Riverhead presents town square and playground design to mixed reviews

Consultants hired this spring to design the town square, riverfront park and streetscape improvements — the centerpiece of Riverhead Town’s massive downtown revitalization effort — presented plans and drawings at a public information meeting at Riverhead Town Hall Wednesday night.

LVF Landscape Architects of New York City, a firm hired by the Town Board in March to develop the design, showcased their ideas for a plaza connecting Main Street to an expansive green space on the riverfront featuring landscaping, walking paths, seating areas, a playground, splash pad and an amphitheater.

“What are the ingredients of a town square and a playground? What makes those spaces special, especially for a place like Riverhead?” LVF partner Alexia Friend said. 

“How are you to create a place where people can gather or events can happen —like they did last week for fireworks and Alive on 25 — all the great things that already happen in here in Riverhead, and also a place where people can sit quietly, find a moment to read a book, to step away,” she said. Town squares are “connectors of spaces,” Friend said, and they are designed with people of all age groups and interests in mind.

LVF set out to design what Friend called a “destination town square, a destination playground,” and “a space that will anchor downtown.”

The upper town square, adjoining Main Street across from the theater, is envisioned as a landscaped plaza, with seating areas, that steps down from Main Street and is framed by buildings on either side: the building owned by the Long Island Science Center on the west and a town-owned building that officials plan to convey to J. Petrocelli Development, the town-designated master developer for the town square; Petrocelli has proposed demolishing the building and constructing a multi-story boutique hotel and condominiums on that site, with restaurants on the ground floor opening on the town square plaza space. 

The upper town square is the space previously occupied by two buildings the town purchased in May 2021 and later demolished. The town then planted the open area with turf grass, and built a cement walkway down the center of it to provide a pedestrian connection between Main Street and a parking lot that adjoins the riverfront’s east-west roadway.

A green space and playground are envisioned for the lower town square, which slopes down to the riverfront. 

The playground is designed for children of all ages and abilities, LVF partner Mike Voelkel said. Its play features are connected to aquatic themes: a 16-foot tall kingfisher playground and a fishing boat. The playground itself would primarily occupy the area directly behind the science center building and will be fenced for safety and gated for security after dark, the planners said.

A walking path curves from the plaza, through the lower town square to the riverfront, to ensure that the entire site is compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act.

An open space “flexible area” connects the upper town square plaza and the riverfront. It opens onto the town-owned property leased to East End Arts, where several historic buildings sit — and where the new amphitheater is planned.

Elevations of the entire area, including the East End Arts campus, will be raised to provide flood resiliency, based on flood zones projected 50 years out — 2070. The buildings on the East End Arts campus will be relocated and lifted out of the floodplain, Riverhead’s Economic Development, Planning and Building Administrator Dawn Thomas said. 

Businesses, Council Member Bob Kern speak out against plan

The plans presented were met with questions, some skepticism and some criticism by community members who attended the meeting, who asked whether downtown’s flooding problems could ever be effectively addressed and sought information about plans for the buildings lining the area along Main Street cleared by the town in 2021.

The most vocal opposition Wednesday night came from a member of the Riverhead Town Board itself, a sponsor of the project. Council Member Bob Kern, former Chamber of Commerce president and the group’s president emeritus, who was elected to the Town Board in 2021, strongly objected to the idea of a playground in that location.

Families visiting downtown during the day are not going to support restaurants, Kern said. “Do you have any economic data — we have about 15-plus restaurants — in terms of how those restaurants are going to survive on 2-to-12-year-olds during the day is my question,” Kern said.

“Most kids, as we know, if you asked him if he wants steak or ice cream, they’re gonna say ice cream. So the ice cream guy is gonna do great. I want to be that guy, not the guy selling steak,” Kern said.

He also said the town square opens up “a little bit of space” but has “a lot of trees,” which makes it not as “flexible” as it should be. He pointed to Bryant Park in Manhattan, which he said is an “extremely flexible” space. “What are we doing for the people who are 20 to 40 who come at night, who are the people that can actually afford and want to go to restaurants. What are we doing?” Kern asked. 

Ex-BID president: This will be a ‘destination park’

Steven Shauger, the former president of a coalition of business people downtown, told Kern he was comparing apples to oranges. 

Shauger, who attended the meeting with his wife Kelly, an architect, and their two young children, is the general manager of the Hyatt Place East End. The hotel is owned by the company that owns the L.I. Aquarium, Treasure Cove Marina, the Seaside Grill, the Preston House, and other businesses downtown, in which town square master developer Joe Petrocelli is a principal. 

“Our family has gone to rocketship park in Port Jeff, because it’s a destination,” Shauger said. “It’s elevated. It’s above and beyond, right? So when do we go? We go during the day. I want you to think of Patchogue as well. If you go there during the day, it’s a ghost town. At night it’s thriving,” he said. “You’re taking two different things. You’re comparing apples to oranges,” Shauger said. 

Riverhead has an opportunity to be attractive to both types of visitors, Shauger said. The town is already drawing families to the aquarium, he said. It must provide those families with other things to do and see. “So then they’re not just coming to the aquarium and leaving. They have a reason to stay,” Shauger said.  “And then you cater to other people with the restaurants.”

Petrocelli attended the meeting Wednesday night but did not express an opinion.

Kern said he though the plan “seems maniacally focused on attracting people during the day.” He said, “three-quarters of the space is a playground and one-quarter is activated at night.”

The consultants said the playground actually represents no more than 30% of the town square space. 

Some downtown businesses oppose the playground: Chamber president

Some local businesses voiced objections to the playground location, arguing that its positioning would obscure the river view from Main Street and restaurants they hope to see open up on Main Street. Expressing those concerns were the executive director of the Suffolk Theater and other, unnamed, businesses that Chamber of Commerce President Connie Lassandro said asked her to voice their objections, which she did in a June 26 letter to the Town Board.The downtown businesses, whose complaints were articulated by the current chamber president in her letter to the Town Board, voiced the same kinds of concerns. 

“The idea that a playground would be on the green between the restaurants and businesses obscuring the very view we know attracts people is contrary to the purpose of creating a welcoming village green,” Lassandro wrote. 

“As an Historic Business/Art District, we need to focus on driving people to a thriving main street,” Lassandro wrote. 

Riverhead already has nine playgrounds and should devote more money to improve them, she wrote. 

The businesses also expressed concerns about downtown Riverhead’s existing “struggles with a drug and homeless problem,” according to Lassandro’s letter. 

Lassandro said in an interview that the letter did not reflect the position of the Chamber of Commerce, whose board of directors did not approve it. It didn’t reflect her personal opinion either, she said.

Suffolk Theater Executive Director Gary Hygom was in the audience and articulated some of the concerns expressed in Lassandro’s letter.

“I know who comes in here,” he said, referring to the theater. “Our audience is not dumping out into a playground. They’re just not,” Hygom said.

He also expressed concern that the playground and riverfront green space would have the same problems he said exist in Grangebel Park. “It’s a beautiful place,” Hygom said, “but the nuts and bolts, guys, is, it’s filled with drugs and problems.”

Riverhead Police Department data and incident reports released to the public do not support the perception of criminal activity in Grangebel Park — and throughout the downtown area — that prevails in the community. Most incidents reported in the park relate to “quality of life” crimes like possessing an open container of alcohol in a public park, smoking (both tobacco and marijuana, which is outlawed throughout downtown) or sleeping on benches or sleeping/lying on the ground. The town has passed “zero tolerance” legislation to better enforce codes pertaining to those kinds of infractions.

Kern advocated for a large open space instead of the playground and park on the riverfront, where he said cultural events could be held that would draw large crowds of people downtown—crowds that would benefit Main Street businesses, he said. “As long as there’s no trees, we can do all kinds of stuff down there.” 

“You have to look at it from 30,000 feet,” Kern said. 

“I don’t know if you really have anybody that does events on your team, or that you’ve engaged with anybody about what they’d really like,” Kern said. 

He suggested that 75% of the space should be available for cultural events, again pointing to midtown Manhattan’s Bryant Park as an example. “Bryant Park is swamped,” he said. “And yes, do I want to see something that’s going to attract 1,000 people at night? Absolutely. Because of the quantity of restaurants that we have. I want them to survive.”

After the meeting, Kern said he has experience in event planning and production and knows people who would want to stage large events downtown right away if the space were available for it. He said that hasn’t been done because of the poor surface condition of the parking lot on the riverfront where the town square park is proposed. The Town Board in 2021 bonded nearly $726,000 to mill, pave and restripe downtown parking lots, but did not include the lot where the town square would be built, in anticipation of the town square project.

Design builds on prior studies and plans that have won major funding

Riverhead Town received a $400,000 grant through the state’s Brownfield Opportunity Area Program in December 2022 to help fund the town square design costs, adding to a $245,000 allocation in the $10 million New York State Downtown Revitalization Award to the town won in January of that year. 

The proposal from LVF Landscape Architects was selected through an RFP process, Thomas said.

The town square, conceptualized by Urban Design Associates in 2020 as a project that would open up Main Street to the riverfront, sought to address a longstanding community lament: a downtown business district that years ago turned its back on its most valuable asset, the Peconic Riverfront. 

The idea was to provide a visual connection between Main Street and the riverfront, along with a welcoming public green space and resiliency against flooding from rising sea levels and more frequent and severe extreme weather events.

Town officials decided to site the town square on property opposite the Suffolk Theater, a 1930s art deco movie palace, restored and reopened over a decade ago as a performing arts center. 

The seeds were sown in 2019 when Riverhead was awarded $800,000 in N.Y. Regional Economic Development Council grant funds do the initial planning work, including a market study, for the town square project. The vision took shape to include an amphitheater and an adaptive children’s playground, a playground fully accessible to children of different abilities. 

Last month, Riverhead announced it had been awarded a long-sought multimillion federal grant. The $24 million award through the RAISE (Rebuilding American Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity) discretionary grant program, will fund $14.6 million toward the $23.7 million projected cost of a 504-space parking garage planned for the parking lot north of Main Street, behind the Suffolk Theater, $4.8 million for flood protection and $4.6 for streetscapes.

On Wednesday, July 17, the town will have a second public information session focused on the proposed amphitheater in the town square. The session with consultants Skolnick Architecture will begin at 6 p.m. at Riverhead Town Hall, 4 West Second Street, Riverhead.

Correction: This article has been amended to correct the name of the architectural firm that is presenting the design of the amphitheater on July 17 and to correct the start time of the meeting.