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The six-year tug of war over the future of a site that some call the gateway to Northport seems to finally have a winner. Commerce Bank, the fast-growing financial institution whose branches are popping up on street corners all across Long Island, immediately hit major opposition in 2002 when it proposed replacing the dilapidated former Cow Harbor Inn at the corner of Route 25A and Waterside Avenue.
Residents called for Commerce to preserve the building, which dates back to 1790 as the ancestral home of the Scudder family, one of the area’s early settlers. It has served as a general store and a post office and, most recently, as a restaurant.
But Commerce, whose founder, Vernon Hill, came from the fast-food industry and has seen the value in brand architecture, has been adamant about sticking to its branch design. Residents sued, and hard-fought battles left each side with victories, but little movement in their goals. Commerce made small adjustments to its design, but not enough to please opponents. Residents, meanwhile, had a tough time on the preservation front, since major changes to the building over the years had reduced its historic significance.
Finally, in March, the Northport Village planning board—the last of the oversight boards with a say in the matter—signed off on the proposal following additional changes made to the design. The zoning and architectural review boards had already given their OKs.
Garrett Gray, an attorney at the Weber Law Group, in Melville, who represents Commerce locally, said the whole building design has changed from its original proposal. The changes range from closing up a curb cut to bringing the bank from the center of the site closer to the street to reducing the number of drive-through lanes to three from four as well as various landscape changes.
Now the bank is conducting an archeological review of the site at the request of the State Office of Historic Preservation after residents claimed that there may be Indian burial relics on the site. Thus far, he said the review has found “nothing that would cause any concern.” In the meantime, opposition to the Commerce Bank’s plan remains ardent.
In its May 2 email newsletter, Vision Long Island, a smart-growth planning organization based in Northport, called Commerce’s plans for the site “an egregious crime in the history of the Town of Huntington.” And in a following newsletter on May 26, the organization called for residents and the Northport community “to take a stake in preserving this historically significant site that would be erased by this development.”
As an example of how the site’s recent history has touched off passions from many areas, that last sentence in the newsletter prompted a critical letter from Mark Hamer, a board member of the Land Use Institute, a free-market advocacy group.
“To think that Vision Long Island and other special-interest factions should govern land use and determine how the commercial real-estate market should be developed eliminates private property rights and increases the costs of doing business on Long Island—a far greater harm to Long Islanders’ quality of life,” Hamer stated.
But to preservationists, it’s not so much about quality of life or business as much as it is about keeping ties to “the stories and layers of experiences that make a place special and unique,” according to Vision Long Island.
