Riverhead Signs 99-Year YMCA Lease for Vacant Route 58 Armory

Riverhead Town Board approved a letter of intent Wednesday to hand the vacant state armory on Route 58 to the YMCA of Long Island, clearing the way for negotiations on a proposed 99-year lease that would transform the decommissioned National Guard building into the town's first community fitness center.

The vote is the most concrete step yet in an effort dating to 2023. Under the proposed terms, the YMCA would pay for all renovation, construction, equipment, operations and maintenance costs throughout the lease. Riverhead taxpayers would bear no direct financial obligation.

A completed facility at 1405 Old Country Road would include a gymnasium, indoor track, aquatics center, fitness areas, sports courts, multi-purpose rooms, a STEM lab, teen room and a community kitchen. Riverhead has no YMCA location. The nearest branches sit in Patchogue, about 20 miles to the west, and Westhampton Beach, roughly 17 miles to the south. For families in town, that distance means a 40-minute round trip just to get a child to swim lessons.

The letter approved Wednesday is non-binding in all respects except confidentiality. It does not create a lease. The YMCA's obligations under any eventual agreement depend on securing adequate funding and all required permits. The organization also preserved the right to conduct environmental testing at the site and exit negotiations if results raise significant concerns.

The campaign began in 2023, when the board first endorsed the armory site and authorized preliminary talks. Progress stalled in 2025 after state law complicated the town's ability to lease state-owned property for non-profit use. Legislation to fix that cleared the State Assembly last spring but sat in the Senate for months before the impasse resolved.

The Route 58 armory has sat largely empty since the state decommissioned it and turned the property over to Riverhead. The building is a large-footprint brick structure on one of the town's busiest commercial corridors, with existing surface parking and direct highway access. Supporters have argued that site accessibility matters as much as program quality for a membership-based fitness center: a location people pass on the way to work closes the friction that keeps members from showing up consistently.

Multiple public hearings over the past two years drew residents who described driving to Patchogue or Hauppauge for swim lessons, sports programs and fitness classes that would otherwise be accessible locally. That accumulated testimony shaped the board's focus on the Route 58 armory over a smaller facility closer to the village center.

Riverhead's demographic profile gives the proposal particular weight. The town has a substantial working-class Latino community near the downtown corridor on East Main Street, a population that community advocates say has fewer access points to subsidized youth programming than families in more affluent areas of Nassau and western Suffolk. A YMCA that offers sliding-scale memberships and subsidized swim lessons would reach households with no equivalent option within town.

The YMCA of Long Island operates branches across Nassau and Suffolk counties, with facilities from Freeport to Port Jefferson to Brentwood. A Riverhead location would be the organization's first presence on the North Fork, filling what advocates have called a persistent gap in eastern Suffolk's community infrastructure.

The organization has not announced a fundraising target for the Riverhead project. Full-service YMCA facilities typically require $15 million to $35 million to renovate or build, though working with an existing structure generally costs less than new construction. No cost figure was disclosed Wednesday.

Final lease terms, once negotiated, must return to the Town Board for a second public vote before taking effect. No construction timeline was announced. Town officials said they expect formal lease negotiations to begin within weeks, with a completed agreement possible later this year if talks go smoothly. Environmental review and design work would follow before any groundbreaking. For a town that has watched the armory sit idle while the campaign wound through Albany, the letter signed Wednesday is the first document worth building from.