Vacant Art Deco building in Freeport to be razed after $6.3M sale

The Freeport Village Zoning Board of Appeals has voted 4 to 1 in favor of razing a long vacant Art Deco building built in 1929 and replace it with 40,000-square-foot Lexus dealership, Newsday reported. The board voted in April to sell the land between Sunrise Highway and Freeport’s train station to the Atlantic Auto Group for $6.3 million. The lawyer representing the buyer, Dominick Minerva of Valley Stream-based Minerva & D’Agostino, said the location is “ideal” and the future dealership “will be in keeping with the character of the area.” But preservationists decried the move to demolish the six-story former Meadowbrook Bank building, which has been empty since the 1980s. Freeport officials have long weighed what to do with the site. For a period, the village considered redeveloping it into a mixed-use facility with rental apartments. The DiNoto Group had even been contracted to build there, but officials later sued the Huntington-based developer to end its contract. [Newsday]