The One Lawn in Setauket That Fills Up Just Once a Year
August 20, 2026
August 20, 2026
"This is home. It will always be home." A Setalcott leader who grew up on this land said that at a past Chicken Hill Country Picnic, standing on the same patch of grass where the Three Village Community Trust plans to gather the neighborhood again this Saturday, August 22, from 4 to 7 p.m. For most of the year, that lawn at 148 Main Street sits quiet in front of three small wooden houses that most people driving past on Route 25A have never noticed. For three hours one Saturday in late summer, it turns into the busiest yard in Setauket.
The reason has less to do with nostalgia than it looks like from the outside. It has to do with who decided those houses, and that lawn, were worth keeping when it would have been easier to let them go.
From the late 1800s until the 1960s, the ground around what's now the Trust's headquarters was known as Chicken Hill, a working-class neighborhood built around the Setauket Rubber Factory, once Long Island's leading producer of shoes, boots, belts, tires and rain gear. The people who lived there included Native Americans, African Americans, and newly arrived immigrants from Russia, Poland, Lithuania, Romania, Ireland and Italy, all housed in small company-owned cottages provided by the factory. The name itself came from a slur aimed at the community, a jab at the fact that nearly everyone there kept chickens to stretch a thin paycheck.
Most of Chicken Hill is gone now. The three Factory Worker Houses that still stand at 148 Main Street only survived because former New York State Assemblyman Steven Englebright and a group of Trust volunteers stepped in before demolition, moving the buildings to the Trust's headquarters for preservation rather than letting them be cleared for something newer. A Trust trustee has called the grounds "a wonderland" in past years, and the annual picnic has typically leaned into that: house tours, raffle baskets, an expanded barbecue menu of pulled pork, chicken, corn and watermelon, and live music that in past years has come from local acts like Buddy Merriam & Back Roads and the Rum Dogs. None of it happens because a government parks budget scheduled it. It happens because a nonprofit and its volunteers decided a "community lost in time," as the Trust describes it, was still worth an afternoon a year.
A five-minute walk from that lawn sits Frank Melville Memorial Park, and most people who walk their dogs around its pond assume it works like any other town park. It doesn't. The 26-acre park was established in 1937 as a gift from Mrs. Frank Melville Jr., dedicated to the memory of her husband, and it remains privately run to this day, even though anyone can walk in daily from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. The park's own literature describes itself, accurately, as "a private park for the public's enjoyment." The Greek Revival post office, the replica grist mill with its working water wheel, the Bates House and the Satterly Barn all sit on land maintained through donations and volunteer labor, including the Three Village Garden Club, which tends the arboretum inside the park at no cost to any municipality.
This summer that private stewardship shows up most visibly on Sunday evenings, when the park's Wind Down Sundays concert series brings free live music to Hap's Red Barn starting at 5:30 p.m. The same pattern holds next door at Patriot's Hollow State Forest, home to Patriots Rock, a former Setalcott meeting ground and the site of a Revolutionary War skirmish in 1772. That parcel didn't come with the park. The Trust purchased it separately in 2010, specifically to keep it protected. Twice, in other words, someone had to choose to buy this ground rather than assume it would simply stay open.
The same pattern of a specific person choosing not to let something disappear shows up two blocks away, on the restaurant row along Main Street, though it looks less like preservation and more like reinvention.
For more than 40 years, Mario's Italian Restaurant was a fixture at 212 Main Street. Then it survived a fire in 2019, a car that crashed through its front doors in 2022, and a second fire in 2023 that finally ended its run. The space sat empty until Scott Brittman, a Setauket native and Ward Melville High School graduate, partnered with Chris Otero and Ed Fabian to open Culpers 1778 there in June of 2025, an upscale steakhouse named for the Culper Spy Ring that operated through this same stretch of Setauket during the Revolutionary War. Brittman didn't frame it as replacing Mario's so much as filling a gap he'd noticed his whole life: "There's not really much else around here that is a higher-end steakhouse."
Four blocks up, at 316 Main Street across from Se-Port Delicatessen, Elaine Micali opened Elaine's Restaurant and Bar in April 2024, in a space that had previously been a hibachi and sushi spot. Micali had spent a decade as catering manager at Pentimento, the Stony Brook restaurant that closed in 2021, and had once hoped to buy it herself before it shut its doors. When the East Setauket space became available, she took it, hiring executive chef Josue Trejo, who'd also worked at Pentimento, and building out the space with a roster of local tradespeople: Frank Restucci of North Country Electric, Nancy Munch of Open House Country Flowers & Interiors, Shawn Keane of Olde Town Gardens of Setauket, and Brian Dusek of BNR Construction.
Neither restaurant is a chain that saw a demographic report and moved in. Both are people with years of history in this specific stretch of Setauket, filling specific buildings that had specific pasts, because they'd been watching those buildings for years and knew exactly what they wanted to do with them.
Put the picnic lawn, the park, and Main Street side by side and a pattern emerges that's easy to miss when you only experience one piece of it at a time. None of the places Setauket residents actually gather this month exist by default. The factory houses survived because a Trust and an assemblyman intervened before a wrecking ball. The park survives on gifts and garden club volunteers rather than a town parks budget. Patriots Rock stayed protected because the Trust bought it outright in 2010. And the two most talked-about spots on Main Street didn't arrive through a corporate real estate play. They arrived because a Setauket native who grew up wanting a steakhouse here, and a longtime local caterer who'd wanted one specific building for years, both went and got it.
That's a different story than "cute historic village with a good restaurant scene," which is the version every site covering Setauket already tells. The more accurate version is that this village keeps rebuilding its own gathering spaces through the private effort of people who already live here, year after year, rather than waiting for someone else to do it.
If you live here and want to see all of this in person before summer ends, here's what to put on the calendar:
None of these require a reservation or a ticket in advance, and none of them will still look the same by October.
Team Calderon spends most of our time helping people buy and sell homes across Setauket, East Setauket, and the surrounding Three Village area, but we're also neighbors who show up to the same picnic and the same Sunday concerts everyone else does. If you're curious what a home in this stretch of Setauket is actually worth in today's market, Team Calderon is glad to talk it through. Get a Free Home Valuation whenever the timing is right for you.
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