Ambitious Riverhead Is Back to Square One

With significant development off the table on the twin forks of New York’s Long Island, because of water, sewer, road and political limitations, only the town of Riverhead, where the forks separate, offers an outlet for meaningful growth touching the area. Historically a railroad and agricultural hub, Riverhead fell behind as wealth and glamour reached the two forks in the last 50 years, serving mainly as a commercial highway corridor for big-box, outlet and strip-center retail that was precluded from the consumer-heavy forks. But in its western hamlet of Calverton, the town’s ambitions for loftier employment prospects were focused on Epcal, the latest proposal in a 25-year quest to fill a large, abandoned Navy-Grumman Corp. parcel. This “enterprise park,” to be developed by an arm of Canada’s Triple Five Group, held the promise of unspecified technology jobs but met fierce community resistance born of suspicions it would primarily be a warehouse depot with cargo planes using the former air base. (Truck-heavy warehouses are rising in much of inland Suffolk County, to supply rich customers amid choking traffic snarls, and airport proposals are a longstanding rub on or near the twin forks.) So, yesterday, as this culminating article in Newsday recounts, the five-year push for Epcal came a cropper, with Riverhead officials pulling the plug. If the town is going to find an identity-defining project that overcomes the affluent allergy to change and disruption that characterizes today’s eastern Long Island, it will have to conjure up another one.

https://www.newsday.com/long-island/towns/riverhead-industrial-development-agency-calverton-aviation-and-technology-ktogcgh8