Travel Guide: Tour the North Shore of Long Island's Suffolk County

Parks & Beaches

Sunken Meadow State Park probably has Long Island’s best boardwalk. (Credit: Facebook)

In this part of Long Island, every beach is a park, but not every park has a beach. And the North Shore of Suffolk County has some wonderful federal, state, county and town parks and facilities for hiking, jogging, camping, snow-shoeing, fishing, cross-country skiing, swimming, boating, horseback riding or just gathering with friends and relatives. Below are our favorites. Tap the links to learn more.

Sunken Meadow State Park, Kings Park (beach)
Crab Meadow Beach, Fort Salonga (beach)
Cedar Beach, Mt. Sinai (beach)
Blydenburgh County Park, Smithtown (no beach)
Heckscher Park, Huntington (no beach)
Caumsett State Historic State Preserve, Lloyd Harbor (beach, not really for swimming)
W.S. Commerdinger, Jr. County Park, Nesconset (no beach)

North Shore Rail Trail

This is a 10-mile recreational path from Port Jefferson to Wading River that had been in the works since the 1970s but officially opened to the public in 2022. It’s a multi-use trail built along the Wading River railway, which was abandoned in 1939 and is now owned by the Long Island Power Authority.

This continuation of the Green Trail, which runs from Setauket to Port Jefferson Station, provides a safe outlet for people to run, walk, hike, or bike and will offer such amenities as bike depots in the future.

Waterfront dining

Harbor-front dining at Prime – An American Kitchen & Bar in Huntington. Credit: Facebook

The South Shore offers way more options for bayside or beachside dining, but these North Shore villages and hamlets (as we call unincorporated communities here on Long Island) all offer at least one option for indoor or outdoor dining with water views, if not necessarily directly on the water: Huntington, Centerport, Northport, Fort Salonga (Crab Meadow Beach), Kings Park, Port Jefferson, Wading River.

Museums & History

The Suffolk County Vanderbilt Museum and Planetarium. (Credit: Facebook)

You could set aside an entire weekend visiting museums and historic sites on the North Shore and only see a fraction of them. But whether it’s a month or a weekend, here are some can’t-miss spots:

Museums

Vanderbilt Museum, Mansion and Planetarium, Centerport
Long Island Music Hall of Fame, Stony Brook
The Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington
Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe, Shoreham
Long Island Explorium (for kids), Port Jefferson
The Whaling Museum, Cold Spring Harbor
The Long Island Museum, Stony Brook

Historic Sites

Coindre Hall, Huntington
Walt Whitman Birthplace Museum, Huntington Station
The John & Alice Coltrane Home, Dix Hills
Deepwells Farm, St. James
Longwood Estate, Longwood

Theatre

The John W. Engeman Theater in Northport. (Credit: Facebook)

There’s a range of live theatre and performance venues in the region, from those offering professional shows to really great community theaters and art centers.

The one professional playhouse on the North Shore is Engeman Theater in Northport. And Suffolk’s largest performing arts center, The Staller Center, is located on the Stony Brook University campus. The Staller Center also hosts one of the biggest film festivals in the Northeast each summer, the Stony Brook Film Festival.

Downtown Port Jefferson is home to what’s become a top community theater on Long Island in Theatre Three. (We highly recommend its annual performance of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.) But there’s also the Community Playhouse of Northport and the newer Smithtown Performing Arts Center.

Transportation

The Bridgeport and Port Jefferson Steamboat Co.

Credit: The Bridgeport and Port Jefferson ferry company on Facebook.

The hands-down best way to get on and off Long Island, especially if you’re out in Suffolk County or coming from New England, is the ferry.

It’s reliable, efficient, and you can enjoy a drink at the lounge area bar and watch time fly. People argue it doesn’t save time versus driving through New York City, but that’s only at 2 a.m. when there’s no traffic in the city. The rest of the time there’s tons of traffic and it’s just getting worse and worse.

The ferry company that runs between Port Jefferson and Connecticut also has a colorful history. One of its 1883 founders was the famous circus producer Phineas Taylor Barnum, of what would later become Ringling Bro. and Barnum & Bailey circuses. He was already in his 70s at the time.

MacArthur Airport (ISP)

Credit: Town of Islip, Long Island, N.Y.

Friends don’t let friends pick them up at JFK or LaGuardia airports in Queens, because the entire experience is harrowing and nerve-wracking, as those are the only airports in the United States where you pull up and immediately start getting hollered and screamed at by police officers and airport workers, simply for being there. Not to mention the traffic getting back through Queens and Nassau and out to Suffolk County.

MacArthur Airport, located just south of Long Island’s major highway, the Long Island Expressway, is quite the opposite experience, and the only way to fly to Long Island if you’re looking to avoid major headaches. You can leave here, rent a car and be in Smithtown within a half hour. Airlines: Southwest, Frontier, Breeze and, starting in October, JetBlue.

Note: We would rather transfer twice to end up at MacArthur, rather than go to Queens.

Long Island Rail Road

The LIRR will take you from NYC all the way to Port Jefferson on the Port Jefferson branch, but that’s where it ends. The only way to get farther east by train is the Ronkonkoma branch out to Greenport, but that bypasses the rest of the North Shore.

The local trains to Port Jeff stop at every town on the North Shore so you could tour the region from your window seat! It might take awhile. But, fares just went up. Expect to pay around $15 off-peak, one way, and $20 for a peak-time ticket, one way. This is the busiest commuter railroad in North America. You might think all that volume would make it one of the cheapest, but it’s quite the opposite.

Automobile

We favor Route 25A for site-seeing, but if you’re looking to get out to the North Shore quickly from New York City and other points west, take one of the major highways then work your way up.

Long Island Expressway (I-495) is an 8-lane major highway famous for its traffic, but things do loosen up a bit after you’ve gotten through Nassau County, where you’ll find the island’s only rest stop just across the border in the form of the Long Island Welcome Center. The LIE, as Long Islanders call it, is toll-free and will take you to the Sunken Meadow Parkway in Commack, where you can then zip relatively quickly up to the rest of the North Shore and Route 25A for touring.

Northern State Parkway runs mostly along the LIE but ends in Hauppague. From there there’s a lot of traffic lights as you merge with NYS Route 347 and head farther east through the North Shore. The Northern State was built in stages starting in the 1930s, mostly to bring summer people out from the city to enjoy Long Island’s state park system. Today it’s a main commuter roadway that doubles as a sort of race track for nut-jobs at night. Be wary. The parkway is curvy and was built for pleasure, not speed.

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