In Northport, a different take on the strike

Some residents who live near the Northport LIRR station welcomed the shutdown and the relative calm it brought to the area.

“I like the strike — no trains, no people, no tourists, no nothing. No one,” East Northport resident Ed Curley said Saturday morning, adding that the railroad “guys deserve the money they get, man.”

Anthony Pigno, another East Northport resident who lives “right across from the train station,” said his neighborhood was noticeably quieter than it would be on a typical Saturday morning.

“It’s much quieter by my house because I don’t hear the trains going by, because the dogs [usually] start barking and stuff like that,” he said as he went for a walk down Larkfield Road around 8 a.m.

“It’s bad for the people who need to go to work and everything else. But I don’t mind,” Pigno said.

Salon owner Jacqueline Koslosky said the shutdown hadn’t yet impacted business at Gian Franco Hair Design, which is about 400 feet south of the Northport station on Lakefield Avenue.

“We have not felt the effect yet,” she said. “How long the strike is going to be, I have no idea.”

Koslosky said the hair salon gets about a fifth of its business from LIRR commuters, so she expects to start feeling a financial pinch if the strike continues into next week.

She believes the same is true for the other storefronts up-and-down Larkfield Road.

By Sam Kmack

sam.kmack@newsday.com

Sam Kmack covers the Town of Islip for Newsday. He is a graduate of the University of Southern California and previously worked as a city watchdog reporter in the Phoenix metro area, as well as an investigative journalist at the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting.