East Williston Village Historic District

East Williston Village Historic District preserves the older center of a small Long Island village about twenty-five miles east of New York City. It covers roughly seven acres along East Williston Avenue and around Station Plaza, and includes houses, carriage barns, two frame commercial buildings, a brick railroad station, a 1925 Gothic Revival church and the Village Green Park. The oldest building is the Willis farmhouse, built in the early nineteenth century and doubled in size in the 1880s. Most other buildings date from 1878 to 1925 and are wood-frame houses with carved brackets, porches and decorative shingling in Italianate-influenced styles, plus two Colonial Revival houses. The district matters because it records how the arrival of the Long Island Railroad in the 1860s turned a farming settlement into a growing suburban village with industry, shops and homes. Dense modern housing now surrounds it, which makes the surviving historic core stand out.