Mount Sinai, NY real estate market

Mount Sinai sits on the North Shore of Long Island in the Town of Brookhaven, right on Mount Sinai Harbor where it meets Long Island Sound. The name took a few tries to get right. European settlers bought the land from local Native Americans in 1664, and for generations the place was called Old Mans, after an elderly Englishman named Major John Gotherson who locals joked had been swindled out of land here. When residents applied for a post office in 1840 that name did not sit well with postal officials, so it briefly became Mount Vernon, then flipped back to Old Mans, then finally landed on Mount Sinai in 1841 or 1842 when postmaster Charles Phillips picked the biblical name, according to local legend by pointing at random into his Bible.

For its first two centuries this was farm country. Building stayed close to the harbor at first, and land south of North Country Road mostly stayed in crops until the late 1800s. Six buildings from 1705 to 1790 still stand, along with more houses from the 1800 to 1840s and 1880 to 1890s periods. Timber here also fed the shipbuilding trade in neighboring Port Jefferson, and a shipyard once operated locally before moving to that deeper harbor. Things changed when the Long Island Rail Road reached Port Jefferson in 1879 and ran through Mount Sinai to Wading River from 1895 to 1938, bringing vacationers who wanted the beaches. Cedar Beach became a draw, and the old Chandler Estate on the harbor was turned into vacation cottages, hosting Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller in the 1950s before Suffolk County bought it as parkland in 2001. Real suburban building did not arrive until the 1960s, and farmland kept giving way to housing well into this century, including the 404 acre Davis Peach Farm, sold and developed in the early 2000s.

A commercial center never really took hold here. Residents have long depended on shops in neighboring Port Jefferson, so do not expect a downtown strip when you tour the area. What Mount Sinai does have is parkland: Suffolk County Chandler Estate Park, Little Portion Friary Preserve, and North Shore Heritage Park. For buyers, that mix of protected shoreline and a lack of a built up commercial core is the trade off worth knowing going in.