FEATURED BUSINESS · DEER PARK

Michelle Broughton grew up in Babylon, and for a while the Deer Park dental office on Half Hollow Road was just a place she picked up temp shifts.

Now she owns it with her husband.

Dr. David Broughton and Michelle Broughton took over Long Island Dental Wellness at 163 Half Hollow Road in the fall of 2024, buying the practice from Dr. Kevin Henner, a past president of the New York State Dental Association who had built it over decades.

The introduction that made it happen came from Michelle, who brought the two dentists together at a Suffolk County Dental Association meeting in 2024.

The couple themselves met online, through a mutual friend, and married in September 2025.

He is 34, from Bethpage, a former wrestler who spent seven years in private practice and served as chief resident at Stony Brook Hospital.

She is the hygienist — which turns out to matter, because the changes they made to the office are almost entirely about the twenty minutes a patient spends in the chair being quietly unhappy.

Noise-canceling headphones. Cozy pillows. Memory foam chairs.

“We genuinely want what’s best for our patients,” Dr. Broughton told Greater Long Island.

The clinical side got its own upgrade: digital scans instead of the mouthful of putty, HD photography so patients can see what the dentist is describing, AI-assisted reading of X-rays, and newer minimally invasive options — including Curodont, a treatment marketed for reversing early decay before it becomes a drill-and-fill.

It is, in fairness, still a dentist’s office.

But the thing worth noticing here is not the technology, which every practice on Long Island is buying.

It is what Dr. Broughton said about the purchase itself.

“You’re not just buying the practice. You’re inheriting a real community.”

That is the whole business model of a place like Deer Park in one sentence, and it is why this column exists.

A practice that has been on Half Hollow Road long enough to have grandparents and grandchildren on the same chart is not an asset that transfers cleanly.

It transfers on trust, one appointment at a time, and the new owners appear to know it.

Long Island Dental Wellness is at 163 Half Hollow Road, Suite 1, Deer Park. The office can be reached at 631-667-2820.

Sources: Greater Long Island · Babylon Local directory

BUSINESS · BABYLON VILLAGE

For more than a year, the marina on Post Place did no business at all. That is over.

Hampton Watercraft and Marine has bought five properties along the Babylon Village waterfront, on Post Place and Fire Island Avenue, and plans to run a full-service marine operation there. It is the company’s fourth location on Long Island and its first in western Suffolk.

Owner Tony Villareale, a lifelong Hampton Bays resident, said the plan is everything: selling, servicing, docking, storing, repairing. Services open gradually, starting with winter storage next month.

He bought it, he said, for the location — a village with a real connection to boating, with access to the Great South Bay and Fire Island and a Shell fuel dock on site.

The parcels run to nearly 1.6 acres with about 1,400 feet of dock space: room for roughly 46 boat slips, 10 Jet Ski slips, and winter storage for about 35 boats. Six buildings totaling around 11,000 square feet sit on it, including a sales office, a marine repair building, and a three-story office and apartment building.

How it nearly didn’t happen

Its previous owner, Rory Hogan of Riteway Marine Solutions, pleaded guilty in November to grand larceny and a scheme to defraud. Suffolk prosecutors said he took possession of clients’ boats to sell and then failed to hand over hundreds of thousands of dollars in proceeds. In June he was sentenced to five years’ probation and paid a combined $477,000 in restitution to six victims.

Hogan told Newsday that personal troubles ran the business into the ground. “It snowballed into a mess,” he said. He says he has now paid more than $1 million in restitution, and he is back selling and repairing boats as Riteway Marine Solutions in Babylon, near his former properties. He would like to build it back up.

Clearing the sale meant resolving a foreclosure and a bankruptcy. Investment firm Bridgehampton Equities bought the five parcels for $4 million in June — closing days before a foreclosure auction was set to happen — and sold them to Hampton Watercraft in July. The price Villareale paid has not been disclosed and is not yet in property records.

Bridgehampton’s chief executive, Jason Zimmerman, said he had looked at combining neighboring parcels for condos, but the extra acquisitions and the zoning change would have made it long and expensive. He kept it a marina instead.

“Waterfront properties — they’re not making more of them,” Zimmerman said.

Why it matters past the sale

Marina land is exactly what tends to become condos. Suffolk County started a waterfront protection program last year, $9.5 million over three years, that pays commercial owners who agree not to develop their land beyond its current use.

Meanwhile the business itself is under pressure. Boat registrations on Long Island fell 7% last year, to 84,704. New York spending on new powerboats, engines, trailers and accessories dropped about 5%, to roughly $1.1 billion.

Villareale, who carries Boston Whaler and Tiara Yachts at his other locations, was blunt about the conditions. “Consumer confidence can swing so quickly either way,” he said. “Mentally, people need to feel good about the world to buy a boat.”

Richard Buono, the Island Associates broker who put the deal together, said marinas rarely come up, and when they do they sell fast — unless something is wrong. “This one not having any business for over a year made it very difficult to sell,” he said.

Villareale said he wants to join local organizations and bring the Babylon marina into his company’s annual Take a Vet fishing event, set for September 20.

“We’re the new guys,” he said. “We know that we need to earn our stripes there, and I just ask for a little bit of time.”

Sources: Newsday · Hampton Watercraft and Marine

BUSINESS · WEST BABYLON

The long-running question about the Chick-fil-A at the Great South Bay Shopping Center finally has an answer, and it is not the one anyone was waiting for.

It is not coming.

The company confirmed to Greater Long Island that it is no longer moving forward at 805 Montauk Highway, closing out a proposal that sat in front of the Town of Babylon for more than four years.

The site was the old Payless pad in the shopping center. The plan was to knock it down and put up a 5,000-square-foot restaurant in its place.

The Babylon Town Planning Board first approved it in April 2022. Chick-fil-A came back in September 2025 with a modified, expanded site plan, and the board approved that one unanimously. As recently as last fall it looked ready to go.

Then nothing.

“We are always evaluating potential new locations in the hopes of serving existing and new customers great food with remarkable service,” the company said in a statement. “We would very much like to have more restaurants in West Babylon, but we have no new locations to confirm at this time.”

The nearest consolation is one town over: the Bay Shore location, going into the vacant TGI Fridays at South Shore Mall, is still moving ahead.

Sources: Greater Long Island · Town of Babylon

HOMETOWN SPORTS · AMITYVILLE

John Hugh Niland was born on a leap day — February 29, 1944 — and grew up to be the best football player Amityville ever produced.

He died August 15 at his home in McKinney, Texas, surrounded by family. He was 82.

He started as an All-State fullback at Amityville Memorial High School. By the time he left the University of Iowa he was an All-American offensive lineman, and in 1966 the Dallas Cowboys took him fifth overall — the first offensive lineman the franchise had ever spent a first-round pick on.

What followed was eleven years and one of the best interior lines of its era: six Pro Bowls, three All-Pro selections, two NFC championships, and Super Bowl VI, a 24-3 win over Miami. He finished his career with the Philadelphia Eagles.

The Cowboys, in their statement, called him a team-first player at the core of Tom Landry’s greatest teams.

He went into the Suffolk County Sports Hall of Fame in 1997 and Iowa’s in 2006. The one that never came was Canton, and people who watched him play have never quite let that go.

“When you put Niland against some of the people that played his position or were offensive linemen,” former Cowboys personnel director Gil Brandt once said, “I think he deserves to be in the Pro Football Hall of Fame as much or more than a lot of those people that are there.”

The Long Island memories that surfaced after his death were not about the Super Bowl. Butch Devine, who went through grade school, high school and Iowa alongside him, remembered the two of them driving the eighteen hours from Iowa City back to Amityville, stopping only for gas.

His family has made him a Legacy Donor. His brain goes to the Boston University CTE Center, for research into what the game does to the people who play it.

They also thanked Jackie, his full-time caregiver of more than six years, calling her an invaluable friend to John and to the family.

A Celebration of Life is set for Saturday, October 17 at 11 a.m. Central at Grace Bible Church, 11306 Inwood Road, Dallas. It is open to the public and will be livestreamed on the church’s YouTube channel. In place of cards, the family is asking for photographs, video and stories, sent to nilandmgmt@gmail.com.

If you have a memory of him from Amityville, that is where it should go.

Sources: Greater Long Island · Suffolk County Sports Hall of Fame

REMEMBRANCE · TOWN OF BABYLON

Between Overlook and Cedar beaches there is a rectangular stone with fourteen names cut into it.

They belong to Town of Babylon residents who were at the World Trade Center and did not die that day. They died later, of the illnesses they got there.

The Town unveiled the memorial at its September 11 commemoration, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the attacks.

It sits just beyond the Town’s existing 9/11 memorial, the one with the metal plaques honoring the 48 residents killed in the attacks. Marble replicas of the Twin Towers flank the new stone, carrying two lines: Never Forget, and Sept. 11, 2001.

The inscription reads: “In solemn remembrance of all Town of Babylon residents who succumbed to illness as a result of their courageous rescue efforts at the World Trade Center. Their sacrifices will never be forgotten.”

Some towns and fire departments have added post-9/11 illness deaths to their existing memorials. Babylon’s is believed to be one of the first on Long Island built for those residents alone.

Thomas Wischerth is one of the fourteen. He was a federal investigator. He died of 9/11-related colon cancer in 2017, at 62.

“My dad was a humble person who would never want that kind of recognition,” his daughter Rhyan Wischerth said. “Just the fact that the town is acknowledging that these guys ultimately sacrificed their lives means a lot.”

Councilman Terence McSweeney put the reasoning plainly.

“They were every much a part of that day as the people who passed away actually on that day,” he said. “It’s important for the families to know their loved ones will be recognized.”

A name qualifies for the stone if the person was a Town of Babylon resident at some point, was at or near Ground Zero, and died as a result of what they were exposed to there. McSweeney was deliberate about how wide that is.

“It doesn’t matter if you were a first responder, if you were installing cable wire, if you were a plumber,” he said. “You were there getting New York, getting the United States back together after the greatest terror attack on this country since Pearl Harbor.”

The Town of Babylon Fire Chiefs Association drove the effort. It cost roughly $100,000, paid out of the Town’s capital improvements budget.

The memorial stands between Overlook and Cedar beaches, and it is open to anyone who wants to visit it.

Sources: Newsday · Town of Babylon