Drive the length of Jericho Turnpike through Commack on a Saturday morning and the rhythm of the place announces itself in semolina and espresso. A queue spills out of the bakery before nine. The deli counter is three deep. The Italians in Commack did not arrive with a parade or a plaque, but they built this stretch of Long Island into something that smells, on a good morning, like a Sunday in Campania.
Commack sits on the line between two towns, Huntington and Smithtown, in the centre of Suffolk County. It has no Main Street and never did. What it has instead is a turnpike, a cluster of shopping plazas, and a population in which roughly one in four people traces their family back to Italy. That is not an accident of the census. It is the end of a journey that began in the tenements of New York City and the hill villages of the Mezzogiorno, and it is the story of how a farm hamlet became one of the most thoroughly Italian-American suburbs on the island.
The Place
Commack takes its name from the Secatogue, the native people who called this high, wooded ground Winnecomac, meaning pleasant lands. The soil was rich and the oak forests thick, and for most of its history the area was farmland, with farmhouses scattered along the old turnpike between Huntington and Smithtown. There was a one-mile trotting track here, on the ground where Commack High School now stands, that drew racing crowds from across Long Island and the city until anti-betting laws closed it around 1900.
For a century and a half this was a crossroads, not a town. The Commack Methodist Church, built in 1789 and still standing, is the oldest Methodist church building in New York State, a relic of the farming village that came before the suburb. Then, in the 1950s, the farms gave way almost overnight to subdivisions. By the 2020 census Commack held 36,536 people, a dense suburb of split-levels and ranches with no downtown to speak of, organised instead around its schools and its shopping centres.
How It Became Italian
The Italian story in Commack is really the Italian story of Long Island, which is a story of two migrations: one to America, and one out of the city.
The first crossing
Between roughly 1880 and 1924, more than four million Italians came to the United States, the majority of them fleeing rural poverty in the south: Sicily, Calabria, Campania, Apulia, Basilicata, Abruzzo and Molise. They did not land on Long Island. They landed at Ellis Island and packed into the tenements of Lower Manhattan, East Harlem, and the emerging Italian quarters of Brooklyn and the Bronx.
Naples was one of the great departure ports, and families from the Campanian countryside passed through it by the thousand. Once in New York they settled where their townspeople had settled before them, the chain migration that built Mulberry Street and Arthur Avenue village by village. For the first generation, Long Island was farmland and sand mines, a place you went to work, not to live.
Out to the island
The second migration is the one that made Commack. After the Second World War, the children and grandchildren of those immigrants left the crowded enclaves of the five boroughs for the suburbs going up on the potato fields of Nassau and Suffolk. The GI Bill put mortgages within reach of returning servicemen, and the building boom of the 1950s and 1960s gave them somewhere to spend them.
Commack was prime ground for this. It was far enough out to be cheap, close enough to commute, and it filled with subdivisions just as the post-war families were looking. Italian-American households moved east in large numbers, often whole extended families relocating within a few years of one another, recreating in the suburbs the dense kinship networks they had known in the city.
The pattern repeated across the island. Today Long Island is home to an estimated 700,000 Italian-Americans, more than any area outside Italy itself, and roughly one in four residents claims Italian heritage. In Commack the proportion is higher still: Italian is by a clear margin the most common ancestry in the hamlet, ahead of Irish at around 15 percent and German at around 11 percent.
Building the institutions
What the families brought with them was not only numbers but a way of organising daily life around the parish, the table, and the extended family. The Roman Catholic Church anchored that life. Christ the King parish on Indian Head Road, part of the Diocese of Rockville Centre, became one of the gathering points for Commack’s Catholic families, the place where baptisms, communions and weddings stitched the generations together.
The commercial life followed the demand. Bakeries, pork stores, gourmet markets and pizzerias opened along Jericho Turnpike and in the shopping plazas, run by and for families who knew the difference between good ricotta and ordinary ricotta and were not shy about saying so. The suburb that had no Main Street grew its Italian high street along the turnpike instead.
The Landmarks
Christ the King Roman Catholic Church, 2 Indian Head Road. The parish, in the Diocese of Rockville Centre, has long been one of the spiritual centres of Commack’s Catholic families. For Italian-American households raised on the rhythm of the church calendar, it is the place where the milestones of family life are marked, from christenings to funerals.
Emilio’s Pizzeria and Ristorante, 2201 Jericho Turnpike. Family-owned since 1980, Emilio’s has been a Commack fixture for more than four decades, an artisan Neapolitan pizzeria and restaurant where locals come for old-world pizza, fresh pasta and imported gelato. It is the kind of place where the same families have been ordering the same dishes across three generations.
Mannino’s Italian Kitchen and Lounge, 2158 Jericho Turnpike. A short walk along the same turnpike, Mannino’s serves a fuller sit-down Italian menu in a more formal setting, a destination for anniversaries and big family dinners. Together with Emilio’s it gives this stretch of road two anchors of Commack’s restaurant culture.
Dortoni Bakery and Cafe, 11 Vanderbilt Motor Parkway. The Commack outpost of one of Long Island’s best-known Italian bakeries, run by the Messina family, opened here in 2019. The cases are stacked with sfogliatelle, cannoli, rainbow cookies and custom cakes, the sweet end of the Italian-American table that no Sunday on the island is complete without.
EMF Gourmet Italian Market, 1958 Jericho Turnpike, East Northport. Just over the Commack line, EMF is the kind of Italian market that does the unglamorous, essential work: imported meats and cheeses, dozens of prepared salads, cold cuts and ready dinners. It is where a Commack family stocks the antipasto before the relatives arrive.
Mayfair Shopping Center, Jericho Turnpike. A community shopping centre of more than 220,000 square feet, Mayfair is one of the plazas around which Commack life is organised in a hamlet with no town centre. Among its tenants is Prato 850, an Italian restaurant and bar that has become a local gathering spot, evidence that the Italian presence here is woven into the everyday commercial fabric, not confined to a few showpiece restaurants.
Commack Methodist Church, Jericho Turnpike. Built in 1789 and the oldest Methodist church building in New York State, it is not an Italian institution at all, but it matters to the story. It is the visible reminder of the farming village that stood here before the Catholic, Italian suburb grew up around it, the before to the after.
Where They Came From
Trace Commack’s Italian families back far enough and most threads run south of Rome. The great migration that filled New York drew overwhelmingly from the Mezzogiorno, the Italian south: Sicily above all, then Campania, Calabria, Apulia, Basilicata, Abruzzo and Molise. These were regions of poor soil, absentee landlords and recurring disaster, and they sent their people abroad by the millions.
Campania, with Naples as its port and its capital, was a particularly heavy contributor to New York. Families from the towns and countryside around Naples departed through the city’s harbour and settled in Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx, the very enclaves from which Commack’s families later moved east. The same outward pull shaped Italian neighbourhoods across the boroughs, from Whitestone in Queens to Throgs Neck in the Bronx.
So the origin of a Commack family is usually double. There is the home village in Sicily or Campania, two or three generations back, and there is the New York neighbourhood, Bensonhurst or Corona or East Harlem, where the family lived before it came to Long Island. Both are part of the answer to where they came from.
Commack Today
Commack today is a settled, affluent suburb that has long since stopped being new. The split-levels built for young families in the 1960s now house the grandchildren of the original buyers, and the Italian character of the place has matured from a fact of migration into a fact of culture.
That character is no longer only Italian. The 2020 census records a population that is roughly 83 percent white, with growing Asian and Hispanic communities, and the deli counters and restaurants of Jericho Turnpike now sit alongside a wider range of cuisines and faiths. The hamlet’s identity is broadening, as suburbs do.
But the Italian thread remains the strongest in the weave. It shows up in the bakery queues on Saturday, in the pork stores and gourmet markets, in the families who still gather for Sunday dinner and the parishes that still mark their milestones. The Italians in Commack built a community without a town square, organised instead around the church, the table and the turnpike, and that community is still recognisably itself. For families researching their own roots in the Long Island diaspora, places like nearby Massapequa and Syosset tell parallel stories of the post-war migration east.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Italians live in Commack, New York?
Italian is the single largest ancestry group in Commack, claimed by roughly a quarter of residents, somewhere in the range of 24 percent depending on the source. In a hamlet of about 36,500 people, that makes the Italians in Commack the dominant heritage community, well ahead of Irish and German ancestry.
Why are there so many Italian-Americans in Commack?
Commack filled with Italian-American families during the post-war suburban boom of the 1950s and 1960s, when the children and grandchildren of immigrants left the Italian enclaves of New York City for the new subdivisions of Suffolk County. The GI Bill made the move affordable, and families often relocated together, recreating their city kinship networks on Long Island.
Where did Commack’s Italian families originally come from in Italy?
Most trace back to southern Italy, the Mezzogiorno, especially Sicily and Campania, along with Calabria, Apulia, Basilicata, Abruzzo and Molise. These regions sent millions of emigrants to New York between roughly 1880 and 1924, and their descendants later moved east to suburbs like Commack.
What are the best Italian places in Commack?
Along Jericho Turnpike you will find Emilio’s Pizzeria and Ristorante, family-owned since 1980, and Mannino’s Italian Kitchen and Lounge for a fuller sit-down meal. For bakery and market needs, Dortoni Bakery on Vanderbilt Motor Parkway and EMF Gourmet Italian Market just over the line in East Northport are local institutions.
Is Commack part of Huntington or Smithtown?
Both. Commack is a hamlet and census-designated place that straddles the boundary between the towns of Huntington and Smithtown, in Suffolk County on Long Island. It has no incorporated village government or traditional downtown, which is part of why its identity formed around its shopping plazas and parishes.
How did Commack get its name?
The name comes from the Secatogue people, who called this high, fertile ground Winnecomac, meaning pleasant lands. The farming village that grew up here in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was known as Comac before the modern spelling and the suburb took hold in the 1950s.
If your family’s story passed through Commack, or any of the places Italians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a village in Campania or Sicily, through a tenement block in the five boroughs, to a split-level off Jericho Turnpike, to wherever you are now.