The most famous service dog in America learned his job on a campus in Smithtown. Now that campus is getting the biggest addition in its history: a 30,000-square-foot Puppy Development and Visitor Center where the public will be able to watch the next Sully grow up.

The Guide Dog Foundation and America's VetDogs, the two nonprofits that share the campus at 371 East Jericho Turnpike, launched the project this summer under a capital campaign called Building for the Future. Construction is planned to run through next year, with the building set to open to visitors in the 2027 to 2028 window. It is a multi-million-dollar, multi-year undertaking, and the organizations say it will let them expand what they do by a quarter.

What is actually being built

The new center is two things under one roof. The working half is for the dogs: breeding, whelping and nursery spaces, early puppy development programs, a modern veterinary suite and upgraded biosecurity, the unglamorous infrastructure that decides whether a litter born in Smithtown becomes a healthy working dog two years later.

The other half is for people, and that is the change a reader will actually notice. The building is designed around a gathering space for more than 300 guests, with interactive experiences and room for the Saturday graduations where a dog that spent two years in training is formally handed to the person it will spend its life with. The campus has always done this work. It has never had a building meant for the public to come watch.

Seventy-nine years of dogs on the same turnpike

The Guide Dog Foundation was established in 1946 and has worked from its Smithtown campus since the early 1950s, breeding, raising and training guide dogs for people who are blind or have low vision. America's VetDogs grew out of it in 2003 to do the same for veterans, active-duty service members and first responders with disabilities.

Between them the two organizations have placed more than 3,300 dogs, with active teams in all 50 states, and every dog is provided at no cost to the person who receives it. That is a larger promise than it sounds: each dog takes more than $50,000 to breed, raise, train and place, all of it privately raised.

The graduate everyone knows

If the campus has a famous alumnus, it is Sully, the yellow Labrador paired with President George H.W. Bush in June 2018. Sully was raised through the organization's puppy programs, finished his training in Smithtown, and spent the last months of the former President's life at his side. The photograph of him lying beside the casket in Houston went around the world. After the President's death, Sully came back to Long Island briefly before joining the facility dog program at Walter Reed, where he still works with wounded service members. The puppies born in the new center will be bred, quite literally, for that job.

A building shaped by an architect who cannot see it

The design team is a local and national mix: Studio Miers Chou Poon Architecture, bld Architecture of Patchogue, and Chris Downey of Architecture for the Blind, an architect who is blind and one of the few in the world practicing full time. For a campus whose graduates guide people without sight, that is not a gesture, it is quality control: the building is being shaped by someone who will experience it the way many of its most important visitors will.

TRITEC, the Long Island builder behind the Station Yards rebuild in Ronkonkoma, is putting it up, and Smithtown Supervisor Edward Wehrheim has backed the project as it moved through town review.

You can walk the campus Thursday

There is a near-term reason to care beyond the construction fence. This Thursday, September 10, the two organizations are holding a Volunteer Open House on the Smithtown campus, timed to the 25th anniversary of September 11 and its National Day of Service. Visitors can tour the campus, meet the dogs and the people who raise them, and try hands-on volunteer projects, from one-day help to the long commitment of raising a puppy at home for its first year and a half.

The organizations already run on more than 1,400 volunteers a year, and puppy raisers, the families who take an eight-week-old Lab and return a confident young dog, are the role they perpetually need more of on Long Island. Details are at vetdogs.org/openhouse or by phone at (631) 930-9000.

What it means here

Smithtown has been the quiet capital of the American service dog for three generations, and most of Long Island has driven past the campus on East Jericho Turnpike without knowing what happens inside. The new center is the campus deciding it wants the neighbors to come in and see. When it opens, watching a future guide dog take its first steps will be a thing a Long Island family can do on a Saturday, a short drive from home, in the town where that work has always lived.