In October 1931, with the Depression two years deep, the Riesterer family opened a bakery and started selling bread. Ninety-five years later the founder's grandson is still frosting cakes under the family name, and this Sunday the whole neighborhood is invited to the birthday party.

Riesterer's Bakery at 282 Hempstead Avenue in West Hempstead throws its 95th anniversary party on Sunday, October 18, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. The bakery is planning a classic car show out front, a bounce house and coloring contest for the kids, music, and giveaways through the afternoon. It is free, it is open to everyone, and it is the kind of party a business only gets to throw a handful of times in a century.

Three generations behind the same counter

The family says Riesterer's is the oldest bakery on Long Island, and the math backs the confidence: 95 years puts its founding in the same era as the opening of the Empire State Building. Karl Riesterer, the founder's grandson, runs the shop today as the third generation of his family to do it, and a fourth generation already works the ovens, which means the succession plan is further along than most Long Island businesses a tenth its age.

That kind of continuity has quietly become the rarest thing on the Island's main streets. The great German and Jewish bakery names that once anchored every downtown here have almost all gone dark, from the Ebinger's blackout cakes of old Brooklyn to the Entenmann's factory store runs that generations of Long Islanders grew up on. Riesterer's kept the lights on through the Depression it was born into, a world war, the suburban boom that built West Hempstead around it, and every supermarket bakery aisle since.

What 95 years tastes like

The cases still lean into the old country. The shop's own feed is a parade of apple strudel, Black Forest cake dressed with cherries and chocolate, and the custom occasion cakes the bakery calls its centerpiece work. Come December, Riesterer's is one of the places Long Island families still go for a real gingerbread house, and the shop has built its holiday reputation on them.

It has also changed with the neighborhood in a way that explains the longevity. The bakery offers dairy and parve kosher items, serving West Hempstead's observant families alongside the customers whose grandparents bought the same seeded rye at the same address.

Sunday's party leans into the history on purpose. A classic car show out front puts machines from the shop's own era on the block it has held since the beginning, and the giveaways and music run alongside the kids' corner of bounce house and coloring contest.

Why a bakery birthday is worth your Sunday

Long Island does not have many businesses left that predate the Long Island it sits in. When Riesterer's opened, the suburban Long Island everyone knows did not exist yet: Levittown was still potato fields a war away, and nearly everything a family ate was made close to home. Every strip mall bakery case and supermarket cake since has been a bet that nobody would notice the difference. A shop that has held its corner for 95 years is proof that plenty of people noticed.

The party runs four hours on Sunday morning. The sheet cakes, the strudel and the family behind them have been there since 1931, and on this one morning the bakery is celebrating the neighborhood that kept it in business for 95 years. Showing up is the whole assignment: bring the kids for the bounce house, look at the cars, and leave with something from the case that a fourth-generation baker made that morning.