Island Park is one and a half square miles, one train station, and about 4,800 people, and this September it has more on its calendar than towns twenty times its size. The village turns 100 this year. And from September 10 through 13, its biggest annual gathering comes back: the San Gennaro Feast on Long Beach Road, running for the 56th time.

Four nights on Long Beach Road

The feast is run by Sacred Heart Church, and it takes over the stretch of Long Beach Road beside the parish for four nights of rides, games and food cooked by the church's own volunteers. It opens with a Mass and a procession, the statue of San Gennaro carried through the village streets, a tradition Italian American parishes have kept since their grandparents' generation brought it from Naples, where the saint has been the city's patron for centuries.

By the church's own count, the feast draws between 5,000 and 10,000 people each year. Hold that number against the village it lands in: roughly 4,800 residents inside the incorporated lines, with about 5,000 more in Harbor Isle and Barnum Isle next door. For one long weekend a year, the feast effectively doubles the town.

A village that built itself, a hundred years on

The centennial makes this year's edition land differently. Island Park was incorporated in 1926, when the village had fewer than a thousand property owners and a first mayor, Charles N. Talbot, who would go on to hold the job for twelve years.

The ground itself has worn three names. For two centuries it was Hog Island. In 1874 it became Barnum Island, after the family that bought it for $13,000. And in 1921 a development company acquired the marshy island between the mainland and Long Beach, dredged the canals, filled the lowlands, and renamed the result Island Park, a resort town willed into existence on the Western Bays. Five years later its residents voted themselves a village. Almost everything a visitor walks past on the way to the feast, the canals, the street grid, the beach, was engineered into place in that first decade.

The village has been marking the anniversary all year. A centennial celebration filled the streets on August 15, and on September 5 the party moves to Masone Beach, where Andy Cooney and His Band play at 7:30 p.m. ahead of a fireworks show over Island Park Harbor.

September in Island Park

Put the two dates together and the shape of the month appears. Fireworks over the harbor on the 5th. Zeppole on Long Beach Road starting the 10th. A village that exists because somebody dredged it out of a salt marsh a hundred years ago gets a week and a half where the whole place is a party, and both halves of it are homegrown: the village throwing its own birthday, the parish cooking its own feast.

The parish describes the feast the same way every year: the Mass, the procession, the rides and games, and food out of its own kitchens. The church posts its volunteer schedule and novena details on its website as the dates approach, and it leans on parishioners rather than concessionaires for the cooking, which is why the sausage and peppers taste like somebody's Sunday recipe. That is the thing that separates a parish feast from a traveling carnival, and it is the reason people who moved away come back for it.

If you go

The feast runs Thursday, September 10 through Sunday, September 13 on Long Beach Road adjacent to Sacred Heart Church. Parking in a village this size is street parking, and the blocks around the church fill early on the weekend nights. The Long Beach branch of the LIRR stops at Island Park, on the same road as the church, which on a carnival night is the better way in.

A hundred years is a strange milestone for a place that still feels improvised, a beach town grafted onto a commuter line. But that is exactly what the feast celebrates better than any official ceremony could. The village was built by people who showed up with more ambition than acreage, and every September the parish proves the recipe still works: close the road, light the rides, cook for ten thousand, and carry the saint through the streets.