The Party City at 120 Sunrise Highway in Patchogue has sat dark since the chain collapsed. On Monday, September 14, the lights come back on under a different name, and the name is doing the same job. Party House, the Long Island startup that already filled Party City's old Woodbury store, is soft-opening its second location there this week.

If the sequence sounds familiar, that is the entire business model. Party House was founded by Emir Ozmutlu with a simple observation: Party City's bankruptcy had emptied more than a dozen big-box party stores across Long Island at the same moment, leaving the balloons-and-birthday aisle to supermarkets and shipping delays. In April 2025 he opened the first Party House in the 12,000-square-foot former Party City at 8063 Jericho Turnpike in Woodbury. Seventeen months later he is doing it again, 30 miles east, in a store half again as large.

What is opening in Patchogue

The new store is big even by the old chain's standards: 19,754 square feet on just over two acres of Sunrise Highway frontage, with a staff of 18 to 20. Monday's opening is the soft one, with a grand opening to be announced later in the fall, which in practice means the aisles will be stocked and the registers on while the balloon arches wait for the ribbon.

The stock is what the address used to carry, and then some. Balloons and balloon delivery, decorations, themed tableware and pinatas anchor the store, and the company says it is widening the range this year into Halloween costumes and decorations, Christmas and New Year's stock for the back of the calendar, plus toy aisles, craft supplies and a stationery section. The stated goal is a one-stop shop for a party, which is precisely the niche the bankruptcy left empty.

The hole Party City left

It is easy to forget how much retail square footage one chain gave up here. Party City ran more than a dozen Long Island stores and over 800 worldwide when its parent company filed its second bankruptcy in December 2024 and shut everything down. The brand itself survived in diluted form, its name and wholesale arm sold off, its products now stocked on end-cap sections inside Staples stores. But the actual buildings, the places a parent walks into at 4 p.m. the day before a birthday, mostly still sit empty along the Island's retail strips. One of the few exceptions is Commack, where the old Party City became a Barnes & Noble.

Ozmutlu's bet is that the fastest way to replace a habit is to move into the exact spot where the habit lived. Both Party House stores are former Party City locations, chosen so that the customer who drives to the store they remember finds a party store there, whatever the sign now says. He has said he wants a third Long Island location in 2027 and to keep expanding as the right spaces come up.

Patchogue keeps collecting

For Patchogue the opening extends a remarkable run. The village and its Sunrise Highway corridor have spent the last few years refilling storefronts faster than most of Suffolk, and a nearly 20,000-square-foot vacancy coming back to life with local ownership and 20 jobs is the kind of unglamorous win that a downtown actually runs on. It also means the south shore's party-supply drive shrinks: since the collapse, the closest thing to a dedicated party superstore for most of central Suffolk has been a patchwork of dollar stores, craft chains and same-day shipping windows.

The timing is not an accident either. A party store opening in mid-September catches the entire fourth-quarter gauntlet: Halloween costumes in October, Thanksgiving and Friendsgiving tables in November, then the holiday and New Year's Eve run that ends with graduation-season balloons already on order. It is the retail equivalent of a snowplow dealer opening the week before Thanksgiving.

What it means for a reader

Practically: starting Monday, there is a full-size party store at 120 Sunrise Highway in Patchogue again, and if the Woodbury store is the template, it will be stocked deep in exactly the things that are miserable to need in a hurry. Less practically, but maybe more satisfyingly: the story of the last two years of Long Island retail has mostly been national chains going dark. This is the reverse, a local operator walking into the dark stores one at a time and turning the lights back on, and it is the second time he has done it.