The West Babylon Strip Mall Where Walt Whitman Used to Teach School

You have probably parked in the same twenty feet of asphalt outside Marshalls a hundred times. Maybe you cut through on a Saturday for returns, grabbed a slice from Alitalia Pizza on the way out, or just used the lot as a shortcut between Montauk Highway and Great East Neck Road. Nobody stands in that lot thinking about anything except which end of the building has the shorter line.

But that patch of pavement, and the farmland underneath it, has a history that predates every anchor store by more than a century. The land where the Great South Bay Shopping Center now sits was once part of a farm where Walt Whitman's family lived while he taught at the local school nearby, during the winter of 1836. West Babylon's own municipal history page states it plainly: the poet taught at the schoolhouse near Great East Neck Road, and the family farm he lived on is now the site of the shopping center.

That single fact reframes the whole corridor. This was never just a retail strip that got built on empty ground. It sits on top of one of the oldest working landscapes in the hamlet, and the road names, the junction points, and even the shape of the modern commercial district trace back to decisions made well before anyone imagined a Dollar Tree or an Ulta.

The Junction That Gave Railroad Avenue Its Name

If you have ever wondered why there's a Railroad Avenue running through West Babylon with no working railroad in sight, the answer is Belmont Junction. Starting around 1874, a branch of the Central Railroad of Long Island connected with the Long Island Rail Road near the intersection of Great East Neck Road and Railroad Avenue, the exact corner where the CVS Pharmacy now stands. That junction operated a freight depot and telegraph station until 1888, and from 1910 to 1920 the same corner served as a stop on the Babylon Railroad trolley line running between Amityville and Babylon.

None of that infrastructure survives. But the street grid does. Every time you drive through that intersection to fill a prescription or grab groceries, you are tracing the footprint of a rail junction that shaped how West Babylon connected to the rest of the South Shore for nearly fifty years before the automobile made it irrelevant.

A few blocks away, the same era left another marker. Around 1936, Bulk's Nursery built a windmill along Montauk Highway to mark the entrance to its garden center, part of a broader stretch of flower farms and nurseries that once defined this part of the hamlet. The nursery is long gone, but the windmill's presence on the highway is a reminder that Montauk Highway was agricultural well into the twentieth century, not commercial.

A poet's classroom, a railroad junction, and a nursery windmill all occupied the same half mile of Montauk Highway before a single storefront went up.

1960: The Farmland Becomes a Power Center

The shift from farmland and rail junction to retail corridor happened in a single move. The Great South Bay Shopping Center opened in 1960 at the corner of Montauk Highway, Brookdale Avenue, and Park Avenue, built as a power center covering roughly 656,000 square feet across 54 storefronts. For a hamlet that had spent the previous century organized around a schoolhouse, a rail depot, and nurseries, this was the first time West Babylon had a single commercial anchor built specifically to serve car traffic on Route 27A.

That anchor has held for over six decades, which is longer than most Long Island shopping centers of its era have managed without a full teardown. The site has been renovated rather than replaced, and it remains one of the larger retail footprints on the South Shore.

What's Actually There Today

Walk the current lineup and you'll find a mix that has clearly been curated for staying power rather than novelty. As of a recent leasing update, the center's anchors include:

• Marshalls, Burlington, and DSW for off-price fashion and footwear
• Old Navy, Ann Taylor Loft, Carter's, and Skechers for apparel across age groups
• Ulta and Bath & Body Works for beauty
• Five Below, Dollar Tree, and Aldi for everyday value shopping
• LA Fitness for the gym crowd who parks at the far end of the lot

Inside that same footprint, Alitalia Pizza has built a local following strong enough that it shows up unprompted in resident reviews of the center, the kind of small business that outlasts the bigger tenants around it because the neighborhood keeps coming back.

The mix tells you something about how West Babylon actually shops. This isn't a boutique destination pulling people in from other towns. It's a working center built around the errands residents already have to run, which is exactly why the recent renovation makes sense as an investment rather than a gamble.

The Corridor Beyond the Register

The history doesn't stop at the shopping center's property line. Head down Great East Neck Road and you'll pass Whiskey Rocks, a live music venue that has become a go-to spot for rock and metal shows on weekend nights, a few doors down from where CVS marks the old Belmont Junction corner. Terrace Diner sits nearby too, the kind of standing appointment diner that doesn't need a website redesign to keep its regulars.

A few minutes closer to the water, on Bergen Avenue, VERN Restaurant and Bar has become part of the same rotation since the Persaud family opened it directly on a sheltered Great South Bay tributary, in the former Seagull restaurant location. It's a family-run spot with live music most weekends and a menu built around Caribbean seafood, close enough to the shopping center corridor that a Saturday errand run and a Saturday night dinner can share the same few miles of road.

None of these places advertise their connection to a poet's old farmland or a vanished rail junction. They don't need to. But knowing that connection changes how the corridor reads. This isn't a random collection of a diner, a music venue, a pharmacy, and a shopping center that happen to share a zip code. It's a half mile of Montauk Highway and Great East Neck Road that has been continuously in use, under different names and different purposes, since before the Civil War.

Why This Matters If You Live Here

Most people who move through a place daily stop noticing it. The shopping center becomes background. The pharmacy on the corner becomes muscle memory. But West Babylon's commercial core has a documented, traceable history that connects a 19th century schoolhouse to a 20th century rail depot to a 21st century power center, all on the same short stretch of road.

That kind of continuity is rare on Long Island, where so much commercial development erased whatever came before it without a trace. West Babylon's version kept the bones. The road names still point to the junction. The shopping center still occupies the farmland. The corridor still works the way it always has, just with different storefronts doing the working.

If you've lived in West Babylon long enough to have opinions about the DSW layout or the best time to beat the Aldi checkout line, you already know this place better than most guidebooks give it credit for. The history was just waiting for someone to connect the dots.

For more on what makes West Babylon and the surrounding South Shore worth knowing, the Kim Holland Homes Team keeps digging into the details that make each of these neighborhoods distinct. If you ever want to talk about what's happening in the local market, or just want to compare notes on the best pizza inside the Great South Bay Shopping Center, get in touch.