The next storefront to open on Greenport's Front Street sells bags, pins, cups, plates and chess sets, and every one of them looks like it was sketched with a fat black marker rather than manufactured. That is the entire idea. The 2D Shop opens September 26 at 310 Front Street, and stepping through the door is meant to feel like stepping into a page of a coloring book, with the whole interior rendered in white space, bold outlines and hand-drawn detail.

The family that drew the town first

The shop comes from the people behind Color Our Town, the Greenport-based publisher whose hand-illustrated coloring books have been a North Fork fixture since 2017. Artist and author Jake Rose has drawn dozens of them, turning local landmarks like the Greenport Carousel and Preston's into black-and-white pages, and the line has grown to postcards, puzzles, art prints and custom collections for hotels and museums. His father Ron Rose runs the venture with him.

Color Our Town also builds custom collections for hotels, museums, resorts and visitor centers, so its hand-drawn landmarks turn up well beyond the North Fork. The shop gives all of that a permanent home address for the first time, in the village where the series started.

For years the pitch was that you bring the pages to life with your own color. The shop flips that around: instead of the drawing coming to your kitchen table, you walk into the drawing. The Roses spent the summer transforming an ordinary retail space into a life-size black-and-white world, down to merchandise that reads as flat even though it works like any other cup or tote.

The stock plays the same trick as the room. The cups hold a drink like any other cup, the sneakers are wearable, and the chess set works fine, even though every piece reads as a flat drawing until it is in your hand. The point is the double take.

The elder Rose has said the family looked around for anyone else doing a two-dimensional store and found only 2D restaurants, a small immersive genre that has popped up in a handful of cities. A 2D shop, as far as they can tell, is unclaimed ground.

Greenport has already met the 2D people

Village Hall got a preview of the aesthetic months ago. At its June meeting, Greenport's village board approved a public assembly permit for Ronald Rose of Color Our Town to send costumed 2D People through the village to promote the shop, a piece of paperwork that must have made for an unusual agenda line.

The family is already planning a bigger version for next summer: an event they call the Great Flattening, in which 18 volunteers will be painted, dressed and made up to read as flat cartoon characters, then paraded to a party at Mitchell Park. The makeup job reportedly takes about ten minutes per person.

Opening on the festival's comeback weekend

The September 26 opening date is not an accident. It lands on the Saturday of the Maritime Festival, the village's biggest weekend of the year, and this edition carries a story of its own. The East End Seaport Museum, which ran the festival for decades, announced last fall that it was stepping back from the 2026 event to focus on its museum work. A group of local businesswomen picked the tradition up rather than let it lapse, and the festival returns September 26 and 27 with its parade, its boats and its crowds intact.

That means the 2D Shop opens its doors onto the busiest Front Street of the season, with a village full of visitors looking for exactly the kind of thing you cannot buy anywhere else.

Greenport has spent the last few years collecting one-of-a-kind storefronts the way other villages collect vacancies: a hand-cut butcher shop, an experimental distillery, a rebuilt waterfront hotel. Come the last Saturday of September, it adds a store with one less dimension than everything around it, from a family that has spent nearly a decade asking Long Islanders to color their town, and is now letting them stand inside the picture.