Long Island oddities attract attention

No, your eyes do not deceive you.

That is a cemetery in the Home Depot parking lot in Commack. And a giant sphinx on Montauk Highway in Bayport. And look-alike Jurassic Park dinosaurs at a Southampton antiques shop.

What, you may ask, are they doing on Long Island?

That answer is as sentimental, historic and amusing as the objects themselves.

The Tyrannosaurus rexes at Yesterdays Treasures in Southampton are hanging out, waiting for a vacancy at a theme park or museum.

"They're fun and attention- getting," said Sandra Schulman, sales director at the shop, whose dinosaurs and other items come from a Dutch company in the Philippines.

The Brewster Burial Grounds in Copiague, dedicated to "the first Native American families on Long Island" and Civil War veterans, have grave sites dating from the 1800s. Three in particular stand out. Richard Brewster, a concrete mason, carved them in the early 1950s to resemble his father Sidney, his Aunt Florance and Charlie Carr, who served in the Civil War.

The giant concrete sphinx in Bayport looms large now, but it was once cut down to size, so to speak. It began life at the turn of the century at the Anchorage Inn in Blue Point. The inn burned down in the late 1920s, but the sphinx was spared and remained on the property, which became a gas station and the owners' residence. When the property was sold in 1973, workers bulldozing the gas station accidentally severed the sphinx's head.

As it happens, twins John and the late Lou Fontana, owners of Fontana Concrete in Bayport, happened by and rescued the head. They restored the sphinx and set it in front of the business in 1983, dedicating it in memory of all its former keepers, including the gas station's owners, who were Lou's in-laws.