Selden, NY real estate market

Selden was known as Westfield back when farmers first settled here in the mid 1700s. Captain Daniel Roe built a house along Middle Country Road before the Revolutionary War, and he is buried nearby in a small family cemetery behind the Old Westfield shopping center. The name changed when the post office opened in 1852, because Westfield was already taken upstate. A judge named Henry Selden offered to do something handsome if the town took his name. It did, and nobody is really sure he ever paid up. The hamlet sits in the Town of Brookhaven in Suffolk County, bordered by Coram, Farmingville, Centereach, and Terryville, and it covers about 4.3 square miles of land.

For most of its life Selden was farm country, known in the 1880s for melons and early vegetables. That started to change once Middle Country Road got paved through in the late 1920s. In 1931, with only about 131 residents, agents began selling small lots to city dwellers as a country retreat, in a project called Nature's Gardens. Real suburban building took off in the early 1950s, and by the early 1970s Selden had become a full suburban community. One piece of local history worth knowing if you are touring the area: the old Suffolk County Tuberculosis Sanatorium opened in 1916 and its site became the main Ammerman campus of Suffolk County Community College in 1961, now enrolling over 11,000 students.

The commercial spine of Selden is Middle Country Road, also State Route 25, and that is where the shopping centers sit. The first Westfield Shopping Center opened in 1972, College Plaza followed in 1975, and Independence Plaza came in 1992 right next to it at Boyle Road. That cluster around Independence Plaza is what locals now call Downtown Selden, and it has kept pulling in more chain and local businesses since plans for a real town center took shape around 2009. For a buyer, that stretch of Route 25 near Boyle Road is the practical center of town, close to shopping and close to the community college campus.