"It's just a nice, informal summer Friday," East Williston Mayor Bonnie Parente said in a Long Island Press report before one of the village's earliest concerts on the green. "No one has to schedule it in advance. You don't have to buy a ticket. You don't have to tell us you're coming."
That line could describe almost any ordinary summer evening in East Williston. In 2026 it also describes the village's 100th birthday. As Long Island Press reported, the second-ever Village Green concert series opened on June 26 with Pat Farrell and the Cold Spring Harbor Band, a Billy Joel tribute act, while members of the East Williston Fire Department worked the grill and North Hempstead Town Supervisor Jennifer DeSena stood alongside Parente listening to the music. Nobody checked tickets. Nobody handed out wristbands. If you didn't know the village had been incorporated for exactly a century, you would have guessed it was just another Friday.
That's the thing worth understanding about East Williston's centennial year. It was never built to look like a production. It was built by two people, funded by a handful of local businesses, and staffed by residents who volunteered their own memories, their own folding chairs, and their own attic boxes for a time capsule. The scale of the celebration says something true about the place that outlasts the anniversary itself.
A Party Built By Two People
A Long Island Press report identified Village Clerk Joanna Palumbo as the concert series' organizer; she saw an opportunity to get neighbors together on summer evenings and started calling around. She booked Pat Farrell for the 2025 opener because she knew him from his day job as the Lake Success village clerk. She lined up Time Passages, a classic rock cover band that also plays Westbury Arts' own summer series, because they were local and available. There was no events firm, no marketing agency, no committee vote on branding. One village employee with a phone and a calendar built the format that the entire centennial year would later run on.
The rest of the year followed the same pattern. A Long Island Press report described the February 28 Reminiscing Breakfast and Living History event at village hall, with village historian Christopher Siciliano calling for residents willing to talk about growing up in East Williston or attending its schools. As Long Island Press reported, the two books the village produced for the centennial, the "East Williston Centennial Coloring Book" and "Pride of Place: 100 Years of Incorporation in East Williston, New York," came out of that same history committee rather than a publisher. Both went up for sale on Amazon the same week the board announced them at its May 11 meeting.
The Year, Laid Out
Strip away the framing and the centennial calendar reads like a list of things a small village would do for itself, in order:
| Date | What Happened |
|---|---|
| Jan. 14 | Interfaith prayer service at the East Williston Community Church opens the centennial year |
| Feb. 28 | Reminiscing Breakfast and Living History morning at village hall, with resident speakers recruited by historian Christopher Siciliano |
| Apr. 23 | Centennial gala at Westbury Manor |
| Apr. 25 | Time capsule buried on the village green, sealed for 100 years |
| May 11 | Village board unveils the centennial coloring book and "Pride of Place" history book |
| May 16 | The village's annual car show gets extra fanfare for the anniversary |
| Jun. 26 | Second-ever Village Green concert series opens with Pat Farrell and the Cold Spring Harbor Band |
| Jul. 10 | Time Passages returns to the green |
| Aug. 29 | Village-wide tag sale |
Nothing on that list required a permit fight, an outside vendor contract, or a corporate sponsor. The gala went to Westbury Manor because it's the kind of banquet hall a small village already uses for its bigger nights. The car show was already an annual fixture. Even the time capsule, buried on the green where the concerts happen, is really just a longer-running version of the same idea: put something local in a box and trust the neighbors to open it later.
The Guest List Doubles As the Sponsor List
A Long Island Press report noted that when the concert series launched, it wasn't underwritten by a bank or a regional chain. The sponsors were Hildebrandt's Diner, Weigand Brothers Funeral Homes, Thomas F. Dalton Funeral Homes, Albert Zolezzi Auto Body, and the Irish American Society of Nassau, Suffolk and Queens. These are businesses residents already drive past on ordinary errands, not names bought in for the occasion. The food trucks that show up at 6 p.m. before each show, an empanada truck and usually an ice cream truck, aren't part of a curated festival lineup either. They're just vendors who found out a few hundred people would be sitting on a lawn with nowhere to eat dinner.
That funding structure matters more than it looks like on paper. A village that wanted a splashier centennial could have gone looking for a title sponsor or a county tourism grant. East Williston instead ran its 100th year on the same businesses that sponsor the Memorial Day 5K and the Little League team, which is a quieter way of saying the celebration never had to answer to anyone outside the village line.
Next Door, a Louder Party
The contrast is easiest to see one street over. A Long Island Press report noted that Williston Park, East Williston's immediate neighbor, is marking its own centennial in 2026, with an official founding date of September 8, a few months after East Williston's. Its version of the year looks different. As Long Island Press reported, on July 11, Williston Park closed Hillside Avenue from Willis Avenue to the railroad tracks for a full block party, with restaurants including Willy's Margaritas Cafe, Sangria 71, and Sally Black's staying open and running live entertainment into the evening. On August 27, the village held its second outdoor concert of the year at Kelleher Field, with the rock band FaceFirst performing at 7:30 p.m.
Both villages turned 100 in the same calendar year. Both leaned on local bands and local businesses. But one closed a commercial strip for a five-hour street party and the other asked people to bring their own lawn chairs to a patch of grass behind village hall. Neither approach is more legitimate than the other. The difference just happens to match each village's everyday temperament: Williston Park has the commercial block to shut down, and East Williston has the green.
The Math Behind "Still a Small Village"
At the January kickoff, a Long Island Press report quoted Parente on the numbers that make the whole year make sense: "In 1926, we had about 75 homes and a little more than 300 residents. Today, we have over 830 homes and over 2,500 residents." That's roughly eleven times the housing stock and more than eight times the population, absorbed over a century without the village ever growing a downtown commercial strip of its own or hiring a events staff to manage its milestones.
What that growth did not change is who plans a Friday night on the green. It's still one clerk with a phone, one historian with a call for volunteers, and a rotating cast of neighbors willing to grill hot dogs or loan a folding table. The population multiplied. The operating system didn't.
What's Left Before the Year Runs Out
As of this writing, the village hasn't published a detailed fall centennial schedule. A November 2025 Long Island Press report said Siciliano expected more events, but East Williston's own village calendar currently shows routine board meetings rather than a headline event. If you've seen mention of a fall anniversary parade or a dinner dance at the Inn at New Hyde Park, that's almost certainly Williston Park's calendar, not East Williston's. Williston Park’s official anniversary landed in September, and the village’s centennial planning has leaned toward bigger, later-season gatherings.
For East Williston, the safest bet is to watch the village's own newsletter and the calendar at eastwilliston.gov, the same channels Parente has used to announce everything from the concert lineup to the board's report that the village's fire protection rating improved this year, a small piece of housekeeping that happened to surface at the same May 11 meeting where the centennial books were unveiled. Big news and small news have been sharing the same agenda all year. That's consistent with everything else about how this celebration has run.
A village that can throw its own 100th birthday party with a village clerk's phone contacts and a handful of neighborhood sponsors is telling you something about what it's like to actually live there day to day. If you're weighing what that kind of place is worth to your own family, or just curious what else is happening in the towns around it, the Fran Mazer team knows this stretch of the North Shore well enough to talk through it. Let's Connect.
