After 50 Years, Heart of Strathmore Still Alive

In 1963, a well-known builder bought 650 acres of land in Stony Brook and began to turn it into the Strathmore communities that still thrive in Three Village to this day, according to a story published this week in The Village Times Herald.

That builder, Levitt and Sons, not only built assembly-line homes that could be purchased for a fraction of today's home prices, but they also began to encourage a sense of quality of life and community pride. They required residents, for instance, to mow the lawn at least once per week and refrain from hanging laundry in the back yard and not on holidays or Sundays. They prohibited commercial entities, to preserve the residential neighborhoods.

Bruce Sander, one of the organizers of the Stony Brook Concerned Homeowners group that has been working with the Town of Brookhaven to curb the problem of absentee landlords running illegal boarding houses in the area, told The Village Times Herald that the neighborhood as a whole "hasn't changed that drastically."

"It's everybody's neighborhood," he said. "It's the type of neighborhood where everybody is out walking their dogs."

Click here to read the full story from The Village Times Herald.