Perkins & Benjamin Building

1911

4-24 West Main Street

Narrator: Supervisor Yvette Aguiar

Hello, this is Supervisor Yvette Aguiar. Welcome to Riverhead and welcome to our Downtown Historic Trail. We are now standing exactly where Riverhead began. If you look at a map, you will see why.

This is literally the center of Suffolk County – see how all the roads come together here on this old map – they still do. From the South Fork, from the North Fork, from Westhampton, from Moriches, even from New York City. Peconic Avenue was the first place someone coming from the South Fork could come across to the North Fork, on a bridge built over an old dam. They even called it Bridge Street back then.

That’s why in 1727, when the leaders of Suffolk County needed a location for their first courthouse, they chose this very spot. It was the easiest and most central place for people from all over the county to come.

Gradually, other buildings appeared around it. Just like today, Riverhead was truly the center of the East End, the place where everyone came for culture and commerce – as well as for the courts. The 1727 courthouse building served in that capacity until 1855 when it was replaced by a new courthouse on Griffing Avenue. All the county meetings and most town meetings took place here – and even hangings were nearby.

After they convicted William Enoch in 1834 for murdering his wife, the minister of the recently-formed Riverhead Methodist Church preached an execution sermon at the request of the prisoner – right here in front of the courthouse -- while he calmly listened in a carriage. Thousands of people came to watch – more than twice the population of Riverhead at the time. Probably the biggest audience that preacher ever had! The crowd was so big that they had to move the actual hanging across the river to accommodate everyone that wanted to watch. In 1854, after they convicted Nicholas Behan of the ax murder of the Wickham family in Cutchogue, they hung him here too on the old oak gallows.

When the county courts moved to the new building on Griffing Avenue in 1855, the original courthouse was converted to commercial use, although the town board still met in its second-floor meeting room. Unfortunately, disaster struck in 1911. It and the adjacent buildings burned down in a spectacular fire that destroyed nine businesses.

The owners of the businesses got together and built this handsome modern commercial block that now occupies 4-24 West Main Street. They hired Riverhead’s leading local architect at the time, William Sidney Jones, to design the new building.

It became the new home of Moses Benjamin’s drug store and the Perkins family’s clothing store. So they called it the Perkins and Benjamin block.

Notice the molded terra cotta capitals at the top of the first-floor pilasters, some with acanthus leaf decorations and others with an egg-and-dart motif. A plaque on the left side of the structure marks the location of the old courthouse around which Riverhead developed.

Hope you enjoy the rest of our Downtown Historic Trail.