New life is being breathed into the history of Downtown Riverhead with the launch of a new collaborative project.
The Downtown Riverhead Historic Trail, a virtual and physical tour that tells the stories of the people who lived and operated businesses stretching from the Riverhead Free Library to the East Lawn building, is now complete.
People exploring downtown will come across 39 newly installed signs at historical landmarks — such as the Suffolk Theater, the Yellow Barn, the Suffolk County Courthouse, PFC Garfield M. Langhorn Avenue, and historic homes like the Howell house — that display a QR code leading to a synopsis of the location’s history read aloud, and sometimes accompanied by historical photographs. The QR code link leads to a specific webpage hosted on the Business Improvement District’s website, which also displays a map of every landmark in the project. Take the virtual historic trail tour here.
The project’s development was led by Riverhead Landmark Preservation Commission Chairperson Richard Wines of Jamesport. Most of the historical synopses are read by historical characters voiced by actors and other volunteers in the community; other scripts are read by Town Board members, business owners or the current members of historical families in the area. Overall, more than 40 community members contributed to the project, Wines said.
“Riverhead has so much history,” said Wines, who began exploring the idea of the project with the LPC around three years ago. “And initially, we were thinking about doing the kind of traditional thing where you put up little plaques on buildings…But then we began exploring and trying to figure out how to make this more interesting and then make it really come alive.”
Wines chose a virtual tour for the project to allow for the inclusion of multimedia elements, including the reading of the scripts by historical characters and the inclusion of videos and historical pictures. Wines said the Hallockville Museum Farm in Northville, where he is a board member and past president, did a similar project for its sustainability trail a few years ago.
The signs for both the Hallockville and downtown projects interactive maps were made with the vendor Frameless Technologies, Wines said. The signs and QR codes cost a little over $9,900 and were funded by the grant received by the town for signage downtown it received years ago, according to Community Development Director Dawn Thomas.
The historical trail has been virtually available for about three months, but the QR code signs were only installed about two weeks ago, Wines said. Riverhead Town will have an official ribbon cutting ceremony for the project in front of the Suffolk Theater tomorrow at 1 p.m..
“Concerning our downtown, it’s been revitalized, and in any revitalization projects across the entire world you need culture, and this is part of that culture,” said Supervisor Yvette Aguiar, who provides the voiceover for the first stop at the trail, the Perkins & Benjamin Building.
The research for the project started around two years ago, Wines said. Much of the information was already accessible in another project Wines had helped create almost 20 years ago with the LPC: a booklet called “Brick, Wood and Stone” sold locally, which explored Riverhead’s history. He also worked with other local historians for the project, including Suffolk County Historical Society Head Librarian Wendy Polhemus-Annibell and Riverhead Town Historian Georgette Case, Wines said.
Because of the large amount of historical landmarks, many significant locations in close proximity to each other are consolidated to one stop.
Wines’ research was also aided by the Facebook group “Remembering Riverhead” created in 2012 by RiverheadLOCAL co-founders Denise Civiletti and Peter Blasl. The Suffolk Theater is based on memories past and current residents of Riverhead Town posted in the group about. That stop on the trail is voiced in part by Civiletti and Blasl.
“I got some things from other sites around too, from people that responded” on Facebook, Wines said. “And they had this information or that information, or they remembered the squeaky floors in the Meyer’s Department Store, whatever it was. So there were things like that, by sort of crowdsourcing information, it added a lot of color to stops.”
The many residents and business owners of Riverhead heard during the trail are voiced by local volunteers, including actors. Wines encouraged the use of accents for some of the historical characters on the trail, including immigrants, to make the experience more authentic.
“After all, Riverhead is this marvelous mosaic and one of the things we wanted the trail to represent is all the people that make up Riverhead or made up Riverhead over the years,” Wines said. “It wouldn’t be just like a bunch of stodgy old white men. Greek immigrants and English immigrants and Polish immigrants, we got migrants that came up from the south. We have not just men, but sometimes their wives and children taking on speaking roles. So we tried to be as inclusive and diverse as we could.”
“So all these different things that came together to make Riverhead the wonderful place it is right now, we tried to represent as many of those as we could,” he said.
Case, the town’s historian, said the trail will help further the goal of bringing historical knowledge of the town to both visitors and guests. She said she helped Wines with the project by fact checking scripts and providing him with some historical photos.
One of Case’s ancestors, Alva Lane Leslie, is one of the characters featured on the trail. She said the trail could also present the opportunity for people to discover and then contact with long-lost or distant relatives.
“[I]f they’re interested in knowing something about the family, they can always try to contact a family member or they can call me and perhaps I might be able to locate a family member for them that maybe they hadn’t seen in years,” Case said. “That would be nice, to have some kind of a reunion with a family member that maybe they haven’t seen in ages, or that they’ve never met.”
Wines hopes that residents introduce visitors to the town to the historical trail to promote local history. He said the tour could also be a classroom tool to teach the town’s history to local students.
Business Improvement District Management Association President Steve Shauger said the project is another “feather in our cap” that will help activate the downtown area and support businesses in the district. that people have already asked about the project. “That’s how we look at this: as playing a big role to bring people downtown and help support the businesses that we have,” Shauger said.
“This is a wonderful collaboration and really it just goes to show what you can accomplish when you bring together dedicated and passionate people looking to make a difference,” Shauger said. “It’s a wonderful way to celebrate our downtown and our downtown’s rich history and also share with future generations.”
Wines said that as much as celebrating the town’s historic district is the goal of the Landmark Preservation Commission, it is a long-term personal goal for himself, and that finally completing a project that contributes to that mission “feels good.”
“Several careers back I was trained as a historian. And sharing that history, connecting people with that history, especially when everything is connected in a fun way, is alway good,” Wines said. “People need to be connected.”
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