FROM THE ARCHIVES

It is Small Business Season™, and Small Business Saturday® falls on Nov. 28. Before it was a campaign, shopping local was simply how the Town of Babylon lived, and Babylon Village’s Main Street was where it happened.

The Village’s history explains why. Travelers from the north headed for the bay, and travelers from New York City headed east, so Babylon was a natural stop-over place, “creating the need for stores, hotels and services.” Streams to the north powered mills for grain, lumber and paper. By 1800, the Village says, Babylon was a hub of activity.

The storekeeper often ran the mail, too. The Town’s history of West Babylon records that the Babylon Post Office opened on March 8, 1851, with Nathan E. Bassett as postmaster. In the 1800s and early 1900s, it notes, a post office was typically run out of an existing store, and the merchant-postmaster was paid a modest fee.

Then came the train. The first South Side Railroad train arrived on October 11, 1867, and the Village’s marker says it spurred a resort boom. From 1871, a horse-drawn line carried visitors from the depot to the ferry docks. From the 1800s to the 1930s, Babylon had at least fourteen hotels, including the Sherman House on Main Street, the Town says.

Main Street even printed its own news. Henry Livingston founded the South Side Signal in 1869, in a building on the south side of West Main Street. It later housed the Red Lion Pub, was moved to Mansfield Place in 1990, and was demolished in 2019. The paper’s pages are now digitized on the New York State Historic Newspapers site.

The big change came after World War II. From 1940 to 1960 the Town’s population grew by 485 percent, and the new suburbs needed stores. The Great South Bay Shopping Center in West Babylon debuted in 1956, on the farm where Walt Whitman’s family once lived. Its first store was Martin’s; a Newsday headline that August called it a “$2 Million Martin’s Store.” The architectural photographers Gottscho-Schleisner shot it on Aug. 7, 1956, and the Library of Congress keeps the negatives.

Main Street survived. When you shop it this month, you are keeping up a habit that is older than the Town itself.

Sources: Village of Babylon, “Our History” · Town of Babylon, “Babylon Village Community Profile” · Town of Babylon History, “Hamlet of West Babylon,” Feb. 2025 · Library of Congress, Gottscho-Schleisner Collection

Martin's at the new Great South Bay Shopping Center, August 1956. Gottscho-Schleisner Collection, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.