Bonus: Stony Brook University
A visit to Stony Brook is easy. The Long Island Railroad Stony Brook stop takes you to the southern side of the SUNY Stony Brook Campus. To get to the historic sites here, most of which are situated around the Stony Brook Village Center, your best bet is to grab a taxi at the train station. You can also check out the Stony Brook University campus, where earlier this year, a field hospital had been built for COVID-19.
Stony Brook University is the largest single-site employer on Long Island with an enrollment of almost 27,000 students. Stony Brook University is well known for its science research, with notable projects like discovering the link between emphysema and smoking and identifying and cataloging 328 distant galaxies. The university was originally established in Oyster Bay as the State University College on Long Island, yet in 1960, Governor Nelson Rockefeller commissioned a new university in the Stony Brook area with a generous donation of 400 acres by Ward Melville. By 1962, the university had just 782 enrolled students, but by 1969 this number grew to over 8,000.
Notable sites around campus include the Charles B. Wang Center, dedicated to understanding East Asian and American cultures, which was designed by architect P.H. Tuan to evoke aspects of a pagoda, Shanghai temples, and rice paper. Additional sites of interest include the Student Activity Center, the Frank Melville Jr. Memorial Library, and the Staller Center for the Arts, as well as a number of sports facilities and nature sites.
Next, check out 12 Places to Discover in Port Jefferson, Long Island!