Blue Point Station - View E c.1925
 (J. V. Osborne-D. Keller)

Note: The express house was moved to a private location, see photo below, as the agency was closed in June, 1946 and the depot razed in 1951. With no agent on duty, the express house served no purpose, so it was probably purchased and moved sometime after the agency closed.  If not moved in June, 1946, then most definitely removed when the depot was razed 5 years later.  Dave Keller

The old Bluepoint express house moved from its original location to a private residence trackside at River Avenue, Patchogue.  1972 view is looking NW  from the crossing. The structure has long since 
been demolished. Photo/Archive: Dave Keller

Bayport-Blue Point Station closing 9/05/80
Archive: William Gilligan

Blue Point  Emery Map MP51-52
Archive: Dave Keller

Blue Point  Emery Map MP52-53
Archive: Dave Keller

The photo was taken just after diesels took over the LIRR.  I always wanted a picture of a train picking up mail but I had forgotten railway mail pick-up rule #1: What gets picked up also is detrained.  

Anyhow, I felt an object go whizzing by my head just as I snapped the photo. It was the off-loaded bag and it missed me by inches. It appears in the photo just about at the coupling point of the engine and RPO car.

I was lucky--another few inches and my brain would have been scattered along the ROW and deservedly so. Well, it was a lesson I would never forget! Stephen Myers   Note: MC (Mail Crane) location on MP51-52 map above. 
Steve Myers data and photo, Dave Keller archive

REID ICE CREAM
Note: Located just east of MP52 SW corner of Atlantic Ave (Blue Point) part of "Y" cabin. 

Reid Ice Cream retail sidewalk sign  -  The Reid Ice Cream Corp. factory (of Bayport), opened in 1926, and was sold to Borden Corp. at some point in the very early 1930s. The plant officially closed its doors on October 3, 1969. This is per an article by Jo Ann McGrath. "Reid Plant in Local History." [no source indicated, but could be the Bayport-Blue Point Historical Society Newsletter, n.d.]: pp. 3, 6. The article reports the property and factory on the market placed with McDee Realty, for $1.2 million, so it was written before the factory was demolished.

The article also said that Suffolk County's real ice cream baron, and the man who first cornered that commercial market, was Augustus Floyd Smith, of East Patchogue, starting in 1879. "Blocks of ice were cut from Robinson's Pond. Some of it was stored...and some of it was chopped and liberally salted. The salted ice was packed around a freezer container into which the ice cream mixture was poured. A horse was then harnessed to a large wheeland walked 'round and round' to agitate the paddles. In this manner Smith was able to provide ice cream to all the hotels and restaurants in Patchogue; to both Clarence and Charley Hawkins' Bellport confectionery store and, with some 'modernization' of his equipment, to the men stationed at Camp Upton during WW I." (p. 3.)  His son took over in 1919, and sold out to Reid Ice Cream Corp. in 1926.

Reid's Ice Cream Plant does show up on Atlantic Avenue Gene Horton's Blue Point, Long Island, New York, Then and Now.  East Patchogue, NY:  Searles Graphics, Inc., 1999:  p. 6.  At the time the "now" shot shows it still there.   Courtesy Research of: Mark Rothenberg, Senior Reference Specialist, Suffolk Cooperative Library System & Patchogue-Medford Library