The best commercial corner in Long Beach that nobody is using sits at 101 West Park Avenue, directly across from the Long Island Rail Road station, a short walk from the library and City Hall, in the path of every commuter who comes off the platform looking for coffee. Starbucks held it for years, then gave it up, and the storefront has sat as a for-lease listing ever since. Now a new name has surfaced for the space, and it says the corner has found its next tenant: Meet the Voorhies.

A new name at the old coffee corner

Meet the Voorhies Corp. is preparing a food and drink business at 101 West Park Avenue, the kind of place built to serve drinks alongside a real food menu rather than a bar that happens to have a kitchen.

State records fill in a little of the picture. Meet the Voorhies Corp. was registered in October 2023 as a Nassau County business corporation, with an address on Jefferson Avenue in Island Park, one town up Long Beach Road on the other side of the bridge. That makes this a local operator rather than a chain, someone close enough to know exactly what that corner is worth at 7:40 on a weekday morning.

What is not public yet is a menu, a concept or an opening date. No storefront or announcement under the Meet the Voorhies name has surfaced. In our experience covering corners like this one, the identity usually arrives within weeks, on a sign in the window or paper in the door, and the name here is distinctive enough to suggest a family putting itself on the awning.

What the corner lost

The Starbucks at 101 West Park Avenue was the west side's anchor caffeine stop, the one you grabbed before the 8:02 rather than walking east down Park. It is now marked closed on every listing service, and the space was put up for lease as a former Starbucks, with the commercial listing making a point of the grease trap already in place, which is broker language for a space that is ready to cook rather than just brew.

That detail matters for reading the move. A grease trap plus a plan to pour is not the outline of another coffee counter. It is the outline of a restaurant, or at minimum a cafe that intends to serve real food and offer something stronger with it, in a location whose foot traffic is the closest thing to guaranteed that Long Beach can offer.

Park Avenue keeps refilling

Long Beach's main commercial strip has had a busier year than most Long Island downtowns. On the beach side of town, a Mexican steakhouse is fitting out the long-vacant Superblock frontage, the boardwalk got its ticket-booth murals repainted by local artists, and Park Avenue's storefront churn has mostly run in the direction of things opening rather than closing. A national chain walking away from a corner and a local operator moving to take it is the shape of that churn in a single address.

It also fits a pattern this publication keeps finding: when a recognizable corner goes dark on Long Island, the replacement tends to come not from another national tenant but from somebody nearby, often a first-time operator, whose mail routes to a house in the next hamlet over. The chains pick markets. The neighbors pick corners.

What to watch

A plan is the beginning of a process, not the end of one. The space needs a build-out, and nothing about a September start promises a season. But things are now in motion at one of the most visible addresses in the city, and the questions left open are the good kind: what Meet the Voorhies serves, who the Voorhies are, and whether the corner across from the train goes back to being the first stop of a Long Beach morning.

If you come off that platform every day, watch the window at 101 West Park. The for-lease chapter appears to be ending, and whoever the Voorhies turn out to be, they are coming to meet you.