St. James, NY real estate market

St. James took its name from Saint James Episcopal Church, built in the 1850s along what is now North Country Road. That road, State Route 25A, still carries a run of nineteenth century structures, and a cluster of them was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973 as the Saint James District. The St. James General Store on Moriches Road sits inside that district and is said to be the oldest continuously operating general store in the country. Back in the early 1900s the hamlet drew stage and screen names as a summer spot, people like the Barrymores and Irving Berlin, though that history shows up now mostly in the old buildings, not in anything you can buy into today.

The hamlet sits in the eastern part of the Town of Smithtown, on Long Island's North Shore, east of Smithtown hamlet itself and just west of the main Stony Brook University campus. Stony Brook Harbor and the Village of Head of the Harbor border it to the north. The CDP covers 4.5 square miles, all land, no water counted in that figure. St. James Rail Road Station opened in 1873 and its station house is the second oldest still standing on the Long Island Rail Road, a small building doing a long job. Port Jefferson is about 15 minutes off, which puts the Bridgeport and Port Jefferson Ferry within easy reach for anyone who wants to cross the Sound to New England without touching city traffic.

Housing here runs to just under 4,930 units as of the 2020 count, with vacancy low, under 4 percent overall and just over 1 percent for owner occupied homes. That is a tight resale market by the numbers. Buyers weighing St. James against Smithtown proper should know both fall under the same town for services and tax rates, so the difference is really about the historic district along 25A, the harbor edge to the north, and that short hop to the ferry, not a different tax jurisdiction.