Williston Park planned its 100th birthday party for September 27. Then the nor'easter that soaked the Island's last September weekend forced Village Hall to push the celebration back a week, to Sunday, October 4. Nobody planned the poetry in that. The village's own records show that Williston Park held its very first election, choosing its first mayor and a four member board of trustees, on October 4, 1926. The rain moved the party onto the one date in the calendar that mattered as much as the birthday itself.

A century in less than a square mile

Residents voted to incorporate the Village of Williston Park on September 8, 1926, carving a community of their own out of the farmland and new subdivisions along Willis Avenue. A century later the village still fits inside a single square mile just east of Mineola, and about 7,500 people call it home. For a place that small, it carries a remarkable amount of daily life: nearly 300 shops, restaurants, offices and other businesses line its two main streets, Hillside Avenue and Willis Avenue, a stretch most of central Nassau drives through without realizing it has crossed into a village with its own mayor, its own board and now its own century.

That compactness is the point of the place. Williston Park is the kind of village where the gazebo gets its own concert series, where the pool complex and the library and the firehouse all sit within walking distance of the homes they serve, and where families who arrived decades ago watched children and grandchildren circle back to raise their own kids on the same blocks.

The party the storm could not cancel

The rescheduled celebration went ahead at 2 p.m. on October 4 at Village Hall on Willis Avenue, with Mayor Paul M. Ehrbar and the board of trustees marking the milestone alongside residents. The village opened the afternoon to everyone, and the date gave the speeches a symmetry no planner could have bought: one hundred years to the day after the first Williston Park voters picked their first mayor, the current one stood in front of the hall thanking their great grandchildren for showing up.

The birthday itself is one stop in a centennial that the village has stretched across the entire year. 2026 opened with an ecumenical prayer service at St. Aidan in January, rolled through an Easter egg hunt, a historical committee presentation in April, gazebo concerts in June, July and August, a concert on Hillside Avenue in July and a pool party in August.

What is still to come

The centennial calendar has plenty left, and the next date is the big one. The Centennial Dinner Dance, itself bumped by the same storm, lands this Thursday, October 8, at 6:30 p.m. at The Inn at New Hyde Park. Tickets are 100 dollars, fitting for the occasion, and the village is pitching it as a night of music and dancing for neighbors, families and the business community together.

After that, the hundredth year winds toward the holidays the way village years always have. November 21 brings Village Official for the Day. A Family Fun Run follows on November 28, the Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend. The Village Hall tree lighting arrives December 6, and a winter concert at the gazebo closes the centennial on December 13. Dates can shift, as September proved, so the village points residents to its website for updates.

The village has also been collecting its own history as it goes. A pair of centennial videos, including a trip down memory lane built from interviews with longtime residents, is posted on the village site, a small archive of first hand memories recorded while the people who hold them can still tell the stories.

One hundred years, same streets

Plenty of Long Island communities are older than Williston Park. Very few have held their shape so completely. The village that incorporated in 1926 is still the village a visitor finds today: the same two commercial streets, the same tight grid of homes, the same habit of gathering at a gazebo because it is there and it is theirs. A nor'easter took its best shot at the birthday party and managed only to move it onto a more meaningful date.

If you live nearby, the dinner dance Thursday is open to anyone who wants to raise a glass to a neighbor turning 100. And if you have ever cut through the village on Willis Avenue at a crawl, wondering why the lights take so long, consider it the price of passing through somewhere that has spent a century being exactly what it set out to be.