers to gather and sell their goods to buyers from an ever-wider radius. A revolution, George Washington, and 200 years later, the village was home to 1,355 people. After the Civil War, Henry Agnew sold paper goods not far from R. G. Powell Undertaker and Powell's Hotel. Printer Lott Vandewater started the Hempstead Sentinel in 1899. In the early part of this century, Louis Cohen opened his dry goods store and A. L. Frank sold men's clothing down the street from Miss Zwerin's Secretarial Studio. One branch of the Long Island Rail Road terminated in the village, also the home of the county's central bus terminal. The major roads, later supplemented by trains and buses, made it the crossroads and brought workers and shoppers from all directions.

By 1940, with a population of 22,000, the village was home to Arnold Constable, a department store in the Manhattan mold. Mayor George Estabrook was envisioning a City of Nassau with the village as its hub. The Chamber of Commerce newsletter talked of Hempstead's "unassailable situation among villages in the state of New York." "Grapes of Wrath" played at the Rivoli Theater.

Like Long Island, the village changed dramatically as manufacturers ramped up for World War II and then more so as veterans and their families moved to the suburbs. Soon to greet them were Sears, F. W. Woolworth, W. T. Grant and Times Square Stores. Abraham & Straus opened a 5-story monster store in 1955 that would go on to become the top-grossing department store in the country for a time.

That was barely a year before the opening of Roosevelt Field in Garden City, Green Acres in Valley Stream, Mid-Island Plaza and Americana in Manhasset. Fifty-thousand shoppers, the population of Hempstead today, attended Roosevelt Field's debut.

The Hub was hurt.

"There were a number of factors," says York, the historian. "It was not just the advent of Roosevelt Field. It was also the demise of Mitchel Air Force Base, which pumped a fair amount of money into the Village of Hempstead as well. And the continuing growth of other communities in Nassau County that were developing their own downtowns."

In time, the village of Hempstead was reeling. The major stores were all but gone. The bankrupt TSS chain closed the 250,000-square-foot Hempstead store in 1989. It remained a derelict until it was leveled in 1997. The parent of A&S, itself in bankruptcy, closed the 540,000-square-foot Hempstead store in 1993. Lots of grand redevelopment talk notwithstanding, it stands forlorn on 17 acres at the hub of The Hub.

With Long Island's economy in better spirits and the village aggressively attempting to recover, the number of vacant stores has dropped significantly. A new $9 million bus terminal opened in 1993 and now has 26 routes and 13,000 riders passing through the village every day. The rundown Rivoli Theater gave way to 112 units of rental housing with retail stores on the first floor. The LIRR is preparing to embark on a new $15.6 million terminal for The Hub.

"The potential for retail here in the Village of Hempstead still exists," York says, "and that's something that's obviously not lost on some of the developers proposing retail development here."

One of the most significant changes in the last 25 years has been the growth of a large multicultural community and related businesses in and around downtown. "The demographics have changed considerably," says David Mosley, president of the Hempstead Chamber of Commerce. "We have had a very very large influx of Latinos."

"The diversity is strengthening the community because it is a great place to live and grow up. It is an international situation in terms of living."

Glen Boehmer, third-generation printer and owner of Sentinel Printing on Chasner Street in Hempstead Village, says, "There seems to have been a death to conventional retail and a rebirth of multicultural retail."

Ann Steinger has owned a uniform store called Top Hat Inc. on Franklin Street in Hempstead Village for 411/2 years. She says, "It is a very mixed village . . . and we are very happy here."

Downtown Huntington

Huntington's downtown is in its second incarnation, which distinguishes it from most of Long Island's central business districts. It also is enjoying a revival, even though major malls and category-killer stores have skewed the situation for many downtowns.

From its settlement 345 years ago a half-mile east of its current center, downtown Huntington has been the heart of commerce in the northwest corner of what is now Suffolk County.

"It's retained its identity," says Mitzi Caputo, curator of the Huntington Historical Society, "probably because it was larger and more complex to begin with."

That doesn't mean it hasn't been challenged, particularly after openings in 1962 of Walt Whitman Mall and Big H Shopping Center to the south. The Whitman Mall continues to draw shoppers away from the Huntington village -- a misnomer since it was never incorporated -- but Big H has hit hard times. Whitman is undergoing a major expansion and there is talk of redeveloping Big H, so there are no guarantees that downtown Huntington will continue to thrive.

In the town's favor is that it is a comfortable setting that attracts families to move within walking distance. "We have so many historic buildings," Caputo says. "We don't have the monotony of that all-the-same facade or the artificially created Nantucket look or anything that's redundant and Walt Disneyish."

Between 1790, when George Washington passed through, and 1820, the population of Huntington Town more than doubled, from 2,000 to 4,935. By the Civil War, the commercial center had shifted west on Main Street from Park Avenue to cluster around New York Avenue.

The arrival of the Long Island Rail Road in 1867 sparked a small rival business district just to the south in Huntington Station that lasted until the early 1970s, when it was bulldozed in an urban renewal program, which left Huntington village as the only downtown for miles around. Urban renewal also threatened downtown Huntington, but only a small number of stores and houses were demolished to make way for a post office and parking lots. The difficulty of traveling, especially before the LIRR, created a brisk hotel trade and a lively variety of supporrting services, including taverns, blacksmiths and livery stables.

A snapshot of the early 1900s would include the smithy of J. T. Cantrell & Brother, who began fitting car frames with wooden wagon bodies to create the forerunner of the station wagon. On Main were McBrien's meat market, Henry Borchers grocery, Goldstein Dry Goods, Wm. Staudenmeier & Sons barbers, Iverson's saloon and the First National Bank.

Five-and-dimes came and went, as did Sears and A&P. The 3-story building at the corner of Main and New York Avenue is representative of downtown Huntington's evolution. In 1880 it was the dry goods emporium of O. S. Sammis, a prominent surname in Huntington history. It became Swezey's furniture store, Hartmanns' department store, Snappy's shoes and now is home to The Gap. What was W. T. Grant Co. is now Marsh's Men's & Boy's Shop.

Downtown suffered in the Depression and periodically afterward, but as with many business districts, each down cycle has been followed by the reverse. The village is now a business improvement district, taxing itself to pay for refurbishments.

Staff writer Tara A. Scully contributed to this story.