Drive the stretch of Broadway between the Hewlett Crossing shopping strip and the library, and you'll notice something that wasn't true a year ago: almost none of the storefronts are dark anymore.
That's a bigger deal than it sounds. For the better part of 2025, this same half-mile was defined by what wasn't there. A pharmacy had gone dark. A convenience store chain that had served Long Island since 1939 was gone. A supermarket-anchor space sat empty behind a Petco sign nobody had bothered to take down. If you did your coffee run, your grocery run, and your bakery stop on Broadway last November, at least one of those errands meant driving somewhere else.
By this summer, that same errand list looks nothing like it did nine months ago. Four separate projects, three retail and one civic, finished within roughly the same stretch of time. That kind of clustering doesn't happen often on a corridor like this, and it's worth understanding what actually filled in, what didn't change at all, and why the timing lined up the way it did.
Four vacancies, one winter
The turnaround traces back to a report last August in the Long Island Herald, which described Broadway as a corridor of cleared storefronts and active construction, with David Friedman, president of the Hewlett-Woodmere Business Association for the past decade, telling the paper he was thrilled by the activity even though most of it hadn't opened yet. At that point, Ready Coffee had no opening date. Club Pilates was still just a name attached to a subdivided pharmacy space. NetCost Market was a rumor tied to a Regency Centers listing.
Here's how it actually played out:
| Business | Address | Former tenant | Opened |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ready Coffee | 1600 Broadway | Dairy Barn (LI convenience chain, founded 1939) | Nov. 17, 2025 |
| NetCost Market | 1296 Broadway | Petco | Dec. 16, 2025 |
| Club Pilates Five Towns | 1338 Broadway | Duane Reade (part of a 1,200-store Walgreens closure) | by mid-2026 (exact date undisclosed) |
| Gold Hall (library theater) | Hewlett-Woodmere Public Library | itself, mid-renovation | May 6, 2026 |
Ready Coffee's opening came with the kind of local touches that only make sense once you know the neighborhood: the Patch writeup on opening week noted the shop ran a different giveback day for five straight days, starting with a free medium drink for first responders on Monday, faculty and staff on Tuesday, and Hewlett High School juniors and seniors on Wednesday. It's a small detail, but it tells you the Hudson Valley-based chain, which has also opened in Baldwin, Glen Cove, Lynbrook, North Baldwin and Freeport since arriving on Long Island, understood exactly who was going to be walking through that door at 5 a.m.
NetCost Market's arrival a month later was a bigger swing. This wasn't a small specialty shop squeezing into a vacant space. According to the Herald's coverage of the December opening, it's the chain's first Long Island location, built out to roughly 14,000 square feet and stocked with more than 45,000 products, from Eastern European staples like zapekanka and syrniki to Belgian chocolate and fresh caviar. CEO Eduard Shnayder framed the store around the idea that food and language are what unite a community, which is a fair way to describe a supermarket that's now doing double duty as a specialty importer for a corridor that didn't have one before.
The neighbors who never left
None of this happened in a vacuum, and it's worth being clear about what didn't change, because the corridor's older businesses are doing more of the day-to-day work than the new arrivals get credit for. A few blocks of Broadway, the same names have been showing up for years:
- Marinara Pizzeria & Restaurant, on Peninsula Blvd since 1995, still running the same family-owned Italian menu that's outlasted three decades of turnover around it.
- Da Nicola Italian Cuisine, at 1203 Broadway, with its stone fireplace dining room and wood-fired pizza nights that predate most of the current storefront tenants.
- Wall's Bake Shop, at 1336 Broadway, sitting directly next to the new Club Pilates space, still turning out the same rugelach and babka that's made it a go-to for birthday cakes across the Five Towns.
The pattern here matters. The businesses that closed on Broadway in the past two years, Dairy Barn and Duane Reade, weren't local operations struggling against Hewlett's demographics. Dairy Barn was a Long Island institution since 1939 that wound down as a chain. Duane Reade's closure was one piece of Walgreens shuttering 1,200 stores nationally. The vacancies were a national retail story that happened to land on this street. The family-run places that predate all of it never had that exposure, and they're still exactly where they were.
Down the block, the library finished its own overhaul
While the retail strip was filling back in, the Hewlett-Woodmere Public Library was working through its own construction timeline, on a completely separate schedule and for completely separate reasons.
Gold Hall, the library's nearly 200-seat theater with a 34-by-15-foot stage, closed for a month and reopened on May 6, 2026, after a full lighting overhaul: 24 new energy-efficient LED high hats and updated wall sconces, according to the Herald's report on the renovation. The reopening happened to coincide with public screenings of "Wicked for Good," which was the first real test of the new lighting for a packed house. Twenty days later, the library started a two-month project replacing both of its primary boilers, alongside quieter upgrades that had been accumulating for a while: contactless self-checkout kiosks, updated security cameras, and paving and sidewalk work to improve accessibility around the building.
None of that happened by accident either. Voters approved the library's 2026-27 budget that same month, by a margin of 1,270 to 713 out of 1,983 ballots cast, and elected Theodore Simmons to a five-year term on the library's Board of Trustees, according to 5 Towns Central's coverage of the vote. That budget funded this summer's Community Art Show, which ran from May 31 through June 30, and continues to fund a new cognitive health initiative the library is rolling out alongside the facility work.
What the timing actually tells you
Put those two threads next to each other and the coincidence is hard to miss. A privately owned shopping strip and a publicly funded library, run by completely different boards with completely different budgets, both went through their biggest overhaul in years within the same six-month window. Neither caused the other. Regency Centers didn't wait for a library budget vote to fill a Petco space, and the library board wasn't tracking Broadway's retail vacancy rate when it scheduled a boiler replacement.
What they share is more basic: both had been deferring visible change for a while, and both hit their moment at roughly the same time. If you'd asked a Hewlett resident last October what was happening on Broadway, the honest answer was "not much, and some of it looks worse than it used to." Ask that same question now and the answer runs through a new supermarket, a new coffee shop with its own regulars already, a pilates studio next to a 30-year-old bakery, and a library theater that just got the best lighting it's had since it opened in 1996.
That's not a corridor in transition anymore. It's one that finished a stretch of overdue work in less time than most people expected, and the library's new cognitive health programming inside a fully reopened building is the part of that story still playing out.
If you're weighing a move within Hewlett or just curious how a specific block or property fits into a changing corridor like this one, Richard Baumel knows this stretch of the Five Towns block by block. Let's Connect.
