The Setauket Greenway You Walk Every Day Was Legally a Highway Until This Summer

Every morning on the Setauket-Port Jefferson Station Greenway looks about the same. Strollers head out from the Limroy Lane trailhead before the heat sets in. Cyclists use the paved corridor to cut between neighborhoods without touching Route 25A. Dog walkers stop at the kiosk near Gnarled Hollow Road to read whatever flyer the Friends of the Greenway posted that month. A trail steward once photographed two wild turkeys using the path, which felt about right for a place built on the idea that people and cars don't need to share the same 150 feet of ground.

What almost none of those people knew, until this July, is that the ground under their sneakers had never actually stopped being a highway on paper.

The Fine Print Under Your Sneakers

The New York State Department of Transportation acquired the corridor in the late 1950s and 1960s for a very different purpose than owl boxes and bike racks. The plan was a vehicular bypass for Route 25A, running roughly 3.4 miles from East Setauket to Port Jefferson Station. Community organizing through the 1990s and 2000s turned that corridor into something else entirely: a paved, tree-lined trail built in two phases, the first opening in 2009 and the second in 2014, with more than $7 million in public investment behind it.

But the underlying legal status never caught up to what the trail had become. The land was still owned outright by NYSDOT, still technically available for a roadway if the state ever decided to use it that way. Assemblymember Rebecca Kassay, who represents Port Jefferson, put it plainly when she introduced legislation to change that this spring: her bill would simply align the legal status of the land with how residents had already been using it for nearly two decades.

Former Assemblyman Steve Englebright, who helped secure the original funding for the trail, has pointed to what a bypass actually does to a community once it's built. He's referenced the Route 25A work through Rocky Point as the cautionary example. "A good number of stores closed," he said of that stretch, describing what happens to a business district once through-traffic gets rerouted around it instead of through it.

That's the version of the Greenway corridor that stayed legally possible for sixty years. It's also the version that just became impossible.

What Hochul Actually Signed on July 6

On July 6, 2026, Governor Kathy Hochul signed S10161/A10341, sponsored by Senator Monica Martinez and Senator Anthony Palumbo alongside Kassay's Assembly companion bill. The legislation places a perpetual conservation easement over the Greenway corridor, which means the land can no longer be converted to residential, commercial, industrial, or roadway use inconsistent with open space preservation. The easement is held by a combination of the state parks office, Suffolk County, the Town of Brookhaven, or a qualified nonprofit conservation organization, not by NYSDOT alone.

The deal wasn't only about the trail. The same legislation authorizes the transfer of 40 acres of the former Lawrence Aviation Superfund site in Port Jefferson from the Suffolk County Land Bank to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Full cleanup of that site was completed in 2025. The land transfer gives the MTA room to build a future railyard connected to the long-discussed electrification of the LIRR's Port Jefferson branch, if and when that project moves forward.

"This bill sets the stage for progress and preservation at this critically important location," Suffolk County Executive Ed Romaine said of the arrangement.

The trade is worth sitting with for a second. The trail's permanent protection didn't happen in isolation. It got resolved because it was bundled with a completely separate transportation priority, the eventual electrification of a rail line that has nothing to do with hiking or biking. For residents, the practical result is the same either way: the sixty-year asterisk on the Greenway is gone.

The Volunteers Who Kept It Alive While the Legal Question Sat Open

None of this would have mattered much if the trail hadn't stayed usable and cared for through all those years of legal ambiguity. That work has fallen almost entirely to the Friends of the Greenway, a committee of the Three Village Community Trust chaired by Charlie McAteer, working alongside Trust board member Herb Mones, who first got involved with the corridor in 1999.

A large share of the trail's physical improvements over the past seventeen years have come from Eagle Scout candidates completing their service projects on Greenway property. A partial list gives a sense of the pace:

• Sean Anderson, Troop 244 Rocky Point, installed a bench and thirty street name signs in 2010
• Tyler Corsello and Anthony Stella, both Troop 427 Setauket, added benches and plantings the same year
• Kenneth John Tant, Troop 117 Stony Brook, handled a bench and general trail cleanup in 2011
• Cole Swensen and Kyle Rosenzweig, Troop 204 Miller Place, installed benches with ADA-accessible concrete pads in 2020
• John Heraghty, Troop 70 East Setauket, built and installed six bat houses in 2020

The most recent addition came this spring from Holden Cone, a Ward Melville sophomore in Troop 427. Cone's project unfolded in four stages: building and installing Eastern screech-owl nesting boxes near the Renaissance Technologies entrance by the Setauket trailhead, creating an educational flyer for the trail kiosks explaining the owls, repairing and repainting a bench near Old Town Road, and fundraising for a public bicycle repair station now installed at the kiosk off Limroy Lane, complete with a pump and tools for on-the-spot fixes. McAteer, describing Cone's work, said "the Friends of the Greenway has never had one individual contribute as many different enhancements" to the trail.

That bike repair station is a small thing to notice next time you're riding past Limroy Lane, but it's a fair symbol of how this trail actually gets maintained. Not by a state budget line item. By named teenagers with troop numbers, working weekends.

What's Actually on the Calendar This Fall

The Trust's 2026 calendar lays out what's coming next for anyone who wants to be part of it rather than just walk past it. The next Greenway cleanup starts at 9 a.m. on Saturday, September 19, meeting at the Port Jefferson Station trailhead. The recurring farmers market at the Three Village Historical Society and Museum runs the first Friday of most months, with the next one on October 2. The following day, October 3, brings Culper Spy Day at Patriots Rock Historic Site, one of the Trust's other long-running community events.

None of this requires membership or a donation. Trail Stewards adopt a section of the corridor for basic maintenance and reporting throughout the year, and the cleanups are open to anyone who shows up with gloves.

The Next Gap Everyone's Watching

The legal protection settles one long-open question. It doesn't close the physical one that Friends of the Greenway members have been talking about for years: the roughly one-mile gap between the Greenway's Port Jefferson Station trailhead and the western end of the North Shore Rail Trail, which opened in 2023 and already runs from Mount Sinai to Wading River. Englebright has argued the two corridors should simply be linked, pointing out that if the Appalachian Trail can run the length of several states, "we can link our trails together here on Long Island."

That connection isn't part of the legislation Hochul signed. It's a separate ask that depends on different landowners and a different round of funding. But it's the piece that would turn a 3.4-mile neighborhood trail into a continuous ride from East Setauket most of the way up the North Shore, and it's worth watching for anyone who already treats the Greenway as part of their daily route.

For now, what changed is simpler and more permanent than an extension. The corridor under your feet stopped being a highway that hadn't been built yet. It's just a trail now, for good.

If you're weighing what a protected greenway, a stewarded trail network, and this kind of sustained civic investment mean for property values or long-term livability in Setauket and the surrounding Three Village area, that's the kind of on-the-ground context Kenny Calderon and Team Calderon build into every conversation with local buyers and sellers. Reach out for a Free Home Valuation and a straight answer about what's actually happening in this market, not just the median price a portal shows you.