Union Place is one of the smallest streets in Huntington village, a short cut-through most people use without reading the sign. On Saturday, October 18, the sign changes. The town is dedicating the street as Sorrentino Way, for the cobbler who spent decades fixing Huntington's shoes there and the woman who built a family and an institution alongside him.

A shop on one small street

Andrea Sorrentino ran Andrea's, his shoe repair shop, on Union Place for decades. It is the kind of business that never makes news and quietly holds a downtown together: generations of Huntington residents handed their worn heels and broken straps across his counter, and he handed them back fixed. The town's resolution for the dedication credits him and his wife Luisa with hard work, generosity, perseverance and community spirit, which is the official language for something simpler: everyone knew them.

The honor comes in a hard year for the family. Luisa Sorrentino died on May 5 at 87. Andrea followed on June 18 at 90, six weeks later. The street they are getting back is the one where he spent his working life.

A family Huntington already knows

The Sorrentino name is woven through the town in ways that go well past the shop. Their son Andre is Huntington's highway superintendent. The family's Sorrentino Family Foundation has run a Thanksgiving turkey giveaway for well over a decade, an operation that has grown into thousands of turkeys and meal bags handed out each November to families who need them. A family that spent decades taking care of the town's shoes turned out to be good at taking care of the town.

The dedication, then a block party

The renaming ceremony is set for noon on October 18 on Union Place. What follows is the better part: from 12:30 to 8 p.m., the foundation throws the first Sorrentino Family Foundation Italian Festival and Block Party on the newly renamed street, with Italian food, music, dancing, drinks and family activities running into the evening.

That is the right shape for this particular memorial. A plaque is for looking at. A street full of neighbors eating and dancing outside the old shop for seven and a half hours is a lot closer to what the Sorrentinos actually did for Huntington, and it gives the village an Italian festival of its own a week after the Long Island Fall Festival cleared out of Heckscher Park.

Why a street name is the big one

Towns hand out plenty of honors: proclamations, plaques, a night at a gala. A street name is different because it keeps working after everyone goes home. Every delivery driver, every GPS, every envelope addressed to a business on that block will say Sorrentino Way, indefinitely. That kind of permanence usually goes to veterans, fallen first responders and civic founders, and Huntington has now extended it to a cobbler and his wife.

That says something worth noticing about what a village decides to remember. Not the biggest business on Main Street. A small shop on a side street where the work was good and the owner learned your name, for decade after decade, until the street itself answered to his.

If you knew the shop, October 18 is the day to walk the block one more time. If you did not, the festival is a fine introduction: the food and the music are exactly what the Sorrentinos would have put out, and the new street sign overhead explains itself.