Oyster Bay OKs property purchases

The Oyster Bay Town Board Tuesday approved the purchase of two properties to expand the Raynham Hall Museum in Oyster Bay and transform a vacant Glen Head gas station into a park.

The town will purchase the house at 30 W. Main St. in Oyster Bay for $540,000. That will allow the nonprofit Friends of Raynham Hall organization, which operates the museum for the town, to move its offices and collections storage out of children's and servants' rooms in Raynham Hall, the earliest section of which was built in 1738 for merchant Samuel Townsend. Those rooms, representing a third of the space in Raynham Hall, will be redecorated to show their historic functions, museum director Harriet Gerard Clark said.

The adjacent house to be purchased will be used as a visitor's center on the first floor, with offices and storage above, Clark said.

The property being sold by Royston Enterprises LLC is 0.12 acres and the 1,989-square-foot house built in 1923 covers about 30 percent of the lot.

Clark said the museum has wanted to acquire the adjacent house for more than 35 years. It has changed ownership three times during that period, but the town, which owns Raynham Hall, could never produce funds to purchase it quickly enough.

"Because it's a historic house, the area for welcoming visitors is actually quite limited," Clark said of Raynham Hall. "We get about 5,000 fourth-graders every year who come to study American history and we really don't have a place to welcome them."

Museum board president Kay Sato said the additional building "will mean a much-improved education program and we don't have to rely on the primary building to house all of our offices and our collections."

The additional space also could provide a safer entrance for school groups onto the museum property instead of crowding onto West Main Street, she said.

After the town purchases the house, the museum group will have to pay for any renovations to both structures although the town has offered help from town employees, Clark said. She said it would take three or four years to fully implement the plans for using both structures.

The town board also voted to acquire the former Sunoco gas station at 670 Glen Cove Ave. for $1.4 million. The property had been used as a gas station since at least 1953 and a small convenience store was added before the station closed many years ago. Sunoco had proposed opening a convenience store on the 0.43-acre site, prompting concerns by the community about increased traffic.

The town will use the site for a passive park with benches but no sports facilities.

The funds for the purchases will come from a town environmental bond act approved by voters in 2007.