The building at 102 Third Street in Greenport has been a lot of things to the village: an American Legion hall, a roller rink, a wedding venue, and for about a decade before its revival, a building slowly falling in on itself. Now it is getting ready to add one more role. Burton Potter Club Inc., the corporate name behind Burton Potter Post 185, the Greenport American Legion post that owns and runs the Third Street hall, is preparing to serve drinks to members and their guests on the hall's second floor.

The plan covers the upstairs level at 102 3rd St, the floor above the rink, and it is built around the post's own community rather than the general public. State records show the post set the plan in motion in mid-August.

The hall that came back

If you grew up on the North Fork, there is a fair chance you learned to roller skate in this building. The post's hall doubled as Greenport's roller rink for generations, then spent more than ten years dark after the structure deteriorated and Superstorm Sandy battered it in 2012.

The comeback started with one member. George D. Costello Sr., a Marine veteran of Vietnam, began pressing the post in 2011 to restore the building rather than lose it, and spent years pulling together the volunteers, donations and repairs that the project needed. When the rink finally reopened to the public in early 2018, roughly 150 people showed up to skate on the first day. The post named the floor for him: the rink at 102 Third Street is now the George D. Costello Sr. Memorial Skating Rink.

Today the hall runs year-round indoor skating sessions, rents itself out for weddings and private events, hosts the post's meetings on the first Thursday of every month, and has even taken film shoots. In a village where event space is scarce and expensive, a 7,000-square-foot rink with a second floor is a genuine asset.

A members room, not a bar

What the post is planning is not a bar in the way most people mean it. The upstairs room would serve members and their guests rather than anyone walking in off the street, the arrangement Legion posts, VFW halls, Elks lodges and their kin have always used.

For a Legion post of this vintage, that is less a new idea than a restoration of one. The upstairs canteen was standard equipment in mid-century Legion halls, the room where members gathered after meetings. Bringing it back would let Post 185 run that room again, and it would also round out what the hall can offer the weddings and private events that already book the space.

What the plan does not include is as notable as what it does. There is no opening date yet, no described buildout, and nothing changing about the rink floor itself, which sits on the first level, below the room in question. Skating sessions and a members room upstairs are not in tension; plenty of halls run both.

What is coming

A plan is a signal, not a certainty. The post still has steps to complete before the first drink is poured upstairs, and that stretch typically runs weeks to months. The post got moving on a Tuesday in mid-August; a room in operation would be expected sometime in the fall.

But the direction of travel is hard to miss. A building that a decade ago was a preservation problem is now an operating rink, a booked events hall, and an organization confident enough in its footing to bring back its members canteen. Villages do not get many second acts like this one, and Greenport's is still adding chapters.

The Wave will follow the project and report when the upstairs room has a date.