Shuttered New York travel center exiting Southern State Parkway

A team of state parks workers Thursday began demolishing a one-time travel center off the eastbound Southern State Parkway near Valley Stream so the site's natural landscape can be restored.

The chalet-style building had been empty since 2017, when Discover Long Island, the regional tourism agency, stopped distributing brochures and travel information there, according to CEO Kristen Reynolds. In the years since, said George Gorman, Long Island regional director of the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, which controls the state parkway system, the building was occasionally vandalized and the landscape became overgrown.

“It’s becoming an eyesore,” Gorman said. “We checked with all the agencies involved — Nassau and the Department of Transportation — and everybody agreed it was OK to demolish.”

In hindsight, the roots of the site’s demise were apparent at its 1979 dedication ceremony, which Newsday covered. At a trailer parked on the grounds of the former parkway toll booths — the travel center’s distinctive chalet-style building arrived in 1982 — Nassau County Executive Francis T. Purcell noticed somebody had stolen some of the newly planted shrubs. Suffolk County Executive John V.N. Klein complained there were no public bathrooms.

That omission was probably fatal, Reynolds said.

“That was the number one reason people stopped. They would get off the highway, think they were coming to a restroom,” she said. “What we learned is that most people were upset by the time they’d gotten off track and realized there wasn’t a place that had any facilities.” (The building was served by a cesspool, said Gorman, but it only had capacity for a staff bathroom.)

A timeline of the travel center's existence, drawn up by Amy Bentley, a Valley Stream Historical Society trustee, notes the good years, like 1983, when a nonprofit organization started giving free coffee to motorists on New Year's Eve, a tradition that continued until at least 2000. Then there was 2003, the year Reynolds' predecessors launched the Long Island Coupon Book. “The first book was made available at the 'Chalet in Valley Stream,' ” Bentley wrote in an email.   

But by the end, the travel center, where officials once expected 35,000 visitors would stop every month for directions and glossy brochures about Long Island’s vacation offerings, was a shadow of itself: “a very dilapidated building with no Wi-Fi,” Reynolds said.

Discover Long Island turned its attention to a much grander welcome center on the Long Island Expressway in Dix Hills — a $20.2 million facility offering toilets and other modern technology — and projects like a mobile app that uses geolocation to guide visitors to the region’s attractions.

“There are diminishing returns for printed material,” Reynolds said.

Assemb. Michaelle C. Solages (D-Elmont), who represents the area and last year introduced a bill intended to improve road safety on the Southern State, said her office had fielded complaints in recent years about raccoons invading the travel center.

“I understand why it closed,” she said. Still, she said, the site — passed by nearly 200,000 motorists per year — had potential to “engage people on all the amenities Long Island has to offer.”

Solages said she hoped a former state police barracks on the opposite side of the parkway could be developed to do that. Gorman said parks officials would study best uses for the site, although there was an inherent problem with a welcome center there. Because it would serve westbound traffic leaving Long Island, it would more properly be a farewell center.

Desiray Boyd, a high school administrator from Elmont who lives nearby, said she was saddened to hear of the impending demolition.

“Coming into Long Island as a young girl, I remember it being a place where we stopped,” she said. “It was a safe haven.”

Attractions like Belmont Park and UBS Arena draw many visitors, she said, and a new welcome center would “highlight what this area’s about.”