Riverhead Rising

You know the going must be getting good in Riverhead when Forbes magazine named the town one of its Top Tourist destinations of 2023 — take that, East Hampton! The laurels from America’s leading business magazine arrived at a moment of profound liminality in Riverhead, where numerous development projects are in the works downtown and elsewhere, and where civic leaders have been aggressively pursuing a vision of what they call “Riverhead Rising.”

That vision includes mixed-income housing developments, a dynamic and varied bar-and-restaurant scene, a revived Peconic River riverfront district and a big push by the town to tie in the bedraggled area near the Long Island Rail Road station to the vibrant and bustling East Main Street business corridor.

“We have a million cool irons in the fire right now,” said Dawn Thomas, community development director for the Town of Riverhead.

Riverhead’s revitalization may fairly be traced to the 1990s, when civic leaders created three Urban Renewal districts in town — near the railroad station, on East Main Street, and in the former Grumman facility in Calverton. That prescient move, according to Thomas, allowed the town to pursue and access economic development funds from New York State and to pursue other grant opportunities available to the town, given its federally designated status as a historically disadvantaged community.

“Downtown revitalization had been long planned for, but never realized,” said Thomas, who has worked for the town in various capacities for more than 30 years. Thomas recalled the negative impacts to the downtown business district when Old Country Road was redeveloped, bringing in the Tanger complex and the assorted big box outlets. Those shoppers tended to stay away from downtown and even if the advent of the big boxes brought more people to town, they weren’t sticking around for lunch at historic Tweed’s on Main Street.

“Mom and pop businesses closed, there were lots of vacancies and blight downtown and the buildings that were here, albeit historical, were not suitable for downtown retail.”

Riverhead is unique among Long Island towns for a few reasons that provide a sort of template of opportunity you don’t see in other bustling burgs such as Port Jefferson or Patchogue. There’s incredible diversity both in terms of cultural demographic and economic standing, which plays out directly on the downtown Business Improvement District, which fields some seven different taco joints, two Latino bakeries, a Turkish restaurant, Irish bars, Italian restaurants, crystal shops, and an assortment of housing options that’s reflective of income disparities in the town of 35,000 that is mostly rural but with a tight and somewhat gritty semi-urban core.

Riverhead also boasts one of the rarest of rare features: It’s the only downtown on Long Island that backs up onto a river, long an unexploited opportunity for both locals and visitors. The Peconic River, as Thomas explains, was originally used for industrial purposes, areas which then became town-owned parking areas and which didn’t readily connect the Peconic River to the town.

The problem had always been one of public access and enjoyment of the river, said Thomas. “We have this blockage of the river — it’s been the hue and cry of the community for 35 years.” To resolve that long-standing gripe, the town is in the early stages of building a town square on East Main Street that will provide a green corridor to the riverfront. A couple of buildings have been demolished to make way for the square, and other buildings will give way as well as this plan moves forward to development, said Thomas, within the next five years. An $800,000 grant from the state kickstarted preconstruction and then the Town Board bonded for $6 million to buy the property from a motivated seller, during the height of the COVID crisis. “This was a complete and utter leap of political faith and literally one of the best decisions they’ve ever made,” said Thomas.

In recent years, the Town Board also set out to tweak its zoning regulations to accommodate higher-density housing development near the rugged neighborhood around the railroad tracks, adopting a transit oriented development plan long before Governor Kathy Hochul’s hotly debated housing plan this year emphasized TOD as best-practices housing policy.

A 2020 request for proposals was issued to would-be developers, a 35-unit mixed-use apartment plan emerged, and is now under development. The effort speaks to the balance the town is trying to achieve as it works to stitch together a truly walkable and public-transit friendly community — encouraging more tourism-via-railroad while taking pains to take care of its diversity of residents of lesser means, while also cleaning up a long-blighted area in the meantime as an added and welcome bonus.

The town also leveraged opportunities that arose following Superstorm Sandy, according to its 2020 “Pattern Report,” an extensive guide for would-be developers that details the various architectural forms, spanning numerous decades, that are part of the downtown matrix.

Following Sandy, the town leveraged state and federal grants to build four multi-family residential buildings with retail ground floors. “For the most part, buildings constructed in the last five years are residential or hospitality uses and between four and five stories, a height required for developers to recoup their investment on the cost of construction and land values.”

Even as it grows as a tourist draw — and even as younger families of means are moving to town and buying up historic homes — Riverhead is working to balance tourist-driven economic growth with the fact that there is a significant population of unhoused and other vulnerable persons with mental health issues who also live in the town, and that it has had to deal with some street-level issues with aggressive panhandling or other petty crimes over the years. As such, there’s been a greater police presence in the core business areas to address those concerns.

And, says Thomas, the town has taken pains to retain what she calls the town’s “diversity of people, diversity of income and diversity of opportunities” for anyone who calls Riverhead home. That includes regulations for some developers to include affordable housing units in their plans. “That is a key element,” said Thomas, who highlighted Riverhead unlike some other communities on Long Island was not “rejecting affordable housing plans,” and currently boasts a mix of workforce and affordable housing options.

But if you had to identify the protean “game changer” in town, said Kristy Verity, executive director of the Riverhead Business Improvement District, it was the 2000 arrival of the Long Island Aquarium and the attached Hyatt Hotel. That was one major factor among several, said Verity, that has seen Riverhead “growing as a destination, not just a pass-through town.”

During a recent stroll with a reporter through downtown, Verity pointed to numerous signifiers of a town on the move as she also checked off some of the recent windfalls and opportunities out there for Riverhead as it continues its rise: The town recently nabbed a $10 million grant from the state for downtown development; another $25 million federal grant is in the hopeful hopper.

Strolling down the riverfront area — where a new playground and amphitheater are planned, along with an extensive Army Corps of Engineers-prompted project to deal with chronic flooding of the Peconic River — Verity pointed to the numerous public-art features that dominate the downtown river area near Peconic Avenue and Main Street, as she noted that Riverhead can lay claim to having the most within-walkable-distance brewpubs of any town on Long Island, that it boasts both a Barnes & Noble and an independent bookstore, that it has a has a hipster-friendly record store (though it’s only open on Sundays), that vegan options are available around town, and that a new Ramen restaurant is opening any time now.

And in a sign that the days of boarded-up businesses may soon be in the long rear-view mirror of Riverhead’s history — even businesses that don’t make it are quick to rebound: After a short but artery-clogging run, a Cuban restaurant on East Main Street recently closed, but is already being reconfigured by its owner as a breakfast nook.

Given the lack of breakfast options in town, “that will be welcome,” said Verity, who spends a lot of her time organizing the town’s annual and highly popular Alive on 25 street-festival series that goes on through the summer (see sidebar). Her organization provides a civic bridge between the residents, businesses and tenants in the improvement district and the town.

As she toured the sprawling hollow between the riverfront parking lots and Main Street that houses the East End Arts complex, Verity said she looks forward to the eventual creation of a designated arts district in town, and added that in five years she fully expects to see an even “brighter and more colorful” downtown scene.

But there’s work to be done: As part of an Army Corps of Engineers’ recent assessment of Riverhead’s chronic flooding problems — made worse by climate change — the several historical buildings that comprise the East End Arts complex will have to be elevated by at least 2 feet — and the ribbon of boardwalk that runs along the river will have to be elevated, too.

Riverhead Rising, indeed.