Brentwood, NY real estate market

Brentwood started as two railroad stops. In 1844 the Long Island Rail Road put in Thompson Station and Suffolk Station on the expansion of its Main Line, and that is really where the hamlet begins. A few years later something stranger happened here. On March 21, 1851, Josiah Warren and Stephen Pearl Andrews founded a utopian colony on 750 acres called Modern Times, built around the idea that people should run their own affairs, buy and sell land at cost, and cap their lots at 3 acres. It had no courts, no jails, no police, just an agreement to leave people alone. That experiment did not last, but in 1864 the settlement was renamed Brentwood after the town of Brentwood in Essex, England, and the name stuck.

Not much of Modern Times survived. Two Octagon houses, the original schoolhouse, and one residence are what is left of the colony buildings, tucked into a much bigger hamlet now. In the first half of the 1900s, Brentwood also had the Ross Health Resort Onehtah, a place people came to for the pine air, run by Dr. William H. Ross. The bigger institution on the map was Pilgrim State Hospital, once one of the largest psychiatric hospitals in the world, now Pilgrim Psychiatric Center. Part of that land, 52 acres of it, became Brentwood State Park's athletic field complex, which opened in 2009 and is the closest thing the hamlet has to a big shared green space today.

Brentwood sits in the Town of Islip, in Suffolk County, so Islip is your town hall for permits and your line for services and tax rate. The hamlet itself covers 11.0 square miles, all land, no water to work around. It marked its centennial in 1950 and its 150th anniversary in 2007, so this is a place that has kept some memory of its own timeline even as it grew well past its Modern Times footprint.