From the 50s to today, block party bonds endure on Long Island

The aromas came from all over the world.

Haitian fried rice. Salvadoran pupusas. Puerto Rican fried chicken.

Every summer, during the block party on Newman Street in Brentwood, people would bring plates of food from their native countries to share with their neighbors. It felt like the “United Nations,” Suffolk County Legis. Samuel Gonzalez (D-Brentwood), who used to organize the parties, said in an interview.

“We got to sit around and talk and get to know our neighbors,” Gonzalez recalled. “The whole block would just light up.”

Block parties, once a fundamental part of summer culture on Long Island, petered out during the pandemic as people retreated inside.

The decline coincided with increasing feelings of disconnect, Gonzalez said.

“Sometimes we don’t know our neighbor, and we think that our neighbor is an enemy,” he said.

But in some pockets of the region, block parties are making a comeback, with 2024 permits exceeding pre-pandemic levels. In Hempstead Town, 368 permits were issued in 2024 versus 303 in 2019. Those numbers were 94 versus 92 in Babylon, 127 versus 102 in Islip and 158 versus 139 in Oyster Bay.

The permit process varies from town to town, but applicants generally must provide signatures from all or most houses on the block, as well as a plan for barricading the street and a fee.

Gonzalez said he plans next summer to throw his first one since the pandemic.

“We have to,” he said. “We are so busy in our lives that we forget to stop and say hello, just to know our neighbor. And the block party brought us — in this community, in my block, on Newman Street — brought us together.”

Suburban tradition

Not long after World War II veterans and their families flocked to Long Island, establishing an early version of modern American suburbia, block parties followed — both formally and informally.

In the 1950s, Hardy Lane in East Meadow, a street inhabited by outer borough expats living in cookie-cutter, Levittown-style homes, was the site of a block party nearly every summer, according to Newsday archives.

Growing up in a Valley Stream development in the mid-1950s, Lawrence Levy, executive dean of Hofstra University’s National Center for Suburban Studies, said in an interview that every week felt like a block party. The area was full of working-class Jewish families who had moved from New York City around the same time.

Neighbors would grill outside, play sports and socialize — but they didn’t call it a block party.

“People got together,” Levy said. “Backyards, most of them didn’t have fences. There was a communal consciousness. People just got together naturally.”

Levy said that as Long Island neighborhoods have become economically, racially and ethnically diverse, that neighborly cohesion has become less common — creating a hunger for the kind of socialization block parties provide.

“There’s not a natural, organic impetus for people getting together in that way,” Levy said. “That, I think, has inspired civic-minded, socially-oriented people who want to create neighborhood cohesion in a time of greater alienation to throw formal block parties.”

Playing in the street

Michael Battaglia, a DJ and the owner of All-Star Party, recalled feeling a sense of freedom riding his bike around his first block party as a kid in Albertson.

“Pretty much 99% of the time your parents are telling you you can’t play in the street,” Battaglia said in an interview. “It was the one day a year when the block gets shut down, there’s no cars coming.”

In 1999, Kenny Jimenez, of Bay Shore, told Newsday his annual block party felt like “freedom.”

‘’We can dance in the street,” he said then. “We go nuts.’’

An uptick

Chris Puglisi, of Massapequa, said he used to throw block parties every Memorial Day weekend. He looks back fondly on those gatherings with his neighbors — adults grilling hotdogs and hamburgers, kids jumping in the bouncy house. He would invite old high school friends and extended family members too.

He said he stopped throwing the parties when the pandemic hit, like many on Long Island. But he plans to bring it back later this summer for Labor Day.

“There definitely have been more in the last two to three years,” Puglisi said. “I hear music sometimes in the neighborhood. They’re starting to make a comeback.”

Battaglia has seen a steady uptick in business. In 2019, he said he worked 24 block parties. After a break in 2020, he’s hosted more every year since: 16 in 2021; 25 in 2022; 27 in 2023; 44 in 2024 and 48 (so far) in 2025.

Edward Schavel, 41, a professional DJ and owner of Intense Entertainment, worked his first block party about 25 years ago, he said in an interview. He was 15. He and his friends lugged his turntables, subwoofer speakers, amplifiers and crates of records from his friend’s basement on South Seventh Street in Lindenhurst to South Sixth Street.

Schavel, of Ridge, said he noticed a shift in people’s behavior at block parties coming out of the pandemic. They were a little hesitant at first, he said.

“You got close, but you didn’t get too close,” he said. “Now you got kids having parties, hugging, everyone getting back to normal.”

He often sees neighbors communicate for the first time, he said.

Talking, not texting

“We live in a technology age where everyone is so dependent upon communication in that way,” Schavel said. “It’s a time where everyone puts everything down, and you meet your neighbors. You talk to your neighbors. Your kids hang out with your neighbors, they might live on the other end of the block.”

Schavel does not limit himself to playing music: He also hosts games for children, like musical chairs, mummy wraps and water balloon throws. Battaglia leads group dances like the cha-cha slide and the YMCA, and also provides a cotton candy machine, ices and face-painting.

The gatherings create the kind of bonds that live on long after the DJ cuts the music, the bouncy house is deflated and the grills are stowed away in the backyard.

Gonzalez, the legislator from Brentwood, woke up one morning earlier this year and didn’t have feeling in his legs, he said. He fell straight to the ground. An ambulance was called, and he underwent back surgery at the hospital.

In his absence, Gonzalez said, his neighbors asked his wife how they could help. They brought plates of food. They took out the family’s garbage. They were present.

“That is what hits the heart,” Gonzalez said. “Not only to have a good time on a block party, but it’s to get to know each other. And know you got people who are concerned that live around you.

“That’s what it’s all about.”