Ruins of Suburbia: the forgotten gas station on Long Island's Northern Parkway
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Growing up deeply ensconced in suburban Long Island like I did, I never really experienced any feeling of permanence or age. Sure, there are lots of colonial settlements on the island - and plenty of buildings that survive from that era - but those are almost exclusively coastal towns on the Long Island Sound. The rest of the island is either so built up - or so meticulously landscaped - that you only have a small inland sliver of the island - usually far eastern Suffolk County, before you get too close to the Hamptons - that's even remotely "natural."
That's why I've always liked the Northern State Parkway. It's one of the oldest highways on Long Island, and while it can be a traffic nightmare during rush hour, it's a far cry from what you would expect from a major freeway. It was built largely in the middle of the last century, with construction ranging from the 1930s through into the 1960s, interrupted only due to the Second World War. It's a car-only highway, as all of the bridges that span the Northern State are too low to accommodate box trucks and tractor trailers, and when you're as anxious a driver as I am it's a relief not having to deal with those monstrous asshole trucks for a few miles.
A postcard of the Northern State from the 1930s. Image Source
However, it was also designed for cars that were much slower than they are today; the entrance and exit ramps are incredibly short, making it a nightmare to merge when traffic is heavy. There have been some recent efforts to widen and lengthen some of these, but for the most part the Northern State looks much as it did back when it first opened: a tree-lined ribbon of highway, punctuated by scenic stone-faced bridges.
The Northern State today. Image Source
I grew up close to the eastern terminus of the Northern State, where it feeds into Route 454 just east of the town of Commack. Close to this east end there's a bizarre anomaly that sits in the median - a boarded-up stone cottage, covered with ivy and graffiti in equal measure, accessible from both the eastbound and westbound lanes through a paved turnoff.
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As a child, whenever we drove east on the Northern State I would look for it, transfixed by what looked like the ruins of an ancient castle in the middle of suburbia, slowly being swallowed by the wild overgrowth. I itched to tell my parents to pull over so we could take a look, but I never did; even as the years passed and the stone house became more bedraggled, and I gained the ability to drive myself I never went, fearful of breaking whatever magical spell that had been cast on the location.
That stone house, it turns out, was a gas station on the Northern State, built sometime in the late 1950s at a time when Long Island was much less settled than it is today, only to be shuttered in 1987. It's a living reminder that there wasn't a gas station on every corner like there is today, that most of Long Island outside of New York City was farmland or estates owned by multi-millionaires like the Vanderbilts or Otto Kahn, and that if you were going "out east" you had better fill up here on the highway before you go any further, as who knows what kind of conditions you're going to encounter so far from civilization?
What the gas station likely would have looked like. Image Source
Of course, today this couldn't be farther from the truth. While the right-of-way of the Northern State is still lush and green from one end to the other, getting off the Commack Road exit puts you right in the center of suburban sprawl - strip mall after strip mall, gas station after gas station. At the corner of Commack Road and Jericho Turnpike there's a White Castle, a motel that you can rent a room by the hour, and a church - you can grab something to eat, then really grab something to eat, and then go to confession, all in the same spot - "burger, bang, and repent," as my sister-in-law's husband would say.
Yeah, by the "sack." Jesus Christ. Image Source
One day, though. One day I'm going to stop off at that old stone house. I'll probably end up getting arrested or something, considering it's state property and NY State Police are some righteous assholes, but I'll do it, just to say I did.
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Nice. I love old places like that that whisper to you from a bygone error. Great images too, man.
Thanks! Yeah there's all this history just lying under the surface,or hiding in plain sight. Makes me want to just start digging.
Ah yes... The Belly Bombs -- by the sack, no less :))
Used to be the cheapest, best meal at 3 AM and you've just pissed on a Dumpster. Now? Maybe not so much.
Nice post @beowulfoflegend, I'm familiar with that area and used to live not far from commack road.
Awesome, so you know what I'm talking about! I grew up in Huntington so the whole Commack Road / Deer Park Avenue area is really well-known to me, too.
Yup, sure do. I remember on one of the Commack Road overpasses, there was something up there that looked like a weather station. We used to imagine it was an alien spaceship.
I also remember, many times, catching the bus on Deer Park Avenue and up Wolf Hill Road to the Walt Whitman Mall.
That mall has changed so much over the decades. I remember back when it was the "dirt mall" compared to Roosevelt Field, complete with dingy fountain that had been drained and left for dead. I miss the bombed-out movie theater that was at one end of the mall, too. Now the whole thing's so built up that I can't even find a parking spot even if I wanted to.
I bet it has. It was the first mall I remember as a kid, that is until the Smith Haven and Massapequa malls arrived and kicked off mall-mania. Roosevelt Field was too far away, so I rarely went there. Parents were lazy back then, hence riding the bus ;-)
And, after much Googling (and to convince myself that it wasn't just a figment of my imagination): Deer Park VOR-DME (DPK).
Hiking those woods, and seeing that thing, and imagining that we'd get abducted by space creatures was a story the likes of the movie Sandlot.
Holy crap! And I thought that big AT&T skyscraper on Jericho Turnpike was weird and out-of-place. That would have totally gotten me and my friends arrested if we knew it was there. Or at least low-level radiation burned.