Huntington, NY real estate market

Huntington sits on the North Shore of Long Island in northwestern Suffolk County, with the Long Island Sound at its back door and Nassau County right next to it. The town got its start in 1653, when three men from Oyster Bay bought land from the Matinecock people, a deal known ever since as the First Purchase. That original parcel ran from Cold Spring Harbor on the west to Northport Harbor on the east, bordered by the Sound to the north and what is now Old Country Road to the south. Some say the name honors Huntingdon, England, birthplace of Oliver Cromwell. The town once stretched much further south, until that section broke off to become Babylon in 1872.

The Long Island Rail Road reached Huntington in 1867 and changed everything. Before that, the economy ran on farming and shipping out of the harbor. After the railroad, Cold Spring Harbor turned into a summer resort town and commuting to the city became part of life here. The real building boom came after World War II, when farms and resorts started giving way to subdivisions as western Suffolk County suburbanized. That postwar wave is why so much of the housing stock across the town dates from that era.

Huntington today covers 137.1 square miles, with a good chunk of that, about 43 square miles, being water. Within the town you will find the incorporated villages of Asharoken, Huntington Bay, Lloyd Harbor, and Northport, each with its own local character and its own layer of governance on top of the town. Anyone shopping here should ask which incorporated village a property falls under versus unincorporated Huntington, since that affects which local services and zoning rules apply, on top of what the Town of Huntington itself provides.