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. As of last week it is also an applicant. On August 11, Burton Potter Club Inc. filed with the New York State Liquor Authority for a club license covering the hall's second floor, according to the state's pending-application records.

Burton Potter is the corporate name behind Burton Potter Post 185, the Greenport American Legion post that owns and runs the Third Street hall. The filing, application NA-0349-26-123088, lists the premises as 102 3rd St, Floor 2, and carries the license class the state reserves for membership organizations. Its status as of this weekend was listed as intake complete, the stage where the paperwork is in and the review begins.

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.

What a club license is, and what it is not

The license the post applied for is not a bar license in the way most people mean it. New York issues club licenses to membership organizations, the category built for Legion posts, VFW halls, Elks lodges and their kin, and it permits service on the premises to members and their guests rather than to anyone walking in off the street.

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. A granted license 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 filing does not say is as important as what it does. It does not name an opening date, does not describe a buildout, and does not promise anything about the rink floor itself, which sits on the first level, below the licensed premises named in the application. Skating sessions and a members' room upstairs are not in tension; plenty of halls run both.

What happens next

A pending application is a signal, not a certainty. State Liquor Authority reviews of club applications typically run weeks to months, and the authority publishes each application's progress in its public records as it moves. The post filed on a Tuesday in mid-August; a decision 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 take on a license application. Villages do not get many second acts like this one, and Greenport's is still adding chapters.

The Wave will follow the application through the state's records and report when the authority acts on it.