Dix Hills Park Was Built In One Decade. This Fall, Only The Cash Register Changed.

On a Saturday morning in late August, the counter inside Clark Gillies Arena works the way it always has. Skates get sharpened while you wait. Kids lace up for a public session on ice that's been running since before their parents could walk. A few hundred yards away, golfers work the back nine at the Dix Hills Park Golf Course, hitting irons off a driving range that's stayed irons-only for as long as anyone can remember. The Olympic pool closed for the season around Labor Day weekend, same as it does every year. None of this looks new because none of it is. What actually changed at Dix Hills Park this year has nothing to do with the ice, the greens, or the water. It's how you pay for any of them.

One Decade Built The Whole Park

Every facility a Dix Hills resident uses at the park traces back to a single stretch of the 1960s and 70s, and the paper trail is unusually well documented for a municipal recreation site.

In January 1963, Rosalind Havemeyer sold 144 acres of her family's estate off Vanderbilt Parkway to the Town of Huntington for $510,000. Two months later, the Town Board hired the engineering firm Edwin S. Voorhis and Son to handle aerial photography and contour mapping, capped at $1,740, a level of budget detail that survives only because the Long-Islander covered the vote line by line.

By 1964 the town was taking bids to clear the land. The pool came first: an Olympic-size outdoor facility with a half-meter board and two one-meter boards, a kiddie pool, and a food concession, opening on Saturday, July 24, 1965, to a crowd of more than 3,000 people. The nine-hole, par-31 golf course followed the next spring, with the first foursome, Bernie Simpson of Huntington Station, Al Montello of Huntington, Ronald Oltom of Dix Hills, and Connie Vertom of Elwood, photographed for the paper's April 28, 1966 issue.

Three jogging trails opened in 1973, graded by difficulty from a flat one-mile loop to a mile-and-a-quarter route over rougher terrain, and running daily from 7 a.m. to dusk. The ice rink came last and drew the most attention. Construction bids went out in late 1973, the building went up in 1974, and by November 1975 it had won a regional design award, beating 61 other facilities across 16 categories for what local trade groups called the Golden Archi. The New York Times covered the win that fall, praising a design that "solved the problem of grafting a service building onto a skating rink in a sophisticated and satisfying way."

That's the whole park. A roughly twelve-year build, one estate sale, and nothing structural added since beyond a second ice surface and a building expansion around 2010. If you've skated, swum, or played a round here, you were using infrastructure that was substantially finished before most of the hamlet's current homeowners were born.

What Actually Changed This Year

The infrastructure hasn't moved, but the way you pay for it has. In November 2025, the Town of Huntington announced that starting December 1, 2025, all financial transactions at Clark Gillies Arena and the Dix Hills Pool would go cashless. Credit cards, checks, and Apple Pay are now the accepted forms of payment. During the transition, the town asked anyone still paying with cash to bring bills no larger than $20, a detail that suggests the switch wasn't instant even after the official start date.

It's a small operational shift measured against a fifty-year-old building, but it's the first real change to how the park functions since the rink expansion over a decade ago. If your habit has been grabbing cash on the way out the door for a skate rental or a round on the nine, this is the season to switch before you're standing at the counter with nothing the register will take.

The Gallery That's Older Than The Park

A few minutes from the park entrance, on East Deer Park Road, the Art League of Long Island has been running since 1955, which makes it older than the park next to it. The nonprofit's bi-level Jeanie Tengelsen Gallery hosts about a dozen exhibits a year, free and open to the public, and right now it's showing the Instructor's Exhibition, on view through September 18.

The fall workshop calendar is where the pace picks up. Michele Gonzalez is teaching a sketchbook class called "Finding Your Voice" on Wednesdays from September 9 through September 23. Right behind it, Ying Chen and Loriya Zuo are running a three-session Eastern ink and watercolor workshop on Wednesdays from September 23 through October 7, with participants carving their own artist seals to sign finished work. On weekends, Jo-Ann Dellaposta leads a two-day mixed media workshop on September 26 and October 3, built around painting, drawing, and layered collage exploring women's lives. All of it books through the League's own site under the Workshops tab, and none of these sessions run long. Most wrap inside two or three weeks, so the window to register is short if a class catches your eye.

The Only Thing That Actually Changes Here

Put the park and the gallery side by side and a pattern shows up. The park's bones were finished by 1975 and haven't moved since. The only real news in fifty years is a payment terminal. The gallery next door runs on the opposite clock, with an exhibit or workshop turning over every few weeks, all year, and has for seventy.

That's the actual shape of recreation in Dix Hills. The heavy infrastructure, the pool, the rink, the nine holes, was decided once in a twelve-year window and left alone. What keeps changing is the layer sitting on top of it: how you pay, who's teaching this month, what's hanging on the gallery wall. If you live here, that's the part worth checking on a rotation, not the ice or the fairways. Those will be exactly where you left them.

Practically, that means two habits worth building this fall. Keep a card or Apple Pay on hand before you head to the rink or the pool, since cash now needs to be broken into smaller bills if you use it at all. And if a workshop at the Art League looks interesting, register within the first week it's posted, because a two-week class fills faster than a nine-hole tee time ever will.

If you're weighing whether a hamlet with this kind of long, well-documented civic investment fits your next move, or you already own here and want a sense of how that kind of infrastructure tends to shape resale value over time, Jamie Marcantonio has spent more than three decades working these North Shore communities and is glad to talk it through. Let's Connect.