The Second Melville Town Center Project Asks for 20,000 Feet of Storefront

A property on the north side of Baylis Road, just east of Maxess Road, reaches a public hearing at the Huntington Town Board on Tuesday, September 15. The application is special use permit MTCO-25-2, filed under the name Cornerstone Melville for the parcel at 115 Baylis Road, and the board scheduled the hearing on August 11 by resolution 2026-447.

The number that should catch a member's eye is not the apartment count. It is 20,000 square feet of ground floor commercial space, on a stretch of Melville that has none today.

What is being asked for

According to the developer's own published project materials, the plan is a four story building with roughly 168 residential units, weighted toward studios and one bedrooms with a smaller number of two bedrooms and townhomes, above about 20,000 square feet of retail and commercial space that includes a planned bistro and cafe with outdoor seating. Residents would park in a gated underground garage with elevator access; retail parking sits at grade. The developer puts the cost at about $100 million, privately financed, and sets aside 20 percent of the units as workforce housing with a preference for veterans and first responders.

Those are the applicant's figures, and an applicant describing its own project has every reason to describe it well. The binding version is whatever the town board adopts, with conditions, after Tuesday's hearing and the environmental review that goes with it.

The overlay that makes this possible at all

Baylis Road sits inside the Melville Town Center Overlay District, which Huntington created by amending its I-1 industrial zoning. The town's own presentation on the district puts it at 183 acres in the vicinity of Maxess Road, about three tenths of 1 percent of the town's land, on ground that was already almost entirely built out. Of the 163 parcels studied, 160 were developed.

The district permits a mix of retail, office, commercial service, residential and public space, and it requires building frontages to face Maxess Road, Baylis Road, Melville Park Road or Corporate Center Drive. That last requirement is the design instruction that separates this from an office park: buildings address the street instead of a parking field.

The town kept several brakes on the process. Every individual project needs its own town board special use permit. Every project gets its own environmental review. The board can require a traffic and parking study at the applicant's expense. There is a cap on total residential units, with the ability to pause development at each 400 unit increment. Projects pay impact fees toward the fire and emergency service district and toward creating town center parks. Two recharge basins on Maxess Road, 1.6 acres each, are identified as possible future green space.

This is the second one, which is the part that matters

The first project through the overlay was Melville Crossing at 75 Maxess Road, which the town board approved earlier this year. The environmental record the board filed as lead agency, published in the state Environmental Notice Bulletin on April 29, describes demolishing a 170,000 square foot office and industrial building on 16.6 acres and replacing it with 400 residential units, a 6,300 square foot clubhouse, 37,300 square feet of retail, food and service space, and 83,600 square feet of commercial space in total. The board issued a negative declaration, meaning it found no significant adverse environmental impact requiring a full impact statement.

Put the two together and the 400 unit pause stops being an abstraction. Melville Crossing on its own is exactly the first increment. Put the commercial space together too and the corridor is being asked to absorb something north of 57,000 square feet of new retail, food and service space across two blocks, in a submarket that currently has almost none of it. Whatever the board does with Cornerstone Melville on Tuesday, it is also deciding the order in which this fills in, and order decides which block gets the first cluster of evening foot traffic and which waits years for the second.

What it means for members

If you lease retail or service space anywhere along the Route 110 corridor, 20,000 square feet of new street level space on Baylis Road is both a competitor and a comparable. It will set asking rents for Melville street retail, because until now there has been almost nothing to compare against. If your renewal lands in the next two years, the number your landlord quotes will be anchored to what these ground floors actually lease for.

If you operate a lunch business in the corridor, the arithmetic of your day changes when a few hundred people live where your customers currently only work. The Melville problem has always been that the corridor empties at six o'clock. Residential above retail is the only fix anyone has proposed for that, and it arrives building by building, not all at once.

And if you have a lease decision or a construction schedule on Baylis Road, Maxess Road or Corporate Center Drive, assume disruption. Two projects of this size, if both proceed, mean years of trucks and lane work on roads that carry your deliveries. Tuesday's hearing is at Town Hall on Main Street at 6 p.m., and it is the cheapest hour anyone in this corridor will spend on the question.