By Christian Arnold Nestled just off Main Street in Huntington Village, Toast & Company offers diners a unique breakfast and lunch experience in a friendly and personable atmosphere.  With a colorful theme and vintage Huntington photos on the walls, the eatery offers lunchtime favorites such as soups of the day and salads. The menu includes comfort foods like meatloaf, southern style steak, five types of paninis and three-cheese macaroni and cheese.  In general, egg dishes are popular with customers, especially the Toast's signature egg dish — a poached egg over potato hash with hollandaise …

In the heart of Huntington sits the Paramount Theater, a gateway to live entertainment and the place to go to enjoy some of the best acts around. Replacing the IMAC Theater which closed in 2009, the venue's newly-renovated décor is reminiscent of an underground night club with breathtaking graffiti-artwork evocating that of the Jean-Michel Basquiat era of the early-1970s. Its glowing neon sign stands out against the busy street as scheduled events flash underneath it on New York Avenue. With a capacity of 1,500 per show, the modern layout puts event-goers close to the stage and artists. …

When Otto Hermann Kahn purchased 443 acres in Cold Spring Harbor in 1914 to build his family retreat, he not only created a train station to bring workers onsite, but also had them construct a hill where his 109,000-square-foot residence would eventually sit. Completed in 1919, Kahn called it Oheka Castle, an acronym for the beginning letters of his first, middle and last names. This “Gold Coast” estate changed hands several times after Kahn’s death in 1934. In the early 1940’s, it was used as a retirement home for the sanitation workers of New York City and renamed “Sanita.” From 1948-1979 …

Check out the view across 300 years from the windows of the Henry Lloyd Manor on Lloyd Neck and celebrate the poetry and birthday of America’s first published black poet in festivities Sunday at the Henry Lloyd Manor. Community members can help celebrate the 300th anniversary of the Henry Lloyd family’s arrival on Lloyd Neck with Colonial-era games and crafts, cider, house tours and a Colonial concert, from 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Related: Caumsett State Park photos. The family worked a 3,000-acre plantation that provided most of its own necessities and had goods to ship to the Caribbean and New …

The light-filled building with its sheltered garden and wall of windows overlooking it are themselves part of the public art spaces that abound at the South Huntington Public Library. The library opened in its current home in 2004. It sits along Pidgeon Hill Road in a former junior high complex that also contains the Long Island School for the Gifted, a pre-K to grade 9 school, and ballfields used by the South Huntington school district. Outdoor art installations are scattered around the front lawn and in the enclosed garden at the rear of the library. Each summer the library hosts an outdoor…

The mothership of Suffolk County museums is celebrating its 100th year at the Conklin House, 2 High St., Huntington. The David Conklin Farmhouse and Museum offers visitors a look at life across almost three centuries of village history. It was deeded to the Huntington Historical Society in 1911 by Ella Conklin Hurd, after being in the Conklin family for more than 150 years, and is believed to be the county's first house museum. The original wing of the house was built in 1750, and its one large room and loft housed David and Sybel Conklin and their eight children. A lean-to with a dirt floor …

You can score a bagel and a cup of coffee in at least nine stores within two blocks in downtown Huntington, and in some stores you can watch them come straight from the kitchen. Drive a little further up E. Main Street and you add in another bagel store where the chewy rounds come out still warm. It’s a testament to how much Long Islanders love their bagels. Even in a snow storm, the flavorful bread remains a must-have for many. Bagel Works, at 55 Wall St., next to the movie theater, has been the queen of village bagel stores, turning out everything from plain bagels to sesame to salt bagels…

The fish hatchery and aquarium at 1660 Route 25A is an example of a successful revamp and privatization of a state business. The Cold Spring Harbor Fish Hatchery and Aquarium became a private, non-profit educational facility in 1982, ending its 99-year run as a New York state trout hatchery. Today it is a public aquarium and educational facility as well as a "demonstration hatchery" -- trout raised there are sold to stock private ponds. Hatchery education programs run from preschool through college and use the natural outdoor ponds as well as the aquariums for instruction. Its brochures say …

The Walled Garden at Caumsett State Historic Park on Lloyd Neck is a great place for a quiet stroll, a picnic or even a concert. Or a play, if the weather cooperates, although Sunday’s 3 p.m. performance of “The Wizard of Oz” was moved to Aug. 14 in anticipation of afternoon thunderstorms. The garden has been lovingly restored by the Caumsett Foundation and the state Department of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, although in this incarnation it more resembles an English country garden than its former use as the kitchen garden for the houses on the Marshall Field III family estate…

Lloyd Manor sits partway up a hill overlooking Lloyd Harbor, the epitome of an old-time manor house. Inside, the rooms are filled with items and furniture appropriate to 1793, based on an inventory by then-owner Joseph Lloyd II. Local schoolchildren know the house from school tours where they learned about Colonial childhood around the time of the Revolution. When it functioned as a rental before it was donated to the Society for the Preservation of Long Island in 1968, it once was home to Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh (February 1940-August 1941). There’s a photo on display showing …

The open fields and gently rolling hills of the Uplands Farm Sanctuary on Lawrence Hill Road give visitors a taste of quiet farm life in years past, when chirping birds provided the counterpoint to the day’s hard labor. The fields of the former cattle and dairy farm are populated by grasses, wildflowers, butterflies, milkweed, raspberry canes and nesting boxes to encourage the Eastern bluebird to call the fields home. In late summer, visitors will see Monarch butterflies, and in spring the mountain laurel blooms. The Long Island chapter of the Nature Conservancy has its offices in the former …

Poet Walt Whitman wrote a letter to the New York Tribune upon returning to his childhood home in West Hills, Long Island:"I write this back again at West Hills on the high elevation (the highest spot on Long Island?) of Jayne’s Hill, which we have reached by a fascinating winding road. A view of thirty or forty, or even fifty or more miles, especially to the east and south and southwest; the Atlantic Ocean to the latter points in the distance–a glimpse or so of Long Island Sound to the north," he said August 3, 1881.These days you can still hike the historic Walt Whitman Trail to Jayne's Hill…

Summer means lazy, hot days and cold, cold ice cream cones. There’s plenty of choice in Huntington village, from scooped hard ice-cream to frozen yogurt to frozen ices. A stroll around the village showed 9 stores where visitors can get a frozen treat, with another just a short drive away. Several stores have convenient benches out front, as well as inside seating. Most stores are open late with summer hours; check each store for specifics. Herrell’s Ice Cream, at 46 Gerard St., is across the street from the movie theater. It has a full line of ice cream made in the store, 200 flavors, along …

Tucked in among the retail developments off Route 110 is the childhood home of the poet Walt Whitman, the “great gray poet” of democracy who popularized free verse. The Walt Whitman Birthplace Association bought the property at 246 Old Walt Whitman Road in 1949 and has been safeguarding it since then. It once was part of the 60-acre Whitman farm. An Interpretive Center was built in 1997, so the association’s offices could be moved out of the house. Expanded exhibits about Whitman were added, along with rotating exhibits. There’s a movie about the poet, an example of an old-fashioned printing …

The Huntington Lighthouse has been keeping boaters entering Huntington Harbor safe since 1912, in varying degrees of style. The concrete platform upon which the lighthouse was built was constructed at Sand City, now Hobart’s Beach at the southwest tip of Eaton’s Neck, and brought over by barge to the entrance to the harbor, just north of a jetty of rocks that lie in wait for unsuspecting boats. The platform was then sunk, and the lighthouse was built upon it, explains Frank Knoll, vice president of the Huntington Lighthouse Preservation Society and one of the guides that gives tours of the …

All it takes is a bit of sun and Huntingtonians hit the beach. They have a nice selection of town beaches to hit, eight in all. Four are outside our purview, in Northport and Centerport – Crab Meadow, Asharoken, Hobart and Centerport. But four beaches are in Huntington and Huntington Bay – West Neck, Crescent Beach, Fleet’s Cove and Gold Star Battalion Beach. Admission for residents is by seasonal beach parking permit, which this year costs $35, or a daily permit for $20 if they show identification. All beaches have a staffed kiosk where the permits are available. Senior citizens over age 60 …

In honor of veterans and Memorial Day, the Top 100 is venturing a little further afield than usual this week, to the Long Island National Cemetery, which lies within the towns of Huntington and Babylon. Established in 1936,  when Cypress Hills National Cemetery in Brooklyn was almost full, the first burials took place in March 1937. It now covers 365 acres and also has a columbarium, for burial of cremated remains. The staff maintains 287,000 gravesites and 334,000 burials all told, said director Roseann Santore. Memorial Day weekend is perhaps the busiest time for the cemetery. Grounds crews…

You can watch the ebb and flow of travelers at the Huntington train station over a cup of coffee while you wait for your train. Most are commuters, some are tourists and others are families off for some sightseeing. Either way, they all contribute to making the Huntington station at the corner of Broadway and New York Avenue one of the Long Island Rail Road’s busiest. If residents had their druthers, the station would have been downtown in the village when service started in 1868, according to research by Robert Hughes, town historian. But because of a dispute, it instead was built two miles …

For some of the best buys in town on practically new and gently used clothing, books, jewelry and housewares, check out the Holiday House Thrift Shop. Proceeds benefit the summer camp programs for underprivileged girls at North Shore Holiday House, 74 Huntington Road. Who knew there was a summer camp program within Huntington’s limits? The colorful bunk houses and outside play area are home to 200 girls ages 7 to 11 in four sessions over the course of the summer. Arts and crafts, swimming, campfires, sports and games and special activities such as computer classes or field trips help expand …

The lovely Gold Coast mansion on the hill overlooking Huntington Harbor is modeled after a chateau. Coindre Hall was built between 1910-1912 and is a replica of a French chateau, complete with towers. The 80,000-square-foot house was part of a 135-acre estate once known as West Neck Farm. The nearby Southdown Elementary School land was once part of the farm, and so was the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship property. The mansion’s 33 acres stretch down to the boathouse at the water’s edge, just past a fresh-water pond where the estate used to cut ice for use cooling the house during the summer…