Dix Hills, NY real estate market

Dix Hills sits in the Town of Huntington, right on the southern edge, sharing a border with the Town of Babylon. The name goes back to a Secatogue man called Dick Pechegan, whose wigwam and fields gave the hilly ground its name. Settlers traded for that land in 1699, and the place was known as Dick's Hills long before it got shortened to Dix Hills by 1911. For most of its history this was farm country, and it stayed that way until after World War II.

The post World War II years are when Dix Hills actually became a place with houses instead of fields. One piece of that story stands out. In 1941, developer J. Franklin Bradley bought a ranch house that had been on display at the 1939 New York World's Fair, part of the World of Tomorrow exhibit, and moved it here to a new development he was building, rebuilding it to its original fair specs. Dix Hills never became its own incorporated village, though people tried twice. In the 1950s there was a plan to combine Dix Hills with Melville, Wheatley Heights, and Sweet Hollow into one village of about 50 square miles. It failed. The idea came back around 2001 with Dix Hills, Melville, Wheatley Heights, and East Farmingdale, and it failed again. So this remains an unincorporated hamlet inside the Town of Huntington, which is who you deal with for permits and services.

Geographically the hamlet runs 15.9 square miles, and the Long Island Expressway cuts almost straight through the middle of it, which makes for an easy commute either direction and puts a lot of the area within a short hop of an entrance ramp. There used to be a Dix Hills post office, but it closed in 1870 and got folded into the Elwood post office, which itself closed in 1902, so mail history here runs through Elwood rather than a standalone Dix Hills branch. If you are buying or selling here, the practical takeaway is the Expressway access. Depending on which side of it a property sits, and how close to a ramp, that can matter as much as the lot itself.