MAJOR RETAIL CENTER PARKING LOT
Walt Whitman Shops, 3.23 Acres of Parking Lot Paving Next to One of Long Island's Most Recognized Retail Destinations
📍 Huntington Station, NY
📅 Completed: 2023
🏗 140,779 sq ft · 3.23 acres
✓ Own Crew · No Subcontractors
140,779
sq ft Total Area
3.23
Acres
1,510 ft
Perimeter
2023
Year Completed
Suffolk
County
THE PROJECT
140,779 Square Feet. 3.23 Acres. One of the Largest Single Parking Lot Paving Projects in Our Portfolio.
Walt Whitman Shops is one of Long Island's premier retail destinations — anchored by major national tenants and serving a densely populated commercial corridor in Huntington Station, Suffolk County. The parking field adjacent to Best Buy, at the northwest section of the property, represents one of the largest single paving areas we've worked on in our decades of commercial paving on Long Island.
The numbers: 140,779 square feet. 3.23 acres. A perimeter of 1,510 linear feet. A lot this size requires a fundamentally different operational approach than a standard commercial parking area. The volume of asphalt, the number of equipment passes required, the drainage infrastructure that has to function across the entire field — all of it scales with the square footage.
This is the kind of project that separates contractors who do parking lots from contractors who have the equipment capacity, crew depth, and operational experience to execute at retail-center scale without losing quality control at the perimeter of the lot while the center is still being worked.
The pavement itself had reached the point where patching had stopped being an option years earlier. Widespread alligator cracking across the main loop, three failing catch basins that were allowing standing water to pool in the interior of the donut after every rain event, and base failures in sections that had been patched and repatched without the underlying drainage issues ever being addressed.
The HOA board had been managing this lot with annual maintenance contracts for years. Each year, slightly more of the lot needed attention. The math had finally turned — another year of patch work would cost more than doing it right, once. This was the year to do it right.
WHAT SCALE DEMANDS
What It Actually Takes to Pave 3.23 Acres Without Losing Quality at the Edges
A parking lot this size demands logistics planning before the first truck rolls. The asphalt has to arrive hot and in sequence — because a paving machine that runs out of material mid-pass creates a cold joint, and cold joints are where water enters, where freeze-thaw cycles do their work, and where pavement fails first. On a 140,000 square foot lot, the gap between a truck arriving two minutes early and two minutes late shows up in the finished surface.
Material volume for a project this size runs to several hundred tons of hot-mix asphalt. Coordinating the batch plant, the haul trucks, and the laydown rate of the paving machine so the mat stays at the correct temperature from the center of the lot to its edges — that's operational experience that doesn't come from doing smaller jobs at a larger scale. It comes from doing jobs at this scale repeatedly.
The drainage across a lot of this footprint also has to be engineered into the finished grade. A flat 3-acre surface with no pitch is a standing water problem waiting to happen. Every section of the lot has to drain consistently toward the catch basin infrastructure, which means grade control during the paving operation isn't just about getting the surface smooth — it's about getting it to drain correctly across 1,510 linear feet of perimeter and the full interior field.
Fiorini handled this project with our own equipment and our own crew from start to finish. No subcontracted paving operations on a section of the lot while our crew worked another. One team, one quality standard, one point of accountability across all 140,779 square feet.
PROJECT SPECIFICATIONS
Full Project Details
LOCATION
Walt Whitman Shops — Best Buy Parking Field, Huntington Station, NY
Client Type
Major Retail Center — Commercial Property Management
Total Area
140,779 sq ft (3.23 acres)
Lot Configuration
1,510 linear feet
Year Completed
2023
Pavement Type
Hot-mix asphalt — commercial parking lot specification
Pavement Section
3" surface course · 4" binder course · 6" compacted aggregate base
Drainage
Catch basin service and grade correction throughout
Restriping
Full stall layout, directional arrows, fire lane markings, ADA-compliant accessible spaces
Crew
Self-performed — Fiorini own crew and equipment
Walt Whitman Shops Is Part of a Broader Long Island Commercial Client Portfolio
This project is one of several major retail center and institutional properties Fiorini Paving has completed work for across Long Island. Our commercial client portfolio includes Roosevelt Field, Broadway Mall, Smith Haven Mall, The Shops at Riverside, Catholic Health, and a range of HOA communities, industrial facilities, and municipal properties across Suffolk County and Nassau County.
Projects of this scale require a licensed, bonded, and insured commercial contractor with the equipment capacity and crew depth to execute without performance gaps. Fiorini Paving has been that contractor for Long Island's commercial property managers since the late 1980s.
Services Used on This Project
Commercial Parking Lot Paving
Parking Lot Striping
Asphalt Paving