Northport, NY real estate market

Northport sits in the Town of Huntington, right on Northport Harbor on the North Shore. The name goes back to English colonists who first called it Great Cow Harbour, since early settlers grazed cattle on the pastures around the water. The name changed to Northport by 1837, and the village incorporated in 1894, the first in the Town of Huntington to do so. The oldest house in the village, the Skidmore House on Main Street, was built in 1761, and a 2009 attempt to sell it led the village to pass its own historical preservation law.

The village grew up around shipbuilding, not farming. By the 1830s there were only eight dwellings here, but the shipyards changed that fast. By 1874 Northport had three shipyards, five sets of marine railways, two hotels, and at least six general stores, making it the busiest village on the North Shore at the time. That boom faded as steel hulls replaced wood, and the waterfront fell into disrepair by the 1920s. The village bought that land back and built Northport Memorial Park in 1932, which is still the anchor of the harborfront today. Main Street still carries the old trolley rails from a streetcar line that once ran commuters out to the Long Island Rail Road station in East Northport, a service that stopped for good in 1924.

Geographically the village runs about 2.5 square miles, mostly low moraine hills, with the harbor to the west, the Sound to the north, and marsh and woods to the east. One local landmark worth knowing is Steer's Pit, a deep depression cut into the cliffs from sand mining between 1923 and the 1950s, sand that reportedly ended up in New York City sidewalks. Part of the Pit is now a park used for youth soccer and baseball, and part has been built out with homes and condos. For a buyer, that mix matters: Northport proper is an older, tighter village grid built around the harbor and Main Street, while newer housing sits on reclaimed ground like the Pit, so lot size and house age can vary block to block even within the same square mile.