Wading River Wildwood
— — a bluff that ends in the Sound.
Not only on a wall.
“Wildwood State Park sits on the north shore of Long Island, where the bluffs above Long Island Sound drop a hundred feet into a long curve of cobble beach. About six hundred acres of oak and hickory back the cliff, with quiet trails that run down to the water through cuts in the rock. The campground above the bluff has been there since the 1930s. On a clear evening the lights of the Connecticut shore come on across the Sound and the wind drops to nothing.
Wading River Wildwood, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Wildwood State Park covers about 600 acres on the north shore of Long Island in the hamlet of Wading River, in the Town of Riverhead, Suffolk County. The land rises in mature oak and hickory forest to a bluff roughly 100 feet above Long Island Sound, then drops to a mile and a half of cobble and sand beach. New York State acquired the property in 1925 and developed campsites and trails through the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s. The park is administered by the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation.
The bluff faces north across Long Island Sound, an open fetch of about 18 miles to the Connecticut shore. The exposure shapes the weather: salt fog rolls in some summer mornings, and the prevailing wind through the canopy keeps the upper trails cool even in August. The forest on top is one of the larger surviving stands of oak-hickory on the north shore, recovered from late nineteenth-century farm clearance. In autumn, the canopy turns through copper and rust about a week later than central Long Island, slowed by the Sound's thermal mass.
The main entrance is on Hulse Landing Road off Route 25A, about 70 miles east of Manhattan and well past the end of the Long Island Expressway. A vehicle entry fee applies in season, typically Memorial Day through Labor Day. The campground holds 322 tent and trailer sites, open from mid-April to mid-October, with reservations through ReserveAmerica. Several short trails connect the bluff to the beach; the Stairway Trail is the most direct, with a long wooden staircase down the cliff face. The day-use picnic area sits in the shade behind the bluff edge.