1946 Huntington Planning Map

1946 Town of Huntington Planning Map As American military personnel returned from World War II in 1945, the United States underwent a dramatic population shift from cities to rural areas. The nation's first major suburban development was Levittown in Nassau County on Long Island. This mass-produced housing concept proved to be so popular that demand for track housing skyrocketed immediately. Huntington Township in western Suffolk County needed to plan for this sudden suburban sprawl. This Town of Huntington planning map from 1946 may not be historical itself, but does cover the right place at the right time to serve as a rare snapshot of the birth of modern American suburbia. It also documents the early efforts of local and state governments to plan for the future of Long Island.

One of the most interesting feature of this map is a proposed east-west highway that would have cut through Cold Spring Harbor and Huntington Station, connecting with Pulaski Road in Greenlawn. This proposed highway was never built and there's no explanation why the plans were changed. Had this road actually been built, it may have resulted in a greatly different landscape of northern Long Island from what we know today. Other penciled in proposals were built, including Lieutenant General Frank Libutti Way which created a second east-west road through the heart of downtown Huntington, parallel to Main Street/25A.

A notable fault on this map is that although construction of the Long Island Expressway began seven years earlier in 1939, there are no references to its future route through the southern part of Huntington Township.

The following towns, villages, hamlets, and census-designated places are found on this map as listed below:

  • Asharoken
  • Centerport
  • Cold Spring Harbor
  • Commack
  • Dix Hills
  • East Neck
  • East Northport (formerly known as Larkfield)
  • Eatons Neck
  • Elwood
  • Fort Salonga
  • Great Neck
  • Greenlawn
  • Halesite
  • Half Hollow Hills
  • Huntington Village
  • Huntington Station
  • Little Plains
  • Little Neck
  • Lloyd Neck
  • Lower Melville
  • Mannetto Hills
  • Melville (formerly known as Sweet Hollow)
  • Middleville
  • Northport
  • South Huntington
  • Vernon Valley
  • West Hills
  • West Neck

While the map states some former town names, others names found on the map as current do not exist today. The Great Neck on this map is not the same Great Neck in nearby Nassau County, and that name is no longer used in Huntington Township. The same goes for Middleville, which now only refers to the name of a middle school in that area. And Vernon Valley was a former name of Northport but hasn't been used as the official name of a town since the 19th century.

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The Map's History
My father worked for the New York State Department of Housing and Urban Renewal for over 30 years. In the mid-1980's his department was being relocated and the workers were told to discard file cabinet after file cabinet of old paperwork rather than spend the time or money to have it transported to the new location. During this process he came across many old maps, including this Town of Huntington Planning Map from 1946. Since we we lived in East Northport (part of Huntington Township) he decided to save this map.