York Beach's Long Sands Finally Has Somewhere to Eat
August 13, 2026
August 13, 2026
Walk south from the Sun & Surf on Long Beach Avenue and, until this year, you'd hit a long stretch of sand, parked cars, and not much else. No food truck, no scoop shop, no reason to linger past the point where your cooler ran dry. That's the beach every longtime resident knows by feel: Short Sands is where you go to eat, Long Sands is where you go to sit. For decades that split held, mostly because nobody built anything to challenge it.
This summer, three separate businesses decided that gap was worth closing, and a hotel company paid $6.9 million to bet on the same stretch of beach. None of them coordinated with each other. All of them looked at the same half-mile of sand and saw the same opening.
Short Sands has always punched above its size. The quarter-mile crescent tucked into Ellis Park comes with a built-in cluster of everything: the Goldenrod pulling saltwater taffy in its front window since 1896, the vintage arcade at Fun-O-Rama, York's Wild Kingdom a short walk up the hill, and Hawaiian Jim's Shave Ice for when the heat gets serious. You can park once and not move your car for hours.
Long Sands never worked that way. It's the bigger of the two beaches, stretched out between York Harbor and York Beach village, but the food options thinned out fast once you passed the Sun & Surf. That asymmetry shaped how people actually used the two beaches. Families with small kids and a full afternoon planned gravitated toward Short Sands. Long Sands stayed the quieter option, the one locals picked when they wanted room to spread out and didn't mind packing their own lunch.
The clearest evidence sits at 73 Webber Road, inside Grain Surfboards, half a mile from the beach. A local surfer named Kaniela Kaulukukui spent this year building a shave ice stand called Ono Sundries, open Thursday through Saturday from noon to 6 p.m., using all-natural, house-made syrups including one built around sweetened condensed milk. Kaulukukui knew Hawaiian Jim's Shave Ice already had Short Sands covered. He built Ono Sundries specifically because Long Sands didn't have anything comparable south of the Sun & Surf, and he wanted to give the neighborhood something during the hottest stretch of summer.
A few blocks away, the Stones Throw Hotel opened a second space this year in the building across from its main property at 123 Long Beach Avenue, adding 30 seats and a 10-seat bar, along with a new rooftop bar at the original hotel. Both launched around Memorial Day weekend, right as the summer crowds arrived.
The same ownership behind Stones Throw also runs the ViewPoint Hotel, the property overlooking Nubble Lighthouse where Lady Gaga once stayed for her sister's wedding. This year the owner, Lipton, opened that coveted wedding-view space to the public for the first time, launching weekly Sunday Socials along with pool passes and live music every Wednesday at the hotel's restaurant, A Little Auk. That's a private amenity turning into a public draw, on purpose, on the Long Sands side of town.
Three different operators, three different bets, all placed on the same stretch of beach in the same season.
If a shave ice stand and a hotel rooftop bar were the whole story, you could chalk it up to coincidence. But look at what happened to the beachfront hotels themselves. The York Beach Surf Club and the Sea Latch Inn both went through foreclosure and sold at auction in the summer of 2025. Portsmouth-based Colwen Hotels bought the Surf Club property for $6.9 million and reopened it as Ocean Surf at 780 York St on May 21, 2026. The former Sea Latch Inn reopened down the road as Ocean Sands at 277 Long Beach Ave on June 10, 2026.
That's institutional capital, not just a local surfer with a shave ice machine, landing on the same corridor. When a hotel operator pays that kind of money for distressed beachfront property, it's a wager that the demand curve is about to shift. The wager here appears to be that Long Sands is no longer the beach people settle for when Short Sands feels too crowded. It's becoming a destination in its own right, with its own food, its own bars, and its own reason to stay past sunset.
None of this replaces what's already working at Short Sands. The Wild Kingdom brought capybaras back to its lineup this year, and the Goldenrod isn't going anywhere. But if you haven't walked down to Long Sands in a few weeks, here's what's actually on the town's community calendar for the rest of the season:
That's a full six weeks of programming split fairly evenly between the two beaches, which is itself a change from a few summers ago when most of the organized activity clustered around Short Sands almost by default.
None of this erases what makes each beach distinct. Short Sands is still the compact, family-dense option with everything in walking distance. Long Sands is still bigger, still quieter at its far ends, still the place you go when you want room to spread a blanket without stepping over someone else's cooler. Those differences are structural and they aren't going anywhere.
What's changed is the assumption that one beach comes with amenities and the other comes with sand. A surfer who works at Grain Surfboards, a hotel owner running two properties, and a Portsmouth hospitality company all read the same map this year and decided Long Sands had outgrown its old role. That's not a marketing campaign. It's three unrelated bets landing on the same conclusion within a few months of each other, which is usually a better signal than any single announcement could be.
If you've lived here long enough to remember when the walk south of the Sun & Surf meant bringing your own snacks, this is the summer that changed.
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