Let Snouder's evolve with the times

Lane Filler is a member of the Newsday editorial board.

What nostalgia will sound like in the year 2060: "Remember when the gang used to hang at the Apple store and check out the iPads and MacBook Pros? We'd swap apps and sing along with YouTube, then go next door to Starbucks for a latte and try to get up the nerve to talk to girls, and fail, miserably. So, so miserably."

What nostalgia won't be in 50 years is our kids reminiscing about how much they loved being dragged downtown to endure a cultural experience designed to be enjoyable not to them but created, instead, to celebrate things their grandparents were nostalgic for.

Snouder's Corner Drug Store - inarguably historic and notably neat - has closed. It was the longest continuously operating business in Oyster Bay, at that location since 1884. Theodore Roosevelt got his phone calls there when governor, and countless couples bought their ice cream sodas and argued over the origin of the term "poodle skirt" and fell in love.

It was a community focal point in a (now) historically designated building, parts of which predate the Revolutionary War, according to town historian John Hammond. The oldest parts of the structure were originally a house.

Snouder's shut down the soda fountain decades ago when soda fountains went out of style, and the store on Dec. 7, because independent drugstores are no longer viable.

So what should happen now?

According to Ray Eaton, executive director of the Snouder's Corner Drug Store Foundation, $3 million should be raised: $1 million to buy the property and $2 million to restore it. Eaton said he and his co-volunteers are concentrating on cataloging, documenting and archiving artifacts, like prescription books from the late 1800s and the old furniture and desks they're finding in the building's upper floors.

The most oft-touted vision then includes putting a soda fountain downstairs and using it and the upper floors as a gathering place for the community, as it was for so many years.

Both Eaton and Hammond say the structure of the building is generally sound, and it makes sense that solid, historically valuable buildings ought to be saved when possible. That the renovation will cost twice as much as the land and building, though, sets off alarm bells - as does the idea that, rather than being a vital, commercially viable gathering place in the modern world, it ought to be an imitation of a vital, commercially viable gathering place from a bygone era.

Walk the streets of Oyster Bay and you see a lot of old buildings hosting modern businesses. Across from Snouder's sits, in a building that dates back to 1849, a business called Appliance World.

Walk the streets of Oyster Bay and you find community centers of every stripe. In Canterbury's, a bar and restaurant near Town Hall, I made friends with a bartender and a local couple enjoying a late lunch while I huddled over some much-needed coffee. Today's gathering spots are no less vital than yesterday's.

So should the Snouder's building be saved? I think so, if it can be done for a reasonable price and private citizens and businesses want to fork over the cash. Should it be a museum devoted to glorifying how we used to socialize? No.

Again, it was first a house. If citizens stood up in 1884 and demanded that, because it dated back to the late 1600s and was so historic in nature, it should stay a house, there would have been no Snouder's, no memories made, no kisses stolen.

Make it pretty and historical on the outside, throw an Apple store and a Starbucks on the inside, and let the kids make some equally valuable memories of their own.