Melville, NY real estate market

Melville has gone by a few names before this one stuck. Native Americans called the area Sunsquams. In the 1600s it was Samuel Ketcham's Valley, named for one of the early residents there. Later it became known as Sweet Hollow, likely for all the honey bees working the trees. The name Melville itself first shows up in records in 1854, and nobody is fully certain where it came from. Some point to novelist Herman Melville, whose Moby Dick had come out three years earlier. The more likely story is simpler: it comes from mel, the Latin word for honey, which fits with the Sweet Hollow name that came before it.

The Presbyterian church built in 1829 at the corner of Old Country and Sweet Hollow Roads is a real piece of Melville history, not just a footnote. It ran continuously until 1930, reopened in 1944 for a funeral, and has been in use since. In 1977 the whole building was moved a mile west. Transportation here has always been in motion too. A trolley line to Huntington opened in 1909 as an extension of a spur running down to Amityville and Babylon, with one of its six fare stops at the Duryea Farm in Melville. It lasted about a decade before farmers complained the noise spooked their animals, and buses took over after that. Route 110 saw a wave of office construction through the 1960s, though by 1971 the market cooled and a lot of that space sat empty for a while.

Melville sits in the Town of Huntington in Suffolk County, right along the Nassau County line, and covers about 12.1 square miles. It has never incorporated as its own village, despite two tries, one in the 1950s that would have joined it with Dix Hills, Wyandanch, and Sweet Hollow under the name Half Hollow Hills, and another in 2001 with Dix Hills, Wheatley Heights, and East Farmingdale. Both fell through, so Melville remains an unincorporated hamlet governed directly by the town, which means Huntington sets the services and tax rate here rather than a separate village board. For anyone buying or selling, that Route 110 corridor is worth knowing well beyond its office history. It is still the commercial spine of the area, and a 45 acre property once home to office buildings near there was purchased in 2026 for $135 million as the site of a planned hospital, a sign of how that corridor keeps turning over.