Newsday, 1996
LIVING IN / In Sound Beach, Character Makes Up For a Lack of Sand

BY SORAYA SARHADDI NELSON. STAFF WRITER. Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson lives in Sound Beach.

POPULATION: 9,359

MEDIAN AGE: 31.6

MEDIAN FAMILY INCOME: $64,444

SCHOOL DISTRICTS: Miller Place; Rocky Point

A PAIR of motorcycle enthusiasts recently stopped off at a home off Lower Rocky Point Road on the North Shore to ask for directions to Sound Beach.

"You're in Sound Beach," the homeowner told them, to which they replied: "No, we mean the actual beach."

A common mistake, she said, smiling.

Despite its name, Sound Beach is not a beachfront community in the traditional sense. There is no public beach with parking and amenities for non-residents. As it is, dwellers in this hamlet east of Port Jefferson prefer nearby beaches in Mount Sinai and Rocky Point to the narrow expanse of sand below the Sound Beach bluffs. Private beachfront developments and the Sound Beach Property Owners Association control access to that beach, much of which is at the bottom of 100 or so wooden stairs.

"We're not really a community where you have (beachfront) access to parking," says Darryl Blasberg, president of the Sound Beach Civic Association. "So the next best thing is for it to be private like it is."

"Because it's quiet, it's very romantic," adds Bob Bedrossian, a longtime resident and real estate agent, as well as a member of the property owners association.

Sound Beach is a hidden jewel for more reasons than sunset vistas from scenic cliffs, however. This hamlet, dotted with mature trees and sloped, meandering roads, offers affordable North Shore housing - many homes go for $100,000 or less. It also has small-town touches like a bakery, a butcher shop and delicatessens where people greet customers by their first names.

There is also a humble downtown area, marked by a bright red, 4-foot-tall smiling plaster tomato with outstretched arms and legs. The dancing tomato sits atop Rubino's restaurant, a popular sit-down dining and take-out pizza place. Nearby, a new acre-and-a-half park with a playground and a walking trail opened two months ago.

"We have a pretty good mix of people here," Blasberg says. "It's a small community, and people are friendly."

Unlike neighboring hamlets that trace their roots back to colonial times, Sound Beach began earlier this century as an advertising venture by the Daily Mirror newspaper. Some homeowners say lots were given away in exchange for a year's subscription to the paper in the 1920s, but "Miller Place and Sound Beach: A Historical Perspective" by Dagmar Von Bernewitz, reports the hamlet was established in 1929, when the now-defunct paper sold 20-by-100-foot plots for $89.50. Eager buyers quickly accumulated land and pitched tents in what became a Memorial Day-to-Labor Day community.

"The community was much more together because they had to live so close," Bedrossian says. People would come to what is now the center of town to collect water in buckets from the area's first electrically-powered well, he adds.

Soon summer cottages replaced tents, and eventually they were converted to year-round residences. Only about 10 percent of the homes in Sound Beach remain exclusively summer homes, Bedrossian says.

Some homes in Sound Beach are seasonal rentals; tenants reside in them for 10 months of the year, and the owners return for the summer months.

One resident, Josephine Pulick, 83, says she remembers camping with her mother and siblings on their newly acquired lots. "There wasn't much in Sound Beach. We had to go to Port (Jefferson) to shop. There was very little traffic," she recalls.

The family tents soon gave way to "railroad rooms," narrow and long structures with rooms built back-to-back because of the size of the lots and an outhouse, Pulick says. In 1963, she, her husband and other family members moved to Sound Beach from Wantagh, turning their summer home into a five-bedroom year-round residence, where she's lived ever since.

Sound Beach today has more than 9,000 permanent residents within its 2.7 square miles. Tucked between Miller Place and Rocky Point north of Route 25A, it has no schools of its own, and school district lines run down the middle of the community, meaning that half of the community's children attend classes in Miller Place and half in Rocky Point.

"I fell in love with it the first time I was here," says James Almer, 53, the bartender at the Sound Beach Inn just across from the post office on New York Avenue. A native of Laurelton, Queens, he came to vacation with his former wife's family 30 years ago and decided it was the perfect place to raise his two children, who are now grown.

"I was always a country-type person; I never much cared for the city." And the community hasn't gotten too busy for him in those 30 years. Traffic has gotten a little heavier, but Almer attributes most of that to the influx of year-round residents.

But the lack of through traffic makes it tough on the few businesses that try to make it in downtown Sound Beach. A video store, a nail salon and a nursery school are among the storefronts now vacant and, in some cases, boarded up.

Lisa Comparetto, 28, has lived in Sound Beach since she was 6 years old. That can make all the difference in running a business in the strictly residential community that has no busy commercial strip along Route 25A like neighboring Miller Place and Rocky Point, she discovered.

"I know basically everybody," she says as she counts up the till in Over the Top Bagel Deli, which she operates with her boyfriend, Steven Over.

"It's kind of like `Little House on the Prairie' here. You know, it's like, 'Hey, Steve! How're you doing?' from most of the customers who walk through the door," Over says. Rather than a shopping strip, "this is more like a neighborhood."